Dear Lazyweb,

I suspect the answer to this is also "Apple horked it in a recent security update", but I still desire to know how to fix it. Lately, when I'm doing rsync+ssh backups of various machines, ssh craps out partway through. Ssh is running on MacOS 10.4 PPC (OpenSSH 4.7p1) with the latest updates, and is aimed at at various Linuxen that haven't been upgraded since, say, 2005 (OpenSSH 4.3). It dies like so:

rsync [...]
building file list ... done
...dozens of files get transferred successfully...
Disconnecting: Bad packet length 787964.

It's dying after transferring a bunch of data, not during connection setup. Both side are most assuredly speaking SSH2.

Googling this error message only results in very old threads where people say, "Oh, that's because you're using SSH2! You should use SSH1 instead." This answer is clearly bullshit. What's the real fix?

Dear Lazyweb, lately (this month-ish) I'm seeing that "A script in this movie is causing Adobe Flash Player 9 to run slowly" dialog all the time. Safari will go all hypnowheel for 5-10 seconds, and then that dialog appears, giving me the options of "break the web page" or "go back to the hypnowheel for another ten seconds, then everything's fine." Who broke what? No scratch that, just tell me how to fix it.

Adium's ability to search IM logs is comically bad. It's so bad, I usually resort to grep. Which is almost enough to drive me back to iChat. But I like having OTR (crypto) built in, and iChat's multi-protocol UI is stupid (I want one list of contacts, not one list per server).

Since the PearLyrics guy gave up, every now and then I look for a new iTunes plugin that downloads and displays lyrics. There are surprisingly few. But I recently came across GimmeSomeTune, which, despite the terrible name, seems reasonable. But I think it gets lyrics only from lyricwiki.org, which means it doesn't have a very big set to choose from. Still, the UI is mostly reasonable, and it has a menubar iTunes controller built in too (I had been using ByteController for that.)

Happy Run Some Old Web Browsers Day!

In honor of the ten year anniversary of the Mozilla project, home.mcom.com, the Internet Web Site of the Mosaic Communications Corporation, is now back online.

It took some doing. There is comedy.

First, the fun stuff:

• Until now, home.mcom.com and all URLs under it just redirected to netscape.com, then redirected a dozen more times before taking you to some AOL portal page. The old URLs that were baked into the toolbar buttons of the original web browsers didn't work any more. But now, if you fire up a copy of Mosaic Netscape 0.9, and click on the various toolbar buttons, they will work again! For example, in the old browsers, when you clicked on the "What's New" toolbar button, it went here.

• home.mcom.com is now a snapshot of that web site from 21-Oct-1994.

• mosaic.mcom.com is now a snapshot of that web site from July 1994. That's from just after the company was announced, but before the first browser beta was released. I think that by Oct 1994, both mosaic.mcom.com and www.mcom.com were redirects to home.mcom.com, but I can't remember any more.

• In order to make these web sites work in the old browsers, it was necessary to host them specially. In this modern world, a single server will typically host multiple web sites from a single IP address. This works because modern web browsers send a "Host" header saying which site they're actually looking for. Old web browsers didn't do that: if you wanted to host a dozen sites on a single server, that server had to have a dozen IP addresses, one for each site. So these sites have dedicated addresses!

  The web server also had to be configured to not send a "charset" parameter on the "Content-Type" header, because the old browsers didn't know what to make of that.

• Trivia Question #1: Do you remember why home1.mcom.com through home32.mcom.com exist?

• Trivia Question #2: Do you remember the behavioral difference the browsers exhibited when they were talking to a Netscape web server?

• Trivia Question #3: When was the <HYPE> tag implemented, and what was its origin?

• I had originally planned on re-hosting these web sites on an SGI Indy running Mosaic Netsite Commerce Server, just for maximal comedic value... and to see how long it took before someone Øwned it, since there must be someone out there who still remembers how to launch an assault on Irix 5.3. Unfortunately, that wasn't possible for political reasons explained below.

Trivia Answers:

1. home1.mcom.com through home32.mcom.com exist because the early browsers did client-side load-balancing: the browser itself had a special case where if it was loading "home.mcom.com" it would actually pick a random number from 1 to 32 and instead load "homeN.mcom.com"! Those were physically different servers in the Netscape data center.

2. When loading pages from a Netscape server, the caption next to the URL field in the browser would change from "Location" to "Netsite".

3. Not telling.

Enough about all that, I want to run some old browsers!

• My personal collection of old Netscape browsers is here: www.mcom.com/archives/. It's not complete, but it's all that I could find. (It is missing some key releases, such as Netscape 0.4 for Irix, which was the first release to ever leave the building; and the "non-exportable"-crypto versions of almost all of them.)

  If you can publicly mirror these, please do! I know of a few mirrors so far: edlang.org, nothings.org, fauxpaw.com, and moar.jp. Torrents, anyone?

• Linux users: You can run Mosaic Netscape binaries as old as 0.93 on modern Linux systems! You need to load the "a.out" module in the kernel, and install some really old libraries:
  • /etc/modules.conf: alias binfmt-0064 binfmt_aout
  • ld.so-1.9.5-13.i386.rpm (a.out loader)
  • aout-libs-1.4-9.i386.rpm (a.out libc 4)
  • libc-5.3.12-31.i386.rpm (elf libc 5, for NS3)
  • Reconstruct /usr/X386/lib/X11/nls/ (ancient X11 idiocy, don't ask)
  • For Java in Netscape 2 and newer:
    mv moz2_01.zip moz2_02.zip java_30 java_301 /usr/local/lib/netscape/

  Since pulling all those files out is kind of a pain, I've put together a tarball: netscape-linux-libs.tar.gz. Unpack it in your root directory. It shouldn't conflict with anything modern. I've tested that on Red Hat 9 and Ubuntu 7.10.

• Mac users: If you're using a modern Mac, you need to use an emulator.
  • Download BasiliskII from Gwenole's site. Note: there are apparently a number of projects that call themselves "BasiliskII 1.0", but the one linked here seems to be the only one that actually works.

  • Download Quad650.zip and MacStartup.img from Redundant Robot (a Mac ROM and disk image of MacOS 7.5.5).

  • Launch "BasiliskIIGUI". Under "Volumes", add "MacStartup.img", and point "Unix Root" at your desktop or something (so that you can transfer the old Netscape installers into the emulator).

  • Under "Network", set Ethernet to "slirp".

  • Under "Memory", set model to "Quadra", CPU to 68040, and ROM file to the (unzipped) Quadra ROM. Turn on JIT. Set your screen size to something sane.

  • Start the emulator, launch "StuffIt Expander" and unpack the "netscape1_0.sea.hqx" file. (You can't just double-click it.)

  • Launch the "netscape1_0.sea" self-extracting archive. And you're in business!

  • But, if you want to run 0.9, you'll have to set your (real) system clock back to 1994 to get around the time-bomb. (0.93 and later don't have a time bomb.)

• Once you've got those old browsers running, you'll find that they're working fine with the mcom.com web sites, but they fail on just about every other web site in the world (for the "Host" header reason I described above).

  I have a fix for that!

  I wrote a small proxy server that bidirectionally translates the HTTP/1.0 protocol spoken by old web browsers to the HTTP/1.1 protocol spoken on the modern web. Download and run http10proxy.pl. (You may need to install the Net::Server::Fork Perl module first.) Then, go into the preferences on your ancient browser and set "HTTP Proxy" to localhost, port 8228. This will adjust outgoing Host headers as well as incoming Content-Type headers.

What Was That About Politics?

When I heard that AOL was shutting down their Netscape division for good, I mailed a contact there and asked if they'd transfer the mcom.com domain to me, so that I could resurrect these web sites to make the old browsers work right.

My contact asked around, and much to my surprise, the answer was yes! Wheels were put in motion, AOL's operations folks removed their dependencies on those domains (no idea what those were!) and the domains were about to be transfered... when...

AOL Chief IP Counsel and Time Warner blocked it.

Why?

Because their lawyers determined that, because mcom.com is ten years old and four letters long, they could make several hundred thousand dollars by simply putting it on the market and selling it to a spammer!

And so they began the process of doing exactly that.

Fortunately, my contact (who prefers to remain anonymous) talked them out of this, pointing out that it would be perhaps not the best PR move. But still, they wouldn't transfer it to me. AOL still owns the domains. However, they were willing to host the old Netscape content there, at least for now.

So, thank you to my anonymous contact for all the help! And thank you to AOL for hosting these historic web pages. And for not (yet?) selling the domain to a spammer.

Mike Akers ported Dali Clock to the iPhone. He says, "it's now installable via Installer.app, in the Utilities section."

I don't have (and don't want) an iPhone^* so I don't know what that means, but presumably those of you who do, do.

* Hate the on-screen keyboard, find their policy of making third-party software difficult to install to be offensive.

Hey, I think I found a kernel bug. It's preventing the "Phosphor" screen saver (and others) from working properly on 10.5. As far as I can tell, if you have a pipe, and the process on the other end exits, the pipe flushes: all bytes that have been written to the pipe from the child but not yet read by the parent vanish. I reported it to Apple (5606018); no response yet.

(  --More--(33%)  )

Make your Dock be flush against the corner of the desktop, instead of centered vertically or horizontally. This means your icons will stay put, regardless of how many windows are open:

defaults write com.apple.dock pinning -string start ;
killall Dock

Turn off menubar transparency on 10.5:

sudo defaults write /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.WindowServer EnvironmentVariables -dict CI_NO_BACKGROUND_IMAGE 1

and then reboot (logging out isn't enough).

Dear Lazyweb,

Let's say I was thinking about upgrading the second monitor I have attached to my iMac from a CRT (SVGA) to an LCD (DVI). I want that second monitor to run in 1600×1200 or so, and yet be mirrored onto my TV (projector) via an SVideo cable. Right now, I am accomplishing this by having the iMac's mini-DVI going into a mini-DVI-to-SVGA converter, and thence to an AverKey 300 SVGA splitter, which gives me an SVGA pass-through plus a downsampled SVideo output. (As discussed earlier.)

So, there are cables like this which split DVI into DVI-plus-SVGA, but they only work with DVI-I... and as far as I can tell, the only mini-DVI-to-DVI adapters that exist are DVI-D only (suggesting that perhaps Macs don't do analog DVI output at all?)

So, what's the cheapest way to do it?

Dear Lazyweb,

TivoTool stopped working on 10.5, and mail to the author bounces. It's looking for this "CamelBones" library that no longer exists. I installed some newer version of it, but that didn't work either. What are my alternatives for getting video off my Tivo without an analog phase? (If you're going to point me at some forum page on tivocommunity or dealdatabase, please try harder: I can never figure out how to download shit from there.)

Update: So, here's one semi-horrible way:

To get the show ID number:
/Library/Application\ Support/TivoTool/vstream-client tivo://hostname/llist

To download that show as an MPEG2 file:
/Library/Application\ Support/TivoTool/vstream-client tivo://hostname/number -o tmp.ty
/Library/Application\ Support/TivoTool/vsplit -m tmp.ty filename unused

Dali Clock 2.25 out now. The only change this time around is that I converted it to a Dashboard widget.

I did the build on MacOS 10.5.0, but I think I have things set up so that it will all still run on 10.4.0 or newer. However, early reports indicate that the Dashboard widget doesn't work on 10.4.10. Update: Fixed! Re-download it. Version number unchanged.

Also I signed the code with a self-signed cert. I wonder if that did anything sane. It's surprising that signatures don't show up in Get Info in Finder.

Dashcode is weird. I couldn't figure out whether I should check the .wdgt into CVS or the .wdgtproj or both.

Also I couldn't figure out how to make the widget be resizable, or how to add color selectors to the preferences panel on the back.

This is awesome:

SurveillanceSaver is an OS X screen saver that shows about 400 live security camera videos from public accessible Axis network cameras. It shows surprising scenes from underwater pool cameras, cows in milking machines, to shopping malls and street cameras.

Dear Lazyweb, I seek software that does the following:

• I give it an ordered list of MP3 files.
• When a user loads some URL in (e.g.) iTunes, those files are streamed out, one after another, with appropriate metadata (extracted from underlying ID3 tags) sent just as each file starts.
• When the user connects, it starts playing at the beginning of file #1 for each user. (As opposed to multicast-style, where all users get whatever's-on-right-now at the same time.)
• The underlying individual files themselves should not be accessible.

I don't think I can make Icecast2 do this, nor Apache::MP3. But maybe I'm wrong.

Failing that, can someone explain to me what asynchronous streaming metadata format iTunes actually understands, and what headers/protocol it requires? It doesn't appear to do the "icy-metaint" thing; does that mean it does the UDP thing? I don't see headers being exchanged for either; and yet, it seems to update metadata somehow. Please don't make me run a packet sniffer. I hate that.

Update: Nevermind, I wrote my own.

Dear Lazyweb, what's the easiest, cheapest way to put a video input on a Mac?

What I care about:

• RCA jack on one end;
• Firewire cable on the other;
• Recognized as a video input by Quicktime Pro, iMovie, etc.

What I don't care about even a little bit:

• video output;
• TV tuner;
• HDTV tuner;
• Hardware MPEG encoding;
• Bundled DVR software;
• Any other kitchen sinkery.

I've used a "Dazzle Hollywood DV Bridge" in the past with success, but those are A) discontinued, and B) more complicated than I need anyway.

Dear Lazyweb, how do I turn on verbose boot permanently on an Intel iMac? (No, I don't want to hold down Cmd-V every time.)

On PPC Macs, the incantation was nvram boot-args="-v" but the Intel Macs don't have the same NVRAM variables.

Update: Hey, what do you know, it's the same command on Intel Macs, even though "boot-args" isn't there by default.

Dear Lazyweb, think twice before upgrading to Missing Sync 6.0.1.

I upgraded from 5.1.2 to 6.0.1 primarily because I wanted the new "SMS Log" app that archives the SMSes on your phone in a readable, searchable way.

However, they also replaced the "MemoPad" application with a new "Notes" application. Unfortunately, the new one is ( full of bugs. )

So, don't buy that upgrade. But if you do, it's possible to continue using the "MemoPad" application from version 5 with the rest of version 6: ( Like so. )

Ok, but now you might find that the "Photos" conduit doesn't work any more. ( So then... )

There, wasn't that simple?

Let that be a lesson to you: never upgrade.

Dear Lazyweb, here are two unrelated questions:

1. What's a command-line MacOS way to extract iTunes metadata from a MOV file (e.g., "Title", "Artist", "Year")? The Perl modules MP4::Info and Audio::M4P::QuickTime and AtomicParsley will extract such metadata from MP4 files, but none of them work on the QuickTime container.
   Update: 'mdls' seems to be the simplest answer to this for MOV files (but not MP4 files, for which MP4::Info works ok.)

2. I put an extension on the cable of my cellphone booster, because a better spot for the antenna was a bit farther away than the 100' piece of coax that it came with. However, this seems to have made matters worse instead of better. In my experience in the past, all coax is more-or-less created equal, but maybe that's not the case when it comes to the frequencies involved here. What kind of cable should I be using for this?
   Update: I replaced it with a single run of RG-6/U quad shield ("Belden 7916A"), and it works a lot better. So either I had a crappy cable in there, or connecting two cables together was a bad idea.