After using my lovely Gen1 Macbook for nearly three and a half years with it's default Tiger install, I decided to take the plunge and upgrade to the latest incarnation of Mac OS X, Snow Leopard. I never upgraded to Leopard because, well, Tiger did everything I want and better the devil you know. Or something. I dunno, Leopard just never really "clicked" with me. However, as soon as I heard about what Apple were doing with Snow Leopard I signed up for notification of release.

A lot of Apple haters have been rubbing their tiny hands with glee recently after news reports of a security flaw in the iPhone OS 3.0 that could allow hackers to "Hijack every iPhone in the world". Many were quick to point out how slow Apple were for not releasing a patch, and many simply made it a soap box for "iPhone sucks, use Android" rants.

However, on July 31st, Apple released iPhone OS 3.0.1, with a patch for this SMS issue. It installs easily enough, job done. Of course, not being privy to such information as how to hack my own phone with this exploit, I can't check if it does the job. Either way, there it is. A fix. More detail on the OS 3.0.1 release notes.

One continuous gripe I have with OpenOffice.org on Mac OS X is the apparent failure to properly handle bullet points. It only affects MS Word .doc format, and looks something like this:

This is apparently caused by the .doc format itself. Saving a .doc file in Word or OpenOffice.org and opening it in OOo will result in this bug. It is caused by a complete encoding failure on the part of the Word document format for bullet point symbols, as it explicitly looks for a particular glyph in the Symbol font rather than looking for the Unicode code point for the character. So, on machines that don't have the Windows version of Symbol.ttf installed ... it simply displays a nonsense character. OS X has its own Symbol font with different glyphs.

Fortunately the workaround for this is very simple. You can use font substitution to make OOo look at a "Symbol compatible" font for the glyph - in this case, OpenSymbol. Open the preferences panel and navigate to the Fonts page. Then, enter a font substitution for Symbol to OpenSymbol, to be applied Always.

This will take effect immediately, so any documents you have open will magically get their bullet points back. Smashing! Here is the same document immediately after closing the preferences window:

For some reason, several places on the web with streaming video (e.g. ITV player) have gone with Microsoft's Silverlight for the interface. I have no idea what Silverlight is like as a platform, but I do know that it's a really bad choice for streaming video.

The main problem I have with it is that, on a 6MB/s ADSL connection, I get skip free performance from the likes of youtube and the BBC iplayer. Silverlight players, not so much. 0% left in the buffer every 30 seconds or so for even small videos, and there is no apparent way to change the buffer settings.

If anyone knows how I can make Silverlight less crappy, please to be posting comments!

Some many moons ago now, I had a little rant about a new scourge on the internets ... the beast that is Twitter. In it, I said that I can understand the draw of social messaging (I use IRC and IM, so the concept is not alien to me) but that I can't understand the point of sending out details of the minutiae of your life to complete strangers. However, a long time has passed since I wrote that post, so I thought it time to revisit. Why? Well, simply because I've been actively using Twitter for a while now. Yes, I have been sucked in. Bugger.

This is just a quick post to remind myself how to do this, because for some reason I keep forgetting ... It might come in handy for others though!

If you're installing the VirtualBox Guest Addition on a Linux guest, you might have problems with display resizing, mouse capture, and complete breakage if you upgrade your kernel. This is easily fixed. Just installed DKMS (Dynamic Kernel Module Support) before running the VBoxLinux*.sh script for your architecture.

This handily enables automatic recompilation of the VirtualBox kernel modules if you change your kernel, and in my case, also actually makes them work in the first place. Double win! Hope this helps somebody. If not, it can just be a post to jog my memory in the future.

Some while ago, I wrote about NeoOffice, an OpenOffice.org port for the Mac. It provided what OpenOffice.org could not - a native interface. OpenOffice.org 2.x still used the X11 interface so integration was clunky at best.

Unfortunately for NeoOffice, that's just about to change. I've been playing with a release candidate of OpenOffice.org 3.0 for the Mac, and it's great. Fully native interface, and everything seems to work. No niggly little keybinding bugs. No scrolling issues. No strangely drawn dialog boxes. It "Just Works".

I'm not really sure where that leaves NeoOffice now, though. While I've appreciated their work, I can't really see any reason to still use it now that the "real" OOo works natively. And seeing as porting OOo 2.x to a native Aqua interface was the prime motivation of NeoOffice, I can't really see what they can bring to the table.

At the moment, the NeoOffice site claims that presentations run faster than OOo 3.0. I'm sure there are other Mac integration efforts they can use to make sure they stay a little way ahead of the OpenOffice.org curve, but for the basic functionality they seem to have been left somewhat high and dry by this latest OOo release.

Time will tell. In the meantime, you have to donate cash to get access to NeoOffice 3, while you can get the OOo release candidate for free. They don't expect to have a free release 'til January 2009. I think I'll just stick with OOo. Sorry, NeoOffice guys.

I suppose I should come clean about something. I recently installed the Team Foundation Server PowerTools and have been using them successfully for a while. They have one or two very handy features that make TFS suck less. Get them direct from the TFS PowerTools page at MSDN.

Online Mode

Using the tfpt.exe command line, the 'online' mode will search your repository for changed files, added files and removed files and check out, add or remove the files as necessary. It also has a simple preview mode. This means that, with only one extra step, you can fix all the missing icons or forgotten checkouts or whatever. It would be nice not to have to do this step at all, but at least it's not entirely manual now.

Annotation

The PowerTools add a new feature to the Source Control Explorer: Annotation! Now you can actually see, line by line, who changed what, why and when. Jolly good.

Recursive Diff

Probably the biggest, most important change is the ability to diff entire directory trees. This will show you a nice window with all the missing files, all the changes, all the things that have not been checked out but should have, and everything else all in one lovely window. This alone is worth installing the PowerTools for.

Unchanged File Undo

A problem that arises from the 'check out required' nature of TFS is that sometimes Visual Studio checks things out automatically that are then never edited. When you check in, the files haven't changed so are not included in the changeset. This means you have a bunch of unchanged files marked as checked out. Very annoying.

Enter the tfpt.exe command line tool, with its 'uu' command. I assume that 'uu' stands for 'undo unchanged' or something. It basically performs an 'undo' on any checked out files that haven't actually changed since being checked out.

I've just finished rewriting my MegaHAL/Irssi script to be a lot cleaner and a lot easier to configure. You can get it from the MegaHAL/Irssi page.

New features include:

• Configurable using standard Irssi /set commands instead of hacking the script
• Supports changing nick without hacking the script
• Generally requires less hacking of the script ...

So, erm, yes. Enjoy!

Some time ago I wrote a short article on forcing VBA to use some form of unicode to allow simple insertion of non-latin1 text into VBA modules. It sort of worked, for the most part, kind of. Well, it didn't. The problem is down to the VBA editor being locked to the local encoding of the machine it is running on. You can only type characters from BIG5 in China, Shift-JIS in Japan, and so on. If you have a need to make a VBA module that uses strings suitable for all locales ... you're pretty much stuffed.

Except you're not. If you do it properly, you can have any unicode character displayed in any VBA locale. So how do you do it properly? Well, you're supposed to use ChrW$() to generate unicode characters individually. Yes. Really.