Obviously it was not Little Snitch or at least not Little Snitch alone that cause the malady which befell my poor Mac.  The morning found it again without the ability to left click and sadness returned.  Fortunately I was able to reboot it and was able to get my mouse back to normal again.  I believe this is going to have to become a more in-depth research problem.  Hopefully it isn’t a problem in El Capitan and I won’t have to deal with it eternally.  I’ll let you know what I find out if anything.

I was trying to do some surfing tonight after a reboot and some Little Snitch Updates.  Thing went horribly wrong and once my Mac Book restarted all I could do was right click and I could only right-click on things that had focus.  It was horrifying, and I think the only time I’ve ever wished to be back on Window… for a brief moment.  I couldn’t left click I couldn’t get focus on any controls.  It was pretty nerve wracking.  Regardless though, I finally managed to find that in System Preferences under the Keyboard section and then shortcuts; there is an option to do CTRL+F7.  This allows for “Full Keyboard Access to All Controls”.  My Savior!  After that I was able to navigate using right clicks and Tab and the Space Bar and Enter and other keys to navigate through the Little Snitch Update to 3.6.1.  After the reboot all was well.  So very happy and relieved.  I will definitely be leaving Full Access Enabled.

After working with Linux and Unix for so long it’s been difficult to go back to the Windows world. It’s not that I’m anti-windows or anything, it’s just a different environment and not one that I adore.

I’ve been trying to be fair to SharePoint and I don’t think that it’s necessarily a bad starting point, but it’s just so massive that it isn’t a one person type show.

I’ll continue to plug away at it and try not to squeeze my squishy ball to death when SharePoint designer or the web interface doesn’t work the way I think it should.

I think that’s all the ranting I’ll do for now. Like I said, it isn’t bad…. it’s just different.

So I decided to say what the hell and signed up for the “Rockmelt” beta. I was intrigued by the video and thought it might be a good experiment.  Unfortunately, it really did not live up to my expectations.

The interface is nice and the ability to add favorite friends and feeds is a nice thing.  The chromium engine give it good speed for loading and browsing and the ability to limit javascript and plugin activity is nice, though nothing close to what NoScript is capable of in Firefox.

I understand that it is a beta and that things may not work properly, but core functionality should work.  I’ve tried on multiple occasions to “share” a link with either friends or post it to my wall and it has not worked.  the button works, but the connection to Facebook fails.  I find it interesting though that when I look at the feed for Facebook, on the left, my credentials work and things are hunky dorky.

The search is different and I’ve had to get use to not seeing them in a page, but in a drop down menu.  That hasn’t really bothered me and the overall usefulness of the search is on par with any other search.  It’s all based on what you’re searching for and how you phrase it.

I’m going to Zap the and reinstall it to see if the issues I’ve been having persist.

So I like making life easier and all that for myself when coding….  So I decided a while back to recreate some of the tags I used to have in happy ClodFusion land into PHP land.  Granted I’m sure they aren’t as pretty or nifty, but they work so I’m happy.  The first one I made was for a textbox type input.

// print a single-line text box
function input_text($element_name, $element_label, $values, $maxLen = ”, $maxSize = ”, $juju=”) {
print ‘<dt style=width:”‘.$juju.’ !important”>
<label for=”‘ . $element_name . ‘”>’ . $element_label . ‘</label>
</dt>
<dd>
<input type=”text” name=”‘ . $element_name .'” id=”‘ . $element_name .'” maxlength=”‘. $maxLen .'” size=”‘. $maxSize. ‘”  value=”‘;
if ($values == ‘$_POST’){
print htmlentities($values[$element_name]) . ‘” /></dd>’;
}else{
print htmlentities($values) . ‘” /></dd>’;
}
}

So once the code is included somewhere with your functions you can call it and it makes a pretty little textbox for you.  I have the following in the style sheet so that the text boxes will align and all that.

dt label{
clear: both;
position:relative;
float:left;
width: 10em;
padding: 0 0 .1em 0;
text-align: right;
}
dd input, dd select, dd textarea{
float: left;
position:relative;
width: 17em;
margin: .25em 0 .25em 0;
padding-left: .2em;
}

Usually to use it I will create a displayFom() function and stuff the form I want to use in it.

//example Form Funtion
function displayForm(){
print ‘<form method=”POST” action=”‘. $_SERVER[‘PHP_SELF’]. ‘ “>’;
//This is the form’s main fieldset
print “<fieldset>
<legend title=\”\”>Blah Form</legend>”;
print “<fieldset>
<legend title=\”Blah Information\”>Blah Information:</legend>”;
input_text(‘firstName’, ‘*First Name: ‘, $_POST[‘firstName’]);
input_text(‘lastName’, ‘*Last Name: ‘, $_POST[‘lastName’]);
print “</fieldset>”;
print “</fieldset>”;
input_submit(‘submit’,’Add this Volunteer’);
</form>
}

At that point if I want a single stage form I’ll write an if statement wondering if the submit has been triggered yet and check to make sure that my required fields are filled in.

//Here it checks to see if the form was submitted
if (isset($_POST[‘submit’])){
//Then it gets ready to check the required fields
//initialize the errors array for validation
$errors =array();
//Create a database record ID if you need one
$ID = uniqid(“”,true);
//replicate the blow code chunk and enter your required fields to either validate them or trigger the error message
if (empty($_POST[‘firstName’])){
$errors[] = “You forgot to enter the Volunteer’s First Name…”;
} else {
$firstName = trim($_POST[‘firstName’]);
}
if (empty($_POST[‘lastName’])){
$errors[] = “You forgot to enter the Volunteer’s Last Name…”;
} else {
$lastName = trim($_POST[‘lastName’]);
}
//if there aren’t any errors
if (empty($errors)){
// then connect to the database
require_once(“theDatabaseConnection”);
//get ready to insert the record
$query = “INSERT INTO things(stuffID,
lastName,
firstName)
VALUES (‘$ID’,
‘$lastName’,
‘$firstName’)”;
//Insert insert insert!
$result = mysql_query($query);
// If all goes well you should hit here and go on
if ($result) {
//Yay the database insert worked!
echo “<h3> Thank you!</h3>”;
echo “<p>”. $firstName . ” has been added</p>
<p><a href=\”/\”>Go back to the  Website</a></p>”;
} else {
//booooo the database insert didn’t work, so now show me how I messed up…
echo “<h3>Uh… Oh</h3><p>I couldn’t process your server information… </p>”;
echo “<p>Please let the webmistress know the following has happened: <br />” . mysql_error();
echo $query;
exit();
}
} else {
//If there are errors in the required fields, this reports the errors
echo “<h3>The following error(s) occurred:</h3>”;
foreach($errors as $msg) {
//Prints each error
echo “- $msg <br /> \n”;
}
//and then redisplays the form to be finished in again with the previously entered information
displayForm();
}
//if the submit button hasn’t been pushed then it goes on to display the initial form
} else {
displayForm();
}

That’s pretty much it… This just uses the one form field type.

I put my NetBook in suspend mode yesterday evening so I could take it home and finish some work on compiling.  Yeah now I remember why graphical logins suck fanny.

The graphical login is broken and just keeps reloading and reloading and reloading and reloading… well you get the idea.

Needless to say, I’m reformatting again, because I shouldn’t have to deal with it being broken and I don’t want to spend the time trying to figure out what happened and how to fix it.

So I’m getting along fairly well with my Netbook and while I understand that I’m not going to find ready made binaries and happy little plugins for everything I would like. I’m also  remembering what a pain some things can be when installing from source.

My latest adventure has been installing Pidgin’s OTR plugin.  I thought this would be an easy thing to ese me back into the the realm.  So… yeah, ummmmm… it still isn’t installed and I decided to reformat my netbook.  I’m still fairly new to “apt”, which by the way is a really nice package manager, and I installed quite a few things that just, well… I didn’t need them and I hate haveing all these extraneous bits lying around.  So since it doesn’t take that long I reformatted the netbook and started over again.

This time instead of using apt-get for some of the stuff I just went to the site and got the source direct.  I found that I didn’t have 2 packages I needed when I tried to compile GLib, pkg-config and .  I did apt-get them.  Then I tried to compile GTK+…. yeah…. now I remember why I don’t like dependencies.

So pixman begat cairo, which begat a whole butt-load of other crap…. I might get the plugin installed by next Tuesday.  /me sighs

I’m at an impass. I’m pleased with the way my NetBook is working with OpenGEU an yet I’m frustrated at the same time.  This is the first time in a VERY VERY long time that I’ve used Linux for a desktop.  It’s really come a long way since then and it’s very usable.  The problem is quite a few of the programs that I’m used to having available to me on windows and the mac just aren’t here.  I don’t think I’ll really miss them since there are alternatives, but it’s the fact that I can’t use their expanded functionality that bugs me. For instance if I wanted to use the video chat in gmail, I can’t. There isn’t code available for that functionality. There isn’t a Y!Chat client at all, you have to go through the web interface which isn’t that bad, but again it doesn’t have all the functionality of the client.  I know there is Pidgin for all the chat things and all that and I don’t mind it, in fact  I rather like it.  It still bothers me that I feel like a second class computer user when it comes to chat.  I love that I have the terminal and all the functionality that my servers have on the little guy, but it’s just the little things that bug me.  I’ll live with it for at least another month and see what happens.  I’m sure it’ll grow on me… if it doesn’t, there is always nLite.

I was a copy-cat a few months ago and bought a NetBook.  I got the ASUS EeePC 901.  it has a solid state hard drive and it’s about the size of a large paperback.  I love it and it worked great for me when I went to a SANS training at the RSA Conference in San Francisco and didn’t want my Mac anywhere near those looney “security” people.

when it first came it had the Xandros OS on it from ASUS.  while it was nice and pretty, it just didn’t do it for me.  Mainly I think because it didn’t have a terminal.  Who has ever heard of a Linux flavor without a terminal!  Anyway I reformatted it with Windows XP and put office on it for RSA.  Everything worked well and I was pleased. Then I ran out of room trying to update office.  I found out when I reformatted the lil’guy that there isn’t one 20GB SSD drive, but 2.  One is 4GB and the other is 16GB.  The 4GB chip being faster I had decided to install the OS to it and run some tools that modified my profile path and the path to where the OS  installs programs by default. Really everything was wonderful, except not being able to update office! Then I tried to get the webcam to work.  That was a no-go.  I tried everything, well except for the obvious, which didn’t occur to me until after I reformatted with Linux for the fourth or fifth time.  Apparently the webcam is disabled in the BIOS by default for some off the wall reason.

I fixed that and then decided I might as well explore the linux variants that exist for the NetBook crowd.  There are quite a few.  There are 4 that tried out: OpenGEU, Mandriva, EasyPeasy and Moblin.  I had problems with all of them to one extent or another.

I settled with Moblin for now, but in this post I just found out that I can’t cut and paste with keyboard shortcuts.  While that isn’t a deal breaker for this particular distro, it is going to be rather frustrating ince I use keyboard shortcuts quite a bit. I’ll have to investigate the little section  called “Pasteboard” which looks to be the way I have to copy and paste.  That is not exciting. (I messed up and touched the trackpad and moved my cursor, and since I still don’t know how to type, was still typing away before I noticed the issue. I tried the pasteboard and it copied the text to it, but then there isn’t a way to get it out of there and where I need it.  I’m really going to be annoyed it there isnt something as fundamental as cut, copy and paste in this distro.)

Another negative for Moblin was the install.  If you’re going to give me the option to install it the a partition that I want to and put the bootloader where I want.  That part better damn well work, which obvously since I’m writing this didn’t.  There were partition table errors coming out my ears. No matter how I tried to slice up the partitions between the drives it just wasn’t having any of it.  I like the overall theory of Moblin, which to me makes the NetBook a “Social Networking Platform” with a terminal.

Easy Peasy and Mandriva were just meh.

I’ve ended up rith now with OpenGEU which is based off enlightenment.  I like it so far… we’ll see how it goes.

I like Linux and I like apple and I even like windows for the most part.  Now in Windows you wouldn’t get a change to the base functionality of xcopy, but here in linux world I have exactly that in the cp command.  it’s always been easy to overwrite a whole slew of files at once if I was say updating a bunch of web sites to a new version of WordPress.  All I had to do was use the –reply=”no|yes” and it would automatically respond to the interactive request to overwrite the files with a yes.  I loved it. It made wading through all the updates to the umpteen different WordPress sites scriptable and fast.  No longer.  The –reply=”” command has been removed from cp.  So now I get to find another way to do it and it’s going to be cumbersome and annoying.  I wonder if I can find an older copy of cp that still has the –reply…. *sighs*