This blog post is to capture a support article which helped me fix a problem on my MacBook Pro. Google still brings it up as the first result, but Apple seems to “misplace” the page when I visit it. The page in question was live at the time of this post, but I’m going to capture the relevant information here in case Apple misplaces the page again.

It’s that time of year again. Happy Festivus!

That must have been some kind of doll.
She was.

It’s weird to think that Fellowship of the Ring came out 10 years ago this month. I can vividly remember how excited I was to see the movie, and how I wasn’t disappointed in the slightest when I saw it on opening day. This teaser trailer has got me just as excited, possibly even more so because I know what kind of quality to expect in December, 2012.

It’s truly a shame that these guys no longer produce videos. Check out their individual sites here: Duane Brando

I’ve used several different web browsers over the years:

• Netscape Navigator Gold 3 - The browser my school system had installed.
• Netscape Communicator - Just an upgraded version with more features.
• Mozilla - Netscape Communicator without the “N”.
• Opera - The first browser I found with good tab navigation.
• Mozilla Firefox - I switched when several sites I visited stopped working.
• Safari - When Firefox 4 came out and broke every add-on I used with Macs.

It’s been an interesting ride. The story that came out last week about Chrome overtaking Firefox in browser market share got me thinking about it. I can’t say I’m surprised, it was hard navigating to any of Google sites in the last few years without being inundated with “Try Google Chrome” on each page. I’ve never tried using Chrome as my primary browser. The only places I always install it are on Linux machines or Windows Servers. Chrome works pretty well on Linux machines, considering that the computers I usually put Linux on are older laptops. Windows Servers had IE so locked down by default I couldn’t navigate anywhere, and I didn’t care enough to figure out exactly what policies I needed to change in order to fix that. I’d just copy a Chrome Installer.exe over onto the server and be done with it.

The thing that surprises me about this list is that Safari is the first browser I’ve ever used that’s the default for an operating system.

One of the biggest tech stories this week involved the independent discovery of an application embedded in several major smartphones. The application, created by the company Carrier IQ Inc., functions by “counting and measuring operational information in mobile devices - feature phones, smartphones and tablets.” According to Trevor Eckhart, who reported the application’s existence and functionality, Carrier IQ’s software goes so far as to log individual keystrokes made by the user. The broad scope of such capability seems to render concerns associated with tracking location data insignificant by comparison. Eckhart demonstrates several examples of Carrier IQ’s interesting capabilities:

• Recording individual keys pressed by the user
• Recording the contents of SMS messages
• Recording requests made to websites, even when using HTTPS

I have recently resumed hosting my own blog. My first absence from blogging was the result of giving up on seemingly endless security patches required to keep my Drupal blog alive. When I started using the free as in beer service blogspot.com, I thought I had found the solution to my dearth of blogging. Blogspot was used by several technical people I had seen give presentations, and it was run by Google who I was an embarrassingly huge fan of. Without much hassle, I found it was sufficient to publish any technical notes I accumulated and wanted to share. However, recently I began exploring alternatives for reasons I outline below.

Introduction

I’ve worked with the Apache Jackrabbit implementation of the Java Content Repository (also known as JCR or JSR-170) for some time now, and found it was a bit confusing to get a load balanced implementation. There are plenty of guides and documentation on the Jackrabbit wiki but piecing them together in a way that makes sense took a significant effort. The purpose of this blog post is to describe my approach in the hope that it may make it easier for others with the same goal in mind. I have created a GitHub project with some of the key configuration files included, please feel free to check it out to refer to it as I go along.

I recently replaced my home server with some Apple hardware and instead of having to buy a rather costly Server version of Snow Leopard, Lion had just come out, as well as an App store Server upgrade option. I was delighted to hear that OSX Lion Server shipped with the PostgreSQL database that I use for my application. I know that some people are probably surprised by this, but I think it is an excellent choice over MySQL which I try to avoid.