25 Jan
With recent Firefox versions (3.6, 4.0 beta), I was unable to view any kind of website that uses Java on my Mac.
Browsing through the about:plugins page I found out that I had three different versions of the Java Embedding Plugin (MRJPlugin.plugin) loaded in Firefox — two of them in addition to the one that already ships with Firefox!
The additional add-ons were found in
/Library/Internet Plug-Ins<user>/Library/Internet Plugins/
After deleting those and restarting Firefox, I was able to enjoy the beauty of Java applets again!
16 Jan
Have a handful of servers you need to perform the same commands on, e.g., keeping their software packages up to date using aptitude:
aptitude update && aptitude safe-upgrade && aptitude clean
So, you’re performing the same procedure on each host: logging in, executing aptitude, logging out… But WAIT! There’s Cluster SSH for you. 
The idea is simple: type in a command into one console and multiplex that input to several remote, i.e., SSH sessions.
For Mac OS X, csshX (also available as homebrew formula) comes in handy as it provides that multiplexing support for Terminal.app.
Open a console in Terminal.app and type in
csshX user1@host1 user2@host2 user3@host3 …
(providing appropriate user@host combinations for your needs, of course).
Then, you enter your commands, e.g., aptitude update into the red control console. As you can see in the screenshot, the keystrokes are the sent to all open shells. Updating a bunch of servers became… a piece of cake. Hooray for the lazy admin!
20 May
You know how it is with geeks. Give them something shiny, new with buttons and fancy sound effects (“swooooosh”) and they’ll love it. Same goes for software: give them a piece of code glued together that perfectly serves its purpose — awesome.
One of the applications I really love and use all the time is the Firefox web browser.
Unfortunately, things turned out to be a little nasty on OS X since Firefox reached version 3.6. When I first upgraded, I noticed a bug that caused Firefox to open two windows when a link was clicked in another application. Not nice, but I could have lived with that until it’s fixed.
Next, Firefox stopped working at all after I updated some add-ons. I tried to reproduce the problem and wanted to boil it down to a particular defective add-on. To be honest, I suspected Weave Browser Sync to be the culprit. I even tried starting Firefox with a fresh, empty profile and installed 2 or 3 other add-ons, several times in various order. Kaboom. No need to mention that even the Firefox nightly build was crashing on me. The solutions described in a related bug report unfortunately didn’t help either.
The sad solution to my problem: I was downgrading to the latest version of the “old” Firefox 3.5 branch, namely Firefox 3.5.9. It does not have all the fancy new features of 3.6 and support ends in August 2010 but at least it’s working. I’ll try 3.7 4.0 when it’s stable and hope the problem has been fixed then as others describe the same issue in various posts in the Mozilla forums.
Update: The problem seems to be fixed in Firefox 4.0 beta 1.
08 Nov
Adobe makes a good job of promoting its new version of their Flash Player 10. They seem to have removed almost every single link to the previous version on their website and all old links redirect to the download of version 10.
This might be great if you want to run their latest software, but if for some reason you need a specific older version, you’re gonna be quite upset, e.g., you want Flash on a legacy operating system such as Windows 98/ME, Mac OS X < 10.4, or older Linux/UNIX OSes.
In my case, there is a web site that has been programmed in such a bad way that it is simply broken and unusuable with the latest version of Flash Player 10. I don’t use the service of that website on a daily basis, but I wanted to install Flash Player 9 on top of a Windows installation in a VM.
You can find the installation files for the legacy Flash Player 9 download on Adobe’s TechNote site. Please keep in mind that Adobe may (and surely will) stop releasing any [security] updates for those old versions of Flash.
Of course–after I eventually found the download link and installed the old Flash version–I remembered having a moldy Ubuntu Live DVD somewhere in my drawer… And I bet it has Flash Player 8 or 9 installed…
18 Jun
After you’ve all upgraded to Firefox 3, you might also want to try out the firefox-mac-pdf extension, too.
It displays PDFs “inline” (inside a browser window) instead of downloading and/or opening it in Preview.app or Adobe Reader. Great extension!
(via macosxhints, TUAW, and others…)
