Changing the default behavior of built-in Cocoa controls
Apple has many task specific controls built into Cocoa. They are all well designed and have most of the functionality a user and a developer expect. One of this controls is the NSSearchField. This control has a special design which allows the user to recognize the provided functionality with ease. It is so well-known that Apple uses the design even on there website. It has support for menus (e.g. for recent search items), auto completion, a cancel button, and so one. Although this is mostly feature complete, there are sometimes cases where you like to extend it. In this post, I will show how to add another visual hint to this control when a search term isn't found. The aim is to change the background of the underlying text edit to become light red to visual mark the failed search.
Installing Linux on a USB hard disk for the MacBook Pro
One of the features of Mac OS X I love, is the possibility to install Mac OS X on any attached removable media, like a FireWire or USB hard disk. This makes it really easy for me to test VirtualBox on the several versions of Mac OS X we support (formerly Tiger, now Leopard and Snow Leopard). The advantage of this setup is that I don't waste disk space for operation systems I usually don't use very often. Currently I have a 150GB hard disk in my MacBook Pro which is really not that much if you deal in the virtualization business. There are several test VM's of any kind of guest operation systems and of course the ISO's to install them. The second main OS, I do much of my work, is Linux. For this I have a standard PC with Gentoo on it, which have all that I need. Unfortunately this doesn't really help when I on travel. As I soon be away for some time, I decided I need, at least for testing, the same flexibility mentioned above for a Linux installation. And here the problems start to arise. Of course Apple didn't really support installing other OS's than Mac OS X on Apple hardware. Yes, there is Boot Camp, but this is mainly for Windows, is very inflexible and doesn't really help if you try to install something on another place than the integrated hard disk. There are projects like rEFIt, which even makes Boot Camp superfluous, but this project has really bad USB boot support. In the following I will explain how it is even possible to install Ubuntu 9.10 on a USB hard disk.
Why an ending slash on a URL matters (or not)
Recently I read a report from Google about the status of their own Web sites in terms of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Uhh, Google, the search engine giant, is looking how the own sites are behaving when a Web crawler is stumble over them! To be honest, it's fully clear to me that in such a big company, like Google, not all is perfect in the sense of cooperative appearance. There are different projects, different teams, with different strengths and weaknesses, different priorities and of course different managers. To summaries the report: In some areas Google does a good job, but in most it doesn't.
FRITZ!Box tuning part 3: Using the VoIP phone line from everywhere
The contract with my Internet service provider includes a VoIP connection. Together with the FRITZ!Box 7270 all phone calls are done over the Internet, an additional conventional phone connection isn't necessary anymore. One of the benefits of this is that you can connect to your registrar from everywhere in the world. But that's theory, cause e.g. my provider doesn't allow a connection if you are not in the network of the provider itself. Of course there are free services like sipgate or even Skype. There you could make free calls within the services itself, but as soon as you like to call a real phone number you have to pay. They are cheap, no question, but my contract includes a flat rate within Germany. That's even cheaper. So what I like to do is to use my VoIP phone connection even when I'm not at home. In the following third part of the FRITZ!Box tuning series, I will explain how to achieve this. As already said in the first two post, where you at least should read the first one, I'm not responsible for anything happens to your FRITZ!Box after you have tried what is described here.
FRITZ!Box tuning part 2: Access your home network with OpenVPN
AVM has built a VPN server into the FRITZ!Box, why should I use some other software for this job, you may ask. The reason is quite simple: the build in one is a piece of closed source software written by AVM and there is only one official client which could be used to connect to it, the FRITZ!VPN software. This client software is only available for the Windows operation system family and so by no means anything useful to me. I'm pretty sure they are using some official protocol like IPSec, so it might be possible to connect to the FRITZ!Box with other clients as well, but that's something I didn't want to try. OpenVPN on the other side is a rock solid open source software which could be used from many popular OS's these days. Even graphical clients, like TunnelBlick for Mac OS X, are available. So here comes the second article of the FRITZ!Box tuning series, which will explain how to convert your FRITZ!Box into a OpenVPN server, where any number of clients can concurrently be connected. I highly recommend to read the first part of this series, because this post is build on top of the stuff done there. This count especially for the filesystem layout on the usbstick and the way additional software is started. Also in the following it will be helpful to have ssh access to the FRITZ!Box all the time. As already written in the first part, there is no guarantee that the information presented here will work on your side or that I'm responsible for anything happen to your FRITZ!Box. In preparation of the following you need access to a second OpenVPN installation which will be used to create all necessary certificates and keys and which could be used to test the installation afterward. I'm using a Gentoo Linux host where you could install OpenVPN simply by executing emerge openvpn. Make sure you have the examples USE flag set to get all the helper scripts which make the life much more easier.