Super Cool Text Editor

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One thing that I love is text editors. No, I don’t count notepad in the list, but I do count Notepad++ for Windows. It’s one of the best text editors I have used, and it has some very impressive and awesome features. Now, before I go any further, for the record let me state that my favorite, and the best text editor of all time is Vi/Vim, hands down. Whatever platform, whatever you need, it’s the best (it’s better than emacs, get over it!). It is also however, rather a pain to learn to use and most people who aren’t already using it on UNIX/Linux, aren’t going to bother learning it just to have a good text editor on Windows.

Saying that gets me back to Notepad++, which is a very full featured replacement for little old notepad that comes with Windows. A couple of the main things that I like about Notepad++ is that not only can it handle text files created on UNIX/Linux platforms, it can convert between the two! Yes, I said convert between Windows formatted text files and UNIX/Linux formatted text files, and back again. That alone makes it a damn fine tool. Throw in syntax highlighting, a tabbed interface, installer-less operation if so desired and lots more stuff to get a powerful and free tool for your kit. So, go check it out and you can thank me later!

Solaris and CD ROMs

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Here’s a quick tip for anyone who is tinkering with a Solaris box, and it stems from a question I get from folk who are new to Solaris, and that is “How do I mount a CD ROM?”. The short answer is to use the mount command, but there is a little more to it. You need to know what device your CD drive is, and the easiest way to find out if you don’t already know, is to use the iostat command, specifically running it with -En so that the (iostat -En) results look like this:

c0t0d0 Soft Errors: 0 Hard Errors: 0 Transport Errors: 0
Model: ST3120026A Revision: 8.01 Serial No: 4JT0S129
Size: 120.03GB <120034123776 bytes>
Media Error: 0 Device Not Ready: 0 No Device: 0 Recoverable: 0
Illegal Request: 0
c0t2d0 Soft Errors: 4 Hard Errors: 0 Transport Errors: 0
Vendor: TSSTcorp Product: CDW/DVD TS-H492C Revision: SI00 Serial No:
Size: 0.00GB <0 bytes>
Media Error: 0 Device Not Ready: 0 No Device: 0 Recoverable: 0
Illegal Request: 4 Predictive Failure Analysis: 0

From the output you can see that one drive is a hard drive by the line Model: ST3120026A and Size: 120.03GB, and the other drive is the CD ROM then because it says Vendor: TSSTcorp Product: CDW/DVD. There you go, find the one that says it’s a CD ROM and we know the device we need to mount is c0t2d0.

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iTunes, QuickTime, and Errors

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Let me start this article by saying that I finally broke down last year and bought myself an mp3 player, specifically an iPod. I didn’t choose the iPod because it was trendy or hip or whatever, I chose it because for what it could do and the space it had, for the price, it was the best deal. Now, with an iPod you need to use iTunes (I realize there are other 3rd party tools out there, but call me a purist, I want to use it the way it was intended). In many ways, iTunes rocks, and in many ways, iTunes sucks. Whether you love it or hate it, you are pretty much stuck with it.

That being said, let me share with you a couple of errors I received recently, and what I did (finally) to make them go away. In my dealings with these errors, my searching on the Internet didn’t find any solution to the problem, although some information pointed me in the right direction. Ultimately, I spent enough time troubleshooting and testing (a.k.a banging my head against the wall) that I got the problem resolved, so I thought I would share, just in case anyone else runs across this issue. Judging from the number of posts I saw about it, lots of folk other than myself have had this come up too.

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Protecting your email address from spambots

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I found a nifty article on Wired tonight, giving some tips on how to protect your email address from spambots and page harvesters. This is software that reads web pages and rips out any email addresses it finds to send spam to. If you have a web page anywhere, and you have a nice little mailto link where someone can drop you a line, odds are some bot has harvested it. This is a neat article, but really just seems to show you some tools that help get the job done. It had some interesting comments too, worth a look for sure.

Backing up your MailWasher settings

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For any of you that use MailWasher, have you gotten tired of manually re-entering all of your email account data every time you re-install, re-build or switch computers? I know I have. If you don’t have to do that very often, or if you don’t have more than one or two email accounts, it’s not that bad. But still, there is all of the data in your Friends list and Black list that you might not want to re-create. If you don’t know what MailWasher is, it’s a great email management and anti-spam tool that we featured as a Cool Tool awhile back, check it out.

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