simonb.com: a 35mm comedic short about a man

On the Mac you can change the DVD region code 5 times after which no more changes are “allowed”. There’s something fundamentally wrong with hardware that disables itself. Or hardware that essentially dictates to the owner (the owner!) what it can be used for. Anyway, some searching turns up the means to reset the code. The below applies to Pioneer drives. My Mac has a Pioneer DVR-117 drive there’s seems to be no specific firmware for this drive downloadable on the net but some searching on the forums makes it clear that we can use the DVR-108 firmware. I found this article particularly helpful.

WARNING: this may permanently damage your drive.

The software to flash the drive - DVRFlash - can be downloaded from here.

The firmware can be downloaded from here.

Just follow the instructions, re-flash and region code is updated. Plus I think it adds some new capability to the drive.

If you get the error “AttributeError: ‘module’ object has no attribute ‘xyz’” in Django. It probably means you’ve added a new app but forgot to put the __init__.py file in the app’s directory.

I wept

Google have released their chart API. Here’s a few alternatives for Python:

• Matplotlib
• ChartDirector
• jpgraph
• dislin

See also vtk and MayaVi

How to change the number of pages (NumPages) displayed in Word documents. Edit those field codes.

China has published pictures from its first moon orbiter.

Interesting talk by Bryan Cantrill on DTrace. At the beginning he rips into Dreaming in Code by Scott Rosenberg. Scott’s talk at Google is here.

“Print file was not accepted (client-error-document-format-not-supported)!”

Is the error line appearing in /var/log/cups/error_log on the Mac

The reason was this line:

application/octet-stream application/vnd.cups-raw 0 -

in file /etc/cups/mime.convs on the server being commented out.

To enable raw printing of octet streams (what the mac sends with foomatic etc.) - the line needs to be uncommented. Otherwise the job will be rejected. You can only see this in the cups error_log file on the server with the cups LogLevel set to debug:

print_job: request file type is application/octet-stream.
Print-Job client-error-document-format-not-supported: Unsupported format ‘application/octet-stream’!

Remember Luke.

Google Apps is a marv thing. And free too. Since looping our email through Google we’ve been getting much less spam. But I’ve noticed the following quirks:

1. smtp.gmail.com is clever about the From field. The user I authenticate as is the one that shows up in the From field when the message is received. So even if I set the From field to be info@..., if I login as simonb@… The receiver sees email From simonb@… Once you’ve authenticated most services let you set the From field to whatever you like.

2. Mail from me to me is invisible to POP. I was emailing error messages to myself which appeared to come from me rather than the from the From field I’d set (see above). These messages appear in the GMail online Inbox but when I try to download via POP they are invisible.

The above is solved easily enough by creating a new user to represent my test box and have the email sent as the test-box-user. Proceed.

Here’s a page explaining how to make the sasl_passwd.db file used by Postfix when SMTP relaying mail.

We like to print invoices in a variety of currencies. There’s no setting in QuickBooks for this - it takes the system default… Well, most of the time. If you have your Region (International PreferencePane, System Preferences) set to one where the little yellow triangle shows up with the message about Unicode and WorldScript, the currency symbol is ignored. So, say I have China selected for no other reason than say I’m in China and billing in Yuan QuickBooks will use the $ (USD) symbol. I have to set the Region to ‘United States’ (not the Unicode one, the other one) and manually set the Currency to Yuan and the Measurement Units to Metric (not Imperial or as the Mac has it ‘U.S.’). Then QuickBooks is happy. Obvious really now I think about it.

I’m re-installing the latest in a line of sick iMacs after it has returned to us with new hard disk. I keep getting “perl crashed” messages appearing in the console when doing a software update and when trying to print with cups. The perl crash log tells us why:

This is fixed by copying over a version of libperl.dylib which does have the symbol ‘atfork’ (available on every other Mac in the office) But the question is why does this happen. I got the iMac back from an official Apple repair center with a working installation of OS X. I doubt they’d go out of their way to hobble Perl. Is this just a feature of recent upgrades?

So the symptoms where Software Update and printing stopped working. The cause, a hosed Perl. The problem is not always where the symptoms appear. I least I’ve not had to re-install the entire system…

It’s often useful to have a local SMTP server one can throw messages at without passwords and authentication. For example, if you’re doing a quick hack or sending messages from a program like Apple’s Mail. It’s even more useful if your local SMTP server can contact your regular SMTP server to send the messages into the greater interweb.

Macs come with postfix installed which can do just that - but without any graphical means of configuration I doubt most people know it even exists. It is a fully functional mail server though and can be used as such. Postfix Enabler will probably work for most people who want graphical configuration. Others will read Postfix’s excellent docs and edit the config files using vi. However, there are a few cases in which Postfix Enabler falls short. Namely if you’re contacting a SMTP server that expects STARTTLS.

To get postfix to use STARTTLS when contacting a SMTP relay you simply add:

smtp_use_tls=yes

to /etc/postfix/main.cf

Newer versions of Postfix recommend a different way of saying the same thing - check which version you have and read the docs. My Mac has 2.1.5 current release is 2.4.

Doing the above after using Postfix Enabler fixed my problems.

Of course, if Apple respected my choice of email client (Thunderbird) rather than forcing me to use Mail everytime I want to mail an event from iCal none of this would matter.

Stephen Fry - a man of many words

Note to self: on Gentoo postgresql configuration files (pg_hba.conf and postgresql.conf found in /var/lib/postgresql/data) need to be owned by the postgres user. So if you edit them as root, reset the owner:group before restarting postgresql.