Updated car kit photos

In a recent post, I wrote about the Bluetooth car kit I installed. Well, I finally finished installing it with a little bit of a twist. I ended up getting a 4" external speaker for a CB radio and installing it under my center console and I cleaned up the routing of the wires a bit. It works quite well and am extremely pleased with the setup.

AOL for free; still costs too much

So after reading that AOL is now offering their service for free, I decided to try it out as I've never used it before (that's right, I've never used it). So I went to their website and picked a username; harder than it sounds as the millions of users already have the cool ones, so I managed to get scottgrubyrules. I logged in and must say that I'm underwhelmed. First off, it isn't a universal binary, so it can't run natively on my Mac. Second, the interface is straight out of user interface hell. There are modal dialogs everywhere and reminds me of the few times I used eWorld back in 1997. The Mac software doesn't seem to let me do 2 things at once, so while it is off munching on a web page, I can't click the other ugly icons on the menu bar. The email interface is poor at best and it wasn't a great experience for the 10 minutes I played with it. I'm not sure what AOL really has to offer for anyone that already has broadband. I clicked on the Calendar button in the toolbar and got a web page saying that it wasn't compatible with my browser. Then the fan on my machine came on as the app pegged the CPU. All in all, probably not a product I'll fire up again. However, I now have a super cool new email address (OK, not really).

Cool developer tip of the day

If you're like me, you only test certain software you're developing on your main user account. For me, anything that involves syncing, I use a second account or machine for testing. As my second machine is a 6 year old G4 tower that sounds like an airplane, I don't like firing it up. Today I discovered a really cool trick to make testing with a second user account more efficient. Tiger has support for VNC built in, however, it appears to only allow you to control the user that is at the console, in other words, the user that is using the machine. This creates a problem (fun things happen if you try it) as I want to control a second account.

A program called OSXvnc to the rescue. This program starts up a VNC server in each user account that you run it in (use fast user switching to login to the other accounts and launch this app; make sure you set a password). Then use a VNC viewer, I use Chicken of the VNC, to connect to the other OS X user accounts. This allows me to test from secondary user accounts, while still being logging into AIM, able to check my email, and develop from my main account. Performance is pretty good on my MacBook Pro. This will definitely save me a ton of time.

I'm famous!

OK, maybe not, but as I was doing a routine search for my name, I came across an RFC (Request for Comments) based on my "NotifyMail protocol". I'm not sure why someone bothered to write it up, but it is RFC 4146, title "Simple New Mail Notification". For a geek, that's pretty cool.