Akatombo Web Log
Friday, November 16, 2007
Getting Stuffit et all without giving out them your e-mail address
This is probably something that everyone else in the world thought of a long time ago, but I just stumbled upon it recently, and since it was useful once again for getting the bento trial I thought I’d post it up here.
Every time there is an update to stuffit, it starts bugging you to upgrade. The problem with this is that the only time I use stuffit is when I double click a zip or other archive file, which means it pops up and asks me to update right in the middle of the extraction. This usually seems to make the extraction process freeze up, and so the only possible way for me to extract the file is to go download the upgrade. This infuriates me, and I need to go find an alternative to Stuffit (any suggestions?), but for now I just dutifully update. The problem is, they ask for an e-mail address, which I feel no obligation to give them (I’d rather go unzip from the command line really).
The simple solution is of course to go to Version Tracker or Mac Update and search for the piece of software you want. There you go, all downloaded and no pesky e-mail address requests.
Saturday, September 15, 2007
Changes in the podcast
I am currently working on the presentation of the AMPPcast podcast portion of this website so things are likely to break and/or look very plain or strange at times. Also, doing an enhanced podcast seemed a little silly since it took extra time with very little benefit and limited our audience to people on the site or people with iPods. I’ll probably convert all our prior episodes to mp3 files and change the site to expect mp3 files instead of the m4a files we’ve been putting up so far. So if you want the enhanced versions get or watch them now. They could disappear at any moment.
Friday, September 14, 2007
can’t execute code from a freed script - FIXED
This is a placeholder for further information on a javascript problem I know I’m going to have to figure out in the near future. Internet Explorers 6 and 7 (is there ever another browser that gives me problems?) throw the somewhat cryptic “can’t execute code from a freed script” when loading a page that I’ve recently added some ecma script to. I’m just getting back into DOM scripting after a while away from messing with it, and am definitely rusty. Still, my understanding of the error message is that it is roughly speaking a matter of scope of code, and that code loaded for one window or frame will have been freed from memory and will not be available when in other windows or frames. This doesn’t seem to apply with the scripting I’m doing. I’m dealing with only one window and no frames so I need to find more out about what the error really means. If you know, please comment and let me know. If you want to know, please watch this space for updates. (If you leave a comment, you can receive notifications when new comments are added)
UPDATE: FIXED! About 10 minutes after posting this I found the bizarre (to me, maybe someone can explain it) solution for this problem. It was as simple as moving any meta tags before the script tags in the head element of the html document. <script><meta> = heartache <meta><script> = salvation.
Friday, October 06, 2006
When Good Disks Go Bad
Apologies to anyone who tried to access the site in the last 24 hours or so. The hard disk on our database server pooped out, and though we had a good backup, it was a very time consuming process to get back up and going, mostly because the disk that was slowly dying was the boot disk of the system. We unfortunately had no raid in place and so I had to reconstruct the server setup completely from the backup which is, by the way, not as fun as it may sound. At any rate, things are back up and going and we plan to have things running on a raid once we finish migrating to a new server—tentatively scheduled for the weekend after next. In all my time working with computers I have been extremely fortunate and this is the first hard disk I’ve ever had fail on me, so it was quite a surprise, and I learned a lot in dealing with it. Thanks a lot to friend and guru Tod McQuillin for assistance when I got stuck, stupid, and/or frozen in sheer Unix-induced terror.
Please let us know by e-mail or in the comments if you encounter any strangeness. I need some sleep now.
Wednesday, October 04, 2006
Podcasting!
Though the audio quality and many other aspects of the first episode leave a lot to be desired, I hereby proudly announce Episode 1 of the new podcast that will be hosted on the Akatombo Media website. The hosts are yours truly, and Stuart Woodward. Topics will likely include Japan, technology, and making things (tinkering) though nothing is set in stone. We don’t even have an official name for the show yet.
The fact that we are able to release the podcast now is a very happy tribute to the success of our (read Akatombo Media’s) work in other areas. Both CEATEC JAPAN 2006 and JISSO PROTEC 2006 are currently underway running on the specialty cms product we have designed for managing the websites of exhibitions. The CEATEC website especially is running on multiple web servers with incredibly high traffic, but our cms has been running nearly flawlessly—allowing me to spend the time that I need to be on call and immediately available to solve problems, working on editing audio and converting an iWeb generated podcast site into a temporary home for our podcast. If any of you happen to be involved in an Exhibition or Convention type organization and are interested in talking to us about how our cms product might help you, please don’t hesitate to contact us and we’ll answer any questions you may have and put you in touch with our sales agent.
In the meantime, I hope you enjoy the podcast and please comment with your suggestions for the show or any problems that you find. We may even do a proper intro next time.
Incidentally, the RSS feed for the podcast is separate from the normal feeds for the site, so to subscribe to the podcast in your aggregator, use http://www.akatombo.com/podcast/rss.xml or Click here to subscribe in iTunes.
UPDATE: The iTunes Subscription url was wrong. Please try again if you had encountered the error before.