Absurdity of the DMCA

If the world of physical objects would governed with the same rules as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act does impose on all things digital, scissors would be illegal and you could end up in jail for manufacturing, and maybe even owning or using them. Crazy ? Well, see this presentation and judge for yourself. This "law" is currently impacting our friends south of the border only, but it is very real that it will soon become a law in Canada as well.

How to show preview for CHM file in Leopard

The CHM files (Microsoft compiled HTML help files) are often used for eBooks. They are readable on OS-X using excellent open source CHMOX application. If you want to get more useful preview in OuickView than the not very helpfull static icon, get this plugin. Download here https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.p...group_id=211847 How to install it: Unzip it, take the proper package for your system (the ZIP file contains several architectures, on modern Intel-based Mac's you want to use x64), put it inside

Excellent comparison of C++ and Objective-C

One of the languages that I managed to completely ignore for almost 20 years was Objective-C. I always saw it as less developed, dead-end version of C++ that has little perspective - despite that GCC supported it since early days. I guess I was wrong on two of three counts - that of little perspective still holds as long as you want to stay outside of OS-X platform. One of the issues I had was strange syntax and that from not too many books on subject, they were

Taking the pain off installation

I was trying to set up an Oracle appliance - install the Oracle Express XE into a virtual machine. What (in my mind) should be smooth and straightforward process was something very different. I should have been forewarned warned after seeing the discussion ... To make long story short, the installer failed on three different Linux VM's I had available - because of unavailable dependencies, too small swap space etc, etc.

Over $500 worth of software for $49.99

As long as you are using OS-X, this is something worthy looking at: the MuPromo is running the annual bundle offer with (currently) 8 applications, worth $534 for the mentioned $49.99. The sale is on for 4 more days. The way how it works is that at certain marks, additional applications will be added to the bundle (for the same price) and will be made available to everybody who purchased the bundle.