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ipfilter (blocklist) update

Benny Chew — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 08:18:21 +0000

There has been update to the ipfilter.dat source which I posted up before (have just updated that post). The previous source was from BISS but the people who maintain the blocklists now publish it at this site.

Whether or not the blocklists are of any use is up for debate, and definitely not something I’m going to go into in this post..

via here

Create iPhone ringtones via iTunes

Benny Chew — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 02:41:17 +0000

The article title says on Windows, but I think it should work on Mac OS X as well. Link over here.

iTunes 100% CPU on closing

Benny Chew — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 02:32:12 +0000

After I got my iPhone 3G a couple about 2 months ago, I had no other choice but to use iTunes for all the syncing, backups, music etc as Apple wants total control of what you can or can’t do with its devices (was using YamiPod previously, writeup here). :|

My loathing for it got worse as it didn’t seem to be closing gracefully on quitting besides causing software restores which all ended up with iTunes.exe taking up 100% CPU. I decided to stop swearing at it and search around for the root cause as this behaviour wasn’t replicated on my work machine and on colleague’s variety of machines.

Turns out it wasn’t iTunes, but the antivirus (NOD32 2.7) which wasn’t playing nice. After adding various iTunes paths to AMON/IMON exclusion lists, there has not been crashes or 100% CPU since (instructions on how to do this here). Guess I was cursing the wrong software but anyhow..

Just a note, this is a fairly belated post as I was having this issue with iTunes 7.x and have since upgraded to 8.0.1 which may no longer require this workaround. ;)

Cross street in Google Maps

Benny Chew — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 16:29:06 +0000

I decided to find out if cross streets (intersections) can be easily searched via Google Maps rather than searching for one street and just scrolling around to find the intersection with the other recently, and realised there was a keyword to do that.

For e.g., typing a very frequently used rendezvous point into Google Maps:

Swanston St at Bourke St VIC 3000

Would give you the intersection of Swanston St and Bourke St (ex-Nike Melbourne). Link to the page here.

Pretty nifty since it’s common place for shop lot locations to be listed as ‘corner X road and Y road’.

via MalekTips

Gmail 2.0

Benny Chew — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 13:10:56 +0000

An updated version of Gmail was recently rolled out to most users just after IMAP access was released, and I got it pretty early on. However, I somehow got reverted back to the old version a few hours later and never actually figured out why, till now..

Apparently, after I got moved over to the new version, I actually switched my language preference in the settings from English (US) to English (UK). :| I sort of left it as it is since then and finally decided to find out the root cause today (after much cursing at how evil it was for me to be given access to the updated version for just a few hours..).

So if you still seem to be stuck in the old version, try the following (was suggested here):

Click ‘Settings’ in your Gmail window (top right, close to ‘Sign Out’).
In the drop down for ‘Gmail display language’, change it to ‘English (US)’.

Oh well, Gmail is still in beta..

More screenshots of the new version here.

More BitTorrent stuff

Benny Chew — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 12:11:58 +0000

I think the links are kinda old, but anyway..

Both links from TorrentFreak.

Shrinking VMware VMDK files before distribution

Benny Chew — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 11:55:30 +0000

Recently been researching and testing with VMware images for the deployment of our application at work which turned out to work pretty well (Ubuntu + Java 6 + MySQL + Glassfish). However, one thing which became bothersome was the overgrowing .vmdk images which didn’t seem to reduce in size even after file deletions were made in the virtual disk itself.

Again, Google came to the rescue for this, linking me to this site which gave a 2 step process for doing the shrinking. Do note that the instructions are for those who are using Windows as their host OS.

Obscure Java error

Benny Chew — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 08:45:09 +0000

Got a “java.lang.InternalError:Can’t connect to window server” while trying to get Glassfish up and running on a Mac G5 running Mac OS X recently at work which was pretty odd as our application and Glassfish do not fire up any GUIs. After some googling, problem was fixed by adding a ‘-Djava.awt.headless=true’ to the list of system variables.

Although it was fixed relatively easily, it seems rather odd that Java would actually try to access the X server even though I was running it through a SSH terminal window (PuTTY)..

Firefox add-on: Split browser

Benny Chew — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 22:10:43 +0000

A Firefox extension (add-on) which enables a Firefox window to have multiple tabs tiled to however you like which is useful if you have a widescreen LCD monitor. To read more, click here.

YamiPod write up

Benny Chew — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 12:32:02 +0000

Just posted a write up on YamiPod (Yet another iPod manager) which is an alternative iPod management software to iTunes here.