Web Architecture, Web Production, Web Marketing

Random post based on MacBreak ep. 70.

Thanks to Merlin Mann for the title, this should make it into his mannerisms (pdf). If you’re someone who would watch Darth Vader make hash browns, you’ll love the Star Wars Holiday Special from 1978. Holy smokes. This could very well be the most wonderfully horrible bit of video I’ve seen. Wow. Do a search for Star Wars Holiday Special on You Tube for clips. Or you can find the full special floating around usenet. Or if you’re campically challenged but still want to get in on the fun, check out this version from Rifftrax to have the humor explained for you.

Just ran across this list of OSX menu bar items. Great collection. The menu bar app, Caffeine was pointed out to me. This great little app allows you to disable and enable your energy saver settings with a single click. So basically you can be a good little monkey and use efficient energy saver settings most of the time but then if you need it, click the ZZZ in the menu bar to make sure your computer won’t go to sleep. If you give a presentation or watch a movie with your laptop unplugged, you know the annoyance of your screen shutting off or your screen saver coming on. I’ve enjoyed HimmelBar but don’t see a need for it in leopard with the stacks functionality. If you’re still using Tiger, check it out. iDiskMenu looks very cool as well as a menu app to mount and unmount webdav and ftp network shares. Unfortunately this doesn’t fire up in Leopard but it gets me wanting something to easily manage network shares. Also nfs support is a must for me. I’ll need to figure that out. Seems like a perfect job for the RixStep guys.

I’ve got CF8 running in single server mode on my MacBook. I also recently installed VMware Fusion for virtual machine support. Running virtual machines creates separate lan networks on your system which can raise some networking issues with things like vpn’s and servers you may run that broadcast to all available ip addresses. JRun for running ColdFusion turned out to be one such problem server.

By default JRun tries to broadcast itself to all available ip addresses. You can verify your setup by checking your jrun.xml file around line 385.

<attribute name="deactivated">false</attribute>
<attribute name="interface">*</attribute>
<attribute name="port">51800</attribute>

That star tells jrun to broadcast itself to all ip addresses hooked up on the machine. I’ve even seen it crash trying to broadcast to a fake ip assigned to the firewire port (think that one’s an Apple bug).

Anyway, there’s really no need for most of us to broadcast to anything but 127.0.0.1, your localhost. So change that star to 127.0.0.1 so that the complete line reads:

<attribute name="interface">127.0.0.1</attribute>

Hopefully this will save you a headache, if not now than in the future if you start adding networks to your machine.