An Esurient Trollop

After upgrading to Apple’s Mac OS X 10.5, I found that my printers no longer existed. So I went to http://localhost:631 and tried adding my Gentoo CUPS printer share like I did before, but it refused to show up in the printers list.

After some searching on the net, it seems that Apple has somewhat broken the way that it deals with Linux CUPS shares. Apparently it only searches for printers via Bounjour. In any case, I found a fix that works perfectly. Alessandro Dellavedova posted a fix for the problem over on the Apple support forums. Below is a slightly more detailed version of what he did.

WARNING: You will need administrator privileges to proceed with this fix.

1. Open System Preferences.
2. Open Print & Fax.
3. Right-click in the printer’s pane and select “Reset printing system…”
4. Open Terminal and type the following:

   sudo nano /etc/cups/cupsd.conf

5. Modify the first few lines such that they look similar to the following:

   Browsing On
   BrowseOrder allow,deny
   BrowseAllow all
   BrowseProtocols all
   BrowseRemoteProtocols all
   BrowsePoll <Your CUPS Server domain or IP>:631
   BrowsePort 631

6. Save the file
7. Restart the printing subsystem by typing in the following:

   sudo killall -HUP cupsd

Now you should be able to see and add the printers on your Linux share.

It seems that the developers at Flagship Industries have finally posted a fix to their Ventrilo client for Mac OS X 10.5, Leopard. You know, the bug fix that takes all of 5-minutes to correct. However, they only fixed the problem in the main window and nowhere else.

Here’s what they had to say:

It is intended to solve the user list window being empty after connecting when running OSX 10.5. This is the only change. The same problem also occurred in a few other windows as well.

If you are not running OSX 10.5 then don’t waste your time downloading it as there is no advantage.

This is an interim update until we release the next major upgrade here soon.

FYI,
Flag

__________________
Flagship Industries, Inc.
www.ventrilo.com

Certainly doesn’t sound like he was very happy about making this fix. In any case, if you would like to download their new version, you can find it here.

Otherwise, if you want the fully patched version, you can still access it from my site.

Well, after many years of using Typo as my main blogging engine, I have switched back to WordPress. I had initially started using Typo because it was the only Rails-based blogging engine out there. Unfortunately, the quality of their project seems to have declined over the years.

After Typo decided to explode at me after using a quotation mark in tag for a new post, I decided I would go back to WordPress, my first blogging engine. WordPress has a long and well supported history and I will likely have fewer headaches for a blog that I barely touch in the first place.

Unfortunately, since there are no up-to-date utilities to migrate the database from Typo to WordPress, I ended up having to copy/paste all of the articles that I felt were worth saving. The problem was that I couldn’t copy over any of the comments made to any of my posts.

I apologize to anyone who left helpful/supportive comments over the years, but I couldn’t save you all!

Anyhow, it seems that Ventrilo has decided to bow to the pressure of people from the Mac community, such as myself. I suppose they got tired of deleting all mine and related thread on how to fix this problem in 10 fricking minutes!Ventrilo had this to say:

There is a known issue with the Ventrilo Mac client 2.3.2.Prototype.15 that prevents the main user list window from displaying the channels and connected users.

While we have this fixed in our soon to be released major upgrade we did not perform the changes to the 2.3 series of programs only because we had hoped to release the major upgrade before Apple was able to release 10.5. Sadly this did not happen due to a few problems found during the beta testing.

While the delay would only have been a few weeks this seems to be a problem for some people. *sigh*

I will see about producing an proto.16 that fixes this problem, but not until I have an official copy of 10.5 in my hands to test with. Assuming BestBuy has it on their shelves tonight.

Any and all (or should I say more) hateful and mean spirited posts from the Mac community on this subject will be promptly deleted. If you can’t control your temper then don’t even bother posting.

Now I wonder how many years it’ll take them to get this build out. >:D

UPDATE: It seems that the developer at Ventrilo decided that this post sounded just a tad too bitter and decided to delete it. Luckily I quoted him for posterity!

As I have promised upon the release of Mac OS X 10.5, here is a patched version of Ventrilo for all us Mac users to download and enjoy!

This version actually works and took me all of 10-minutes to fix. I have posted instructions for the Ventrilo developers in the past on how to fix this problem, but instead they prefer to threaten me with legal action.

Download: <Link Removed>

EDIT: You should probably download and install Ventrilo first, as I am unsure as to whether it installs anything to other locations on the drive.

Simply delete the original install and move my patched version over to the applications folder afterwards.

Enjoy!

Well now, this bug has existed with Ventrilo for over a year on OS X 10.5. But guess what? I fixed it! Yes, I spent about an hour tooling around with the package contents of Ventrilo.app and found main.nib. I then opened this file in Interface Builder (part of Xcode) and did a little trial and error editing. Throughout this process I discovered the problem, fixed it and have tested the results. Everything works fine. I didn’t go much deeper than the main channel list, but I am sure this problem exists in other spots within the application. However, with the problem identified, it should be rather simple to fix in the future. I’m surprised that one of Ventrilo’s valuable developers couldn’t spare the 5 or 10 minutes needed to fix this problem… That is, spare 5 or 10-minutes over the past bloody year in which this bug has been known on Leopard Beta. In any case, I offer the solution to everyone!

Since the Ventrilo.app file that you install is read only, you will need to copy the application to a different directory. On the copy, right click on the application and select “Show package contents”. Navigate to the English.lprog folder and replace the main.nib file with the one I have linked above. Enjoy being able to run Ventrilo on OS X 10.5 guys!

UPDATE: If you are looking for the patched version of Ventrilo, see this post.

UPDATE #2: A person, who’s comment I lost, posted a simple shell script on how to make the change in all offending portions of the program.

su root **You will need password to your machine**
cd /Applications/Ventrilo.app/Contents/Resources/English.lproj/main.nib
cp objects.xib objects.xib.old
cat objects.xib | sed 's/rowHeight">0</rowHeight">20</g' > objects.xib.new
rm objects.xib
cp objects.xib.new objects.xib

Restart Ventrilo!

I don’t know how my picture made it into wired, but it did and I am quite pleased!

It is kind of amusing considering it only took me a few minutes with Photoshop and being bored in class.

Wired Article
BoingBoing links to the article too!

In Hexadecimal:

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

In decimal:

2^6 * 5 * 19 * 12,043 * 216,493 * 836,256,503,069,278,983,442,067

In binary:

00001001 11111001 00010001 00000010

10011101 01110100 11100011 01011011

11011000 01000001 01010110 11000101

01100011 01010110 10001000 11000000

As a 320×160 Image: (©Copyright Steffen L. Norgren 2007)

The above is the HD-DVD Processing Key for most movies released so far. I was not aware that a string of numbers and letters was copyrightable. Perhaps its just my ignorance but it seems that someone is abusing the DMCA again.

This means the (admittedly long) number is precisely the key you need in order to decrypt and watch HD-DVD movies in Linux (oh, okay, maybe software is also required). And the fact that it’s out there, spreading like wildfire, is killing the types at the movie studios right now.

This post on Slashdot was too juicy to pass up. It struck me as particularly hilarious.

“According to an article at the BBC, an evolutionary theorist in London suggests that humanity may split into two sub-species within the next 100,000 years. From the article: ‘The descendants of the genetic upper class would be tall, slim, healthy, attractive, intelligent, and creative and a far cry from the “underclass” humans who would have evolved into dim-witted, ugly, squat goblin-like creatures.’”

This made me thing about the Eloi and Morlock, created by H. G. Wells for his 1895 novel, The Time Machine.

However, in this version, the Morlocks are the stupid ones and the Eloi are the smart ones. In any case, it was woth a laugh.

Well, I finally decided to upgrade my old Power Macintosh G4 (Quicksilver 2002) with a new server. Much like the old server, the new one is running Gentoo, however, the new server is an Intel box that was supplied by my father for free. Beggars can’t be choosers, eh?

Old Server:
CPU: PowerPC 7455
CPU Speed: 933 MHz
Memory: 1.0 GB
Storage: ~600 GB

New Server:
CPU: Intel Pentium 4
CPU Speed: 2.80 GHz
Memory: 2.0 GB
Storage: ~700 GB

As much as I hate to switch to an ugly PC box, it is only for server use. That is, basically the new ugly black box is my mail/web/music/file server. Hopefully, now that it is all set up, I’ll actually get around to posting random nonsense into this blog.