Provenzano Blog

A brand new world: iPhone!

Provenzano — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 12:50:41 +0000

Iphone is out there for a year now. I would have loved to be a early adopter but iPhone was not sold in Brazil or Tunisia. So I tried my best to forget about it. All my effort was destroyed last week.

I went to London for a short vacation and bought an unlocked iPhone from an italian friend. I am amazed how easy to use it is. It is not a phone at all. It is a magic creature, a tiny computer with a embedded GSM phone!

I’m very happy of my purchase. I just hope Apple will start selling it legally in other countries soon. So more people can use one of the best gadgets I’ve had in my hands ever!

Mac Heist Bundle! January 2008! Mac software almost for free!

Provenzano — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 09:42:33 +0000

I am very happy to see that Mac vendors are offering nice apps at very affordable prices! I am amazed as the companies that produce and sell Mac software support their users!

MacHeist promotes it’s second bundle. For 49$ you can buy at least 7 apps, and depending on how many people buy the bundle you can get 10 apps worth more than $300!

My favorite apps from this new bundle are AppZapper and 1password. CoverSutra is fun. I use Money Dance for finance but I’ll give Cha-Ching a try. iStopMotion is useless for me today, but since I plan to buy a camera it can be of much help in a near future. I like Awake and maybe I will use it instead of Alarm Clock Pro. I’m very interested on CSSEdit for my blogs theming and Snapz Pro X. Pixelmator is nice too, but right now I’m used to get Gimp to do the art work I need, wich is not much.

If you buy 2 or 3 bundles you get discounted prices! And 25% of the amount you pay is donated to charity (you can choose 1 of 10 institutions to donate to or to divide your donation between the 10).

Buy it now and enjoy all those good software!

Mac Update Bundle – What a Christmas Gift!

Provenzano — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 07:01:28 +0000

Take a look in the picture to get an idea about this promo. All those products are yours for only US$49.99. This is the second macupdate promo and I’m sure you will love it. I did.

Marine Acquarium is awsome. Xslimmer rocks! Swift Publisher is amazing! And all the other software!

If you want to put some fresh air on your mac, this is a very god opportunity!

The promo runs until the 20th of december 2007!

Run Macky, Run!

WordPress Drag and Drop and a misconfigured Proxy

Provenzano — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 11:30:46 +0000

I have problems with drag and drop on WordPress.com.

I thought it was a problem with my Firefox install, since I had the same problem with my wordpress self-hosted blog.

It took me time to understand what needed to be fixed. On WordPress 2.3.1 a simple editing solved the problem. It persists on WordPress.com since the installation cannot be tweaked by users.

When I load widgets.php (Admin -> Presentation -> Widgets) I can’t use drag and drop. Firefox error console points out some error messages:

Error: jQuery("ul#palette").Sortable is not a function Source File: http://provenzano.wordpress.com/wp-admin/widgets.php Line: 453

Those are functions that belong to jquery extension interface.js.

If I check with Safari “active connections” I noticed that when widgets.php tries to load interface.js it gets a file not found error.

If I directly try to load:

http://provenzano.wordpress.com/wp-includes/js/jquery/interface.js?ver=1.2

I get:

Not Found

The requested URL /wp-includes/js/jquery/int was not found on this server.

If I directly try to load the url:

http://provenzano.wordpress.com/wp-includes/js/jquery/interface.js?ver=

It works like a charm.

The problem relies that the proxy is in some way misconfigured and thus it translates

/wp-includes/js/jquery/interface.js?ver=1.2 into /wp-includes/js/jquery/int

To fix it on WP 2.3.1 I needed to edit scripts-loader.php.

from:$this->add( 'interface', '/wp-includes/js/jquery/interface.js', array('jquery'), '1.2');

$this->add( 'interface', '/wp-includes/js/jquery/interface.js', array('jquery'), '');

Now WP does not force the version of interface.js and the generated URL is not messed up by the server misconfiguration.

I documented it here since it can be of use for people that are behing misconfigured proxies they cannot bypass. This is my case right now, I’m working in Tunisia and there is no internet connection that does not pass trought the country’s proxy.

It solves the problem on Worpress.org blogs, but for wordpress.com there is no solution I can see other than asking to support personal to fix this for you.

I’ve written about this problem in my blog in portuguese , sent my solution to wordpress.org forum and wp-hacks mail list.

Nice App – Browseback

Provenzano — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 08:28:44 +0000

There applications you need. There are applications you love. There are applications that if you use it one time, you love it so much you need it! Browseback is one of the last ones.

People nowadays do not browse sites. They zap sites! And sometimes, six months after you visited that nice blog from an american girl who lives in Africa, you can’t remember it’s url address. Maybe you can’t even remember her name, but mostly you remember the page, you remember maybe the page’s colors or layout. The history listing of urls can’t help you at all. But Browseback can!

Browseback creates a database of your visited pages, and show you thumbnails of those pages. You just click on it you can browse it really fast! Just scroll, click and voilà! You can visit the page, make a pdf, send it by e-mail, print it or save it. Take a look at the screenshot from their site:

It can gather information from almost all main browsers in the market (Safari, Firefox, Camino, Opera, and others) and creates a single database! You can set the amount of space it will use in the hard drive, how many days back it should keep the database, search the pages in a spotlight like way…

And the best feature is that it starts getting information from your past visits, so if you install it today, it will build it’s database and you will have weeks before it was installed registered! Amazing!

It’s price is US $29.95. I think it’s a little salty, but it’s so much fun. If you get it a try you never live without it again!

Macupdate bundle

Provenzano — Sat, 14 Jul 2007 07:27:31 +0000

Macupdate has lauched a software bundle for $49.99. You can get 7 to 10 great software for your Mac for a nice price! Take a look!

My new MacBook Pro

Provenzano — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 07:11:58 +0000

Yes my friends, I’m back from Africa, I’m back from Angola. It was a hard time, away from my family, away from my hobbies, away from my MacMini. It was hard but I did it. And as a reward to mysef, I bought my precious, a MacBookPro 17”. I’m right now writing this post from it, in a hotel room in the paradisiac city of Parathy, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

I have to share with you my joy! Now this power toy will follow me into my new work adventure, again in Africa, but in Tunisia this time.

Wish me luck!

A new path to follow

Provenzano — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 22:53:46 +0000

It’s almost a month since I last wrote on this blog, and I apologize for that. The last few weeks I’ve been in a hush. I’ve been offered a job in Africa and I’m taking it!

That means a total change on my life. I’ll be moving in 3 weeks and I will be there for Christmas. I do not know if or when I’ll be able to post from there. I’m prety sure I’ll not see a Mac arround unless I buy a powermac for myself.

My first assignment will last 3 months. After that I’ll fly back home for 2 weeks, and I hope I´ll get my contract renewed.

Wish me luck on this new adventure!

Can Windows read my Mac hard disk?

Provenzano — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 11:57:47 +0000

A few posts ago I decided to format a 120Gb IDE drive with HPFS+ and attach it to a USB enclosure so my Macmini could serve me better. A lot of docs, music and work files are now safely stored there.

I’m out of the linux world for the 2 last months. I deleted my linux partitions on my PC, since I needed the space for some huge work files, and those have to be manipulated from windows programs.

I have a home network to share files between PC and Mac. It works like a charm, but sometimes it is not fast enough for my needs. I needed to transfer 14 Gb of files from my Mac to my PC and over the network it was taking too much time. It would be so good if Windows could recognize my HPFS+ Partition and read and write it!

Good news is that there’s a nice set of windows program that does just that! I can cite here Transmac, MacDisk and MacDrive.

MacDrive is my personal choice. It integrates gently with Windows and is smart enough to create a “real” mac hard drive on My Computer. You can forget that you are working with files that came from another OS, partition, etc… For the user it is like another PC hard disk, and it IS fast.

Give a look to all three, but I bet you will choose Macdrive if you need a “permanent” solution. And it is cheaper than the competitors!

Can my Mac mass rename files?

Provenzano — Sat, 14 Oct 2006 15:07:29 +0000

Sure it can do! There are more choices here than in the windows world, since you can use the bash command shell to write mass rename scripts! Oh, you are a Mac user and you do not want to write a single line, just some program that ‘just works’… If you want to pay for it there are some interesting utilities available…

File Renamer is a cheap ($9.95) and nice choice, it seems to be easy to use and has a nice interface. Take a look at the screenshot (from their website).

A Better Finder Rename seems to be the most powerful mac mass rename application I’ve found. It can do a lot more than all other software I’ve tried but costs also more ($19.95). Their website highlights some features:


Completely rewritten in Cocoa to offer best-of-breed interface Detachable, fully resizable instant preview window Combine multiple steps into a single multi-step rename Simple drag & drop installation, full control over which components are installed	Operate as stand-alone application Drag & drop files into the preview window Improved renaming from file lists (imported from Excel, database, etc.) Unicode support for international users Over 100 tweaks and refinements

It can work with meta tags on digital photos and mp3. It is also script-able and a wonderful tool for the power-user. If you can pay for it, this software is the right choice IMHO.

Here follows the screenshot:

These are neat choices but, like myself, ten bucks will make a difference in the end of the month.

If you wish to find a tool maybe not that powerfull, but that is for free…

Let’s take a look on 2 nice apps I’ve found that are very handy!

The first one is Renamer4Mac.

This app is very fast and reliable, it works with regular expressions and it can perform all the ser of basic operations you would need for mass renaming files. It is easy to use and IMHO the best choice for most mac users. I love the software, it is simple, intuitive and free. If you use it, please consider donating to the developer, who did an amazing work! Take a look:

If instead you are a power user that came from linux world, loves python and are a GPL zealot, Methamorphose is the software for you.

It needs you to install the last python release and is not as fast as remame4mac, but is far more powerful. It is not that easy to install for a Mac driven mind, it’s a python script!! No nice icon out of the box! Using it is not at all straight foward. There are a lot of options and features most of users do not want to know about!

It has also support for id3 tagging, so it can be a good choice if you need to rename mp3 files based on tags. Great feature!
Please be aware that this software is not a pieace of cake to digest for a newbie or out-of-the-box style guy. It`s the open source world dude, only the fittest survive!

Ok, mates , these apps are all good options and can make your life easier when mass renaming files. It depend now on your budget and user profile to choose one of them.

Oh my!, Mac is sooo adictive!

Technorati: rename, files, mac, macosx, freeware, open source, gpl, mp3, digital photos

iTunes 7 and Coverart

Provenzano — Sun, 08 Oct 2006 22:38:02 +0000

After the battle for partitioning my 120Gb Hd I started playing with my music collection on it. First thing to do was get all music loaded to iTunes library. It was painless, just a few clicks and my 40Gb collection was available to sync and go with my iPod Photo.

About these days Apple released iTunes 7, and advertised a great feature I’d always wished : auto cover art downloading! When I tried to give it a try I got stuck because Apple does not allow people from countrys without Apple Music Store’s account to use the feature. What a frustration! Since developing countries are never on Apple’s plans I think I’l never be able to use iTunes for buying music from them.

I started googling a little and found nice apps and scripts that could get the cover-art from the Internet. Most were commercial, others were free. The set of features differ one from another and the one I choose to use is called clutter.

This small and nice application is NOT a mass cover-art downloader. It will not scan your collection and fill it with covers! Instead it will found the cover art for the album that is playing on iTunes at the moment. So you’re listening to a Bad Religion album? t will fetch the cover or a set of covers for that album. You can apply it to your iTunes library or not. It searches mainly Amazon for the covers, but it can also launch your browser and google for it.

But if clutter is unable to find that cover art but you found it on a nice website like Findmycover? You just drag it from the browser to clutter, asks it to apply to iTunes library and it’s done.

Another nice feature of clutter is that you can drag a cover album from it to your desktop and you have a nice iTunes play-list on your desktop that has the cover as an icon! Nice isn’t it?

I hope this tip can be helpful to you!

Technorati: Mac, itunes, freeware, music, ipod, coverart, cd

Mac OS X and HD Partitions just let me down

Provenzano — Mon, 02 Oct 2006 23:50:34 +0000

I’ve bought an USB External Hard Disk Case (IDE) , and installed an 120GB IDE drive on it. Since the files I store there should be accessed also by my Dual Boot XP/Ubuntu, I’ve started to study wich partition type would be the best choice.
After a little googling I’ve decided to format it as FAT32, that can easily be recognized by all the 3 OSes. I formated the drive plugged it to the Mac, it was recognized and mounted ok. I´ve started transferring some files from Windows to it, until it was almost full (90 GB), with thousands of files (20.000). I have to say that this step was really fast. But when I tried to read the files on the Mac it was very very slow. Most of these files where rar or zip files with jpegs into it, so first it would decompress the file and then show the images. It was a pain in the neck, because all the system overall speed decreased.

I started searching a little more and studied a few option:
NTFS – It can be read by the Mac but not written to. Linux can handle it better with a few tweaks (captivefs), but Mac does not.

HFS+ – It can be read and written by Macs, with third party software Windows can handle it, and Linux with limitations can read it (should turn journalizing off and pray the gods to write on it).
ext2/ext3 – Linux loves it, Windows handles it and MacOsX hates it, as far as I could understand. It seemed to me that I could lose all my data very easily if something got corrupted.
UFS – Unix File System – Mac and Linux SHOULD recognize and work with it. I capitalized “should” because I couls not find real information about it actually happening, just theorectly.Windows is blind to it.

After thinking about it, I created a HFS+ partition, and a Samba share point to get it accessed from Windows/Linux.

It was the best option I found, and it’s pretty fast now on Mac. Windows and Linux are able to access it with slower speeds since it’s done by a 100Mbps network and not directly by USB2 (400Mbps)…

Maybe I’m wrong and someone can point me out a better way to handling my problem, but I could not find a better solution!

WordPress VIP

Provenzano — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 11:44:43 +0000

As I’ve wrote one week ago, WordPress.com is implementing some new services. The hability of hostin your blog on WordPress.com with your own domain name is a feature launched this week and is called VIP Hosting, avaible only to the chosen!

I hope it suceed, because I’m very happy to have wordpress and wordpress.com around!

Ubuntu and Compiz

Provenzano — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 15:21:38 +0000

This weekend I’ve managed to install compiz on my ubuntu desktop. I’ve to tell you that it was not as easy as it is sold on the wiki. It’s not just a matter of apt-get install something and edit a few config files. It was not that difficult eather, and the results for me were not what I expected.

My video card is a MSI – ATI 9200. Not the newer nor the fastest card in the shelves, but what I could afford sometime ago. For this ATI card there are two X video drivers avaible, one opensource (ati – radeon), and the other proprietary(fglrx). I’ve used both in different moments of my “quest”, and I’ve to say both performed badly in my desktop enviroment.

Compiz can run above two X variants, Xgl and AIGLX. Ubuntu repos for this software were broken this weekend, so I got packages from ubuntu.compiz.net in order to try the software.

Xgl installed fine, but I had issues getting it understand that my card has acceleration. The desktop run very slow. When running with the proprietary driver it got even worst, since it could not understand the Xlib library on my system. Above that compiz could not start. After some hours trying to fix the problems, getting help from google and #ubuntu-xgl on freenode, I gave up and decided I would give AIGLX a try.

AIGLX installed better and performed better. It was faster to configure and was not slow at all. Great! Compiz started and performed nicely. I was very happy with the results so I put compiz-start on sessions–> run, so it would start magically everytime I log in. I rebooted and found, very sadly, that now the desktop was slow again. I’ve not tried to solve the issue, since I was getting bored on that trial and error game.

My conclusion is that the 3d effects are near in the future, but not yet here for all of us. If you have time at your disposal to mess around with this software great. Otherwise I would wait a little. I know both Xgl and AIGLX are alpha software and we should install it at our own risk. I did it at my own risk!

My best results were with AIGLX so that is the one for me. Be aware that compiz is forking right now and in some weeks we will have a new version under the name Beryl.

The people who were this weekend on #ubuntu-xgl at freenode are great, and they helped me a lot. I think the main problem in my case was the ati drivers (both opensource and proprietary), and their relations to the system (libraries) and to the servers (Xgl , Xorg and. AIGLX).

I can’t stop thinking that if I had the time to get Gentoo running it would perform better, because I would be sure everything got compiled as pieces of the same system. Maybe I’m wrong and it is not a problem of Ubuntu (wich is my day by day distro btw) packages (on multiverse, there is, or in the compiz .net repos) that are not behaving well with the base system. It seems the lego is missing pieces…

Why Mac is addictive (II)

Provenzano — Sat, 23 Sep 2006 04:04:28 +0000

Mac OS X is easy to work with. Even easier than Windows. It has the most beautiful interface any OS I know. Aqua is great! And Mac OS X works like a charm. It is easy and yet powerful. I can have my mother play with it and yet I’ve bash and a lot of Linux apps ported if I’m a power user.After six months working on it I’m glad to say that it was pretty easy to learn the basics. It’s true I’m not very used to shortcuts on Mac as I’m on Windows/Linux, but what the heck, I’m using those for a bunch of years!

Another addictive function Mac has are Steve Jobs Keynotes. The man is a wizard. He can truly make you believe on his words. And he is very competent also. He is the genius who made Apple products so unique and attractive… And they’re all tech related!

The approach to computers Apple has is driven by marketing people who try hard to produce electronics that fits naturally on your life. My Mac Mini occupies so little space on my table that I’ve been asked lots of times why I had 2 monitors for just one PC, sice people could not identify the mac as computer.

MacMini is not very powerful, I should say. Well I don’t regret the purchase, all the other way arround, but It’s specs are very low to me. I needed more hard drive space, memory and maybe a better video card. I upgraded to 1GB myself opening it with instructions I found on the net some months ago, last week I bought a USB external HD case and plugged one 120GB IDE Hard disk to it. I will not say my Macmini runs faster than my PC (AMD64 – 1,5 GB RAM), but it performs great with it’s limitation.

I trully got the Mac fever. I’ve become addicted.