William Computer Blog

Apple has released iTunes 4.9, with a new podcasting feature. This feature was promised last month by Apple CEO Steve Jobs at D: All Things Digital Last month.

Using iTunes 4.9 you can now browse, subscribe and listen to podcasts. Podcast is different from internet Radio station. Radio is streamed over the Internet while Podcasts are downloaded into your computer.

Because they are downloaded into your computer, you can transfer the podcast episodes to an iPod. Let’s explore this new podcasting feature in iTunes.

Synergy is a software that lets you share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers without any special hardware requirement.

Synergy works with different operating systems allowing you to work with the same keyboard and mouse on Windows (95/98/ME/NT/XP), Unix, Mac OS X. I made a diagram below to give you an idea of how synergy works:

To move the keyboard/mouse from one computer to another is easy. Just move your mouse to the egde of your screen. You can also cut and paste between computers now.

Installation is very easy, just install the software on every computers, and then assign the computer with the keyboard/mouse you wish to share as the server.

This is a good software for people who work with multiple computers and monitors but wish to share the same keyboard. Another great news about this software is, it is an open source software released under the GNU Public License (GPL).

Visit Synergy website »

Remember when I posted about my new ADSL modem with wireless router. After using Linksys WAG54Gv2 for almost a month, I am disappointed.

The quality of the wireless is so bad, it took 15ms for me to ping the router from my laptop when the laptop itself is sitting right next to the router. My d-link AP is so much better than this one.

To be fair, the ADSL modem works fine without any problem. I probably need to wait for a new firmware to fix the slow wireless issue. There is a long thread about WAG54G on whirlpool forum.

I’ve been playing with Ruby on Rails these past few days. Dreamhost, my webhost, announced on June 16 2005 they now offered Ruby on Rails.

Ruby on Rails are now pre-installed on all servers. I decided to create a subdomain for my Ruby on rails playground. This is how I enable Ruby on Rails support on Dreamhost.

First, login to your Dreamhost web admin panel. Under the domain sub-menu, choose Add domain.

You should choose the fully hosted domain option and enable FastCGI support.

IMPORTANT: Remember to set your Web directory to: /home/username/subdomain.example.com/public

Once everything is setup, you can ssh into the web server and then type rails subdomain.example.com to create your new rail application.

The directory structure is now created for you, you need to set the public folder permission to 755.

Have fun playing wtih Ruby on Rails.

Everyone probably heard the news that Apple is going to use Intel Microprocessor in the future.

I’m not going to comment about Apple move from PowerPC to Intel. The only question I have in my mind right now is, will Apple ship future Macs with the Intel Inside sticker?

I have finally upgraded my mac from 10.3 (Panther) to Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) yesterday. When tiger was released, I mentioned that I won’t be upgrading to tiger because I’m planning to get a new PowerBook.

Well, I couldn’t wait any longer so I decided to upgrade my mac and get a PowerBook when a new revision is released. The installation was a success.

I’ve been spending a few hours to experiment with tiger’s new features. So here is a short blog entry about my experiment with Tiger. This is not a complete review, because someone else already wrote one.

SpamLookup is the new Movable Type plugin for identifying and eliminating weblog spam. This plugin merges MT-Blacklist, MT-Moderate and DSBL wrapped up into one plugin.

SpamLookup uses several techniques to identify spam (SpamIdentification) and then uses user-supplied choices to either moderate or block it outright. SpamLookup also supplies a management console that allows the user to manage all of the comments and TrackBack pings in their database, regardless of the number of weblogs they have installed. There is also a DeSpam feature to uncover spam that may exist in the database already.

You can now disable MT-Blacklist and DSBL and use SpamLookup on your Movable Type blog.

Introducing SpamLookup »

Project page for SpamLookup »

I finally made the switch to ADSL after being with Bigpond Cable for six years. I’m now using Exetel as my ISP.

Linksys WAG54G is a wireless ADSL router with built in modem. The reason for choosing linksys is because it’s owned by cisco and the firmware is based on the Linux kernel. The one I owned is the V2 version of the router, which added support for ADSL2/ADSL2+. ADSL2+ allows maximum speed of 24Mbit/s if you live within 1.5 km of the exchange.

Setting up the router was easy, and the speed? Not as fast as Bigpond Cable. I did a speed test on both exetel and bigpond. Bigpond is 5000 kbit/s, and exetel is 1000 kbit/s.

If you’re wondering why I made the switched since Bigpond is faster? Because Bigpond only offers 10GB per month and that is not enough for me. I can upgrade to the 20GB plan but that would cost me more. 36 GB plan on exetel is good for me. I can get all the pr0n now.

I was logging into a secured website containing private information. Firefox then warned me with the following message:

Although this page is encrypted, the information you have entered is to be sent over an unencrypted connection and could easily be read by third party.

I was pretty sure the login page is on a secure http connection (https). See picture below:

After searching on google, I found out that the login form is submitted (action) to a JavaScript. Firefox does not have any idea what the JavaScript is doing to the data sent.