Also habe ich direkt noch einmal die alte Mail in der die Login-Daten stehen rausgekramt und es erneut versucht. Wieder vergeblich. Nach dem Griff zum Telefonhörer hat der Account-Inhaber mir bestätigt, dass er sich aber genau mit diesen Zugangsdaten weiterhin einloggen kann.

Diesmal habe ich das Passwort von Hand angegeben und schwups war ich eingeloggt. Neugierig wie ich bin habe ich das noch einmal versucht und es klappt einfach nicht via Copy & Paste. Daher habe ich den Source geguckt und gesehen, dass dort tatsächlich onKey-Events dafür verantwortlich sind.

Die Idee an sich ist ja ganz gut, um gegen Passwort-Thief-Bots vorzugehen, aber es ist ein absolutes FAIL von PayPal, eine falsche Fehlermeldung zu geben.

Fazit:

Beim Einloggen mit PayPal muss man das Passwort von Hand eingeben.

Sicherlich ist Freunde nicht ganz der richtige Begriff, sondern Kontakte oder Bekannte wäre angebrachter. Wenn man ausgedehnte Hobbies zum Beruf macht, kommt man sehr schnell an diese Grenze. Jedenfalls scheint der Google+ Konkurrenzkampf etwas Fortschritt oder Klarheit hereinzubringen, denn man kann ja nun durch Listen schon bestimmen, wer Freund, Familie, Bekannter, Best Buddy oder Feind ist. Was den Datenschutz anbelangt bin ich etwas unbefriedigt, denn dem Werbemogul diese zusätzlichen Informationen zu schenken stimmt mich nachdenklich.

Warum aber soll man nicht mit mehr als 5000 Leuten in Kontakt bleiben? Möglicherweise ist das auch einfach nur eine Frage der Resourcen oder eine lediglich weit hergeholte Ziffer ohne Belang.

Natürlich wollte ich weder Freunde noch Seiten rauswerfen, um jemand Neuem Platz zu machen, denn das Problem würde frühzeitig wieder aufkommen. Eine einfache Lösung ist die relativ kürzlich eingefügte Funktion, sein normales Personenprofil in eine Seite umwandeln zu lassen. Das habe ich vor wenigen Minuten durchgeführt und hat bisher auch einwandfrei geklappt, leider mit einigen Einschränkungen. Es können nur Freunde und das Profilbild übernommen werden. Der Rest wie z.B. Beiträge, Fotoalben, Profilinfos, etc. nicht. Nimmt man den Hinweis ernst, wird das vielleicht künftig auch möglich sein.

Glücklicherweise kann man aber zuvor eine Sicherung seines kompletten Profils in seinen Kontoeinstellungen herunterladen. Man erhält eine eMail mit Fertigstellung und kann ein ZIP-Archiv auf seine Festplatte speichern. Nach dem Auspacken findet man alles schön übersichtlich sortiert und als HTML-Seiten und man kann es mit dem Browser betrachten.

Anfänglich hat mich etwas die Anzahl meiner Freunde erschreckt, denn die heissen als Seitenbetreiber nun Fans. Zu Beginn hat er nur noch knapp 600 angezeigt, aber im Laufe der Zeit kam die zuvor bestrittene Fünftausendermarke sukzessiv zurück. Die Umwandlung scheint also im Hintergrund weiterzulaufen.

Wer ebenfalls dieses “Problem” hat, dem kann ich auch die Facebook-Hilfeseiten empfehlen. Auch die deutschen Texte geben ausführliche Informationen und sämtliche Sicherheitshinweise. Ich glaube, Facebook lernt dazu – schliesslich kann man eine so riesige Plattform und Infrastruktur nicht von heute auf morgen verbessern.

Welche Vor- und Nachteile die Umstellung gebracht hat, wird sich im Laufe der nächsten Tage noch zeigen. Gegebenenfalls schreibe ich ein kurzes Follow-Up dazu.

Mit Hilfe des Archivs werde ich nun die Alben wieder komplettieren, TGIS (thank God it’s Sunday).

Der Button ist sicherlich so beliebt, weil man damit wesentlich mehr Menschen auf seine Webseiten, Blogs, Fotoalben, etc. zieht als es für den Normalmenschen mit Suchmaschinen möglich ist.

Überall wo man Traffic auf sich ziehen kann, bleiben auch die bösen Buben nicht fern. Hast du schon mal einen Link in deinem Profil gehabt, von dem du ganz sicher weisst, dass du nicht auf gefällt mir geklickt hast? Das ist mir auch schon ein paar Mal passiert und die Ursache dafür war tatsächlich meine Neugier.

Wenn deine Freunde einen Link mit einem lustigen Video posten, schaust du dir das bestimmt auch mal an, denn deine Freunde sind ja glaubwürdig. Doch sehr wahrscheinlich sind sie auch schon auf die Trickbetrüger reingefallen und haben ganz bestimmt nicht den Link absichtlich eingestellt.

Diese Leichtgläubigkeit wird ausgenutzt und fängt damit an, dass ein Spammer einen Link veröffentlicht, der wie ein Video aussieht – oft mit dem Foto einer heissen Frau oder anderen Kuriosität. In etwa so:

Klickt man drauf, erwartet man entweder, dass wie bei Youtube, die Videos direkt in Facebook oder auf einer neuen Webseite angezeigt werden. Genau das machen sich die Klick-Betrüger zu Nutze. Sie lenken auf eine eigene Website und tun so, als ob dort ein Video ist und man muss nur auf Play klicken, um es abzuspielen. Doch der Playbutton ist ein getarnter Gefälltmir-Button.

Wenn man sich den Screenshot anschaut, dann sieht man sofort, dass das vertraute Youtube-Design geklaut wurde. Doch was haben diese Betrüger davon?

Ganz einfach: Klicks.

Klicks bringen Geld, wenn man Werbepartner ist. Ein gutes Beispiel ist Google-Adsense. Für jeden Klick gibt’s ein paar Cents. So werden die Buttons nicht als gefällt-mir-Button getarnt, sondern sind oft auch versteckte Werbung.

Auf der anderen Seite kann es ebenfalls sehr gefährlich sein, diese Webseiten auch nur aufzurufen. Oftmals aktualisieren Nutzer nicht ihre Browser (Internetanguckprogramme) und deren Sicherheitslücken werden ausgenutzt, um Trojaner, Viren und andere Seuchen in dein System zu schleusen. Damit könnte dein Computer zur Spamschleuder bringen oder andere interessante persönliche Daten ausspionieren – beispielsweise gültige eMail-Adressen, die teuer verkauft werden könnten.

Mein Tipp:

Augen auf und Lesen bevor man klickt. Wäre das tatsächlich ein Youtube-Video, dann wäre auch ein Link zu Youtube sichtbar.

Lizenzen bringen Probleme

Allerdings soll es bei diesem Codec in Zukunft einige lizenzrechtliche Probleme geben und die Suche nach Alternativen ist die einzig vernünftige Lösung.

Die Zukunft

Bei modernen Browsern der neuen Generation wie Google Chrome, Firefox 4, IE9, etc. ist ein Audio- und Videoplayer bereits integriert, um das Video-Tag einzubinden. Das Format WebM mit dem VP8 Codec ist bereits gut unterstützt.

Google ist sogar einen Schritt weitergegangen und hat H.264 direkt rausgeworfen und setzt nur noch auf VP8. Bei Youtube wird ebenfalls alles dahin codiert und abgelegt. Somit ist der Trend scheinbar festgelegt.

Press play on tape

Das Abspielen innerhalb der oben genannten Browser funktioniert bereits. Einfach die Videodatei mit dem Browser entweder über das Menu öffnen oder per Drag und Drop reinwerfen. Auch andere Wiedergabeprogramme wie VLC zeigen die Inhalte einwandfrei.

Encodieren

Leider gibt es auf dem Mac mit OS X 10.6.6 noch keine native Unterstützung, doch es gibt eine sehr bequeme Methode für Quicktime 7 Pro. Einfach das Paket WebM Component Installer.pkg installieren und schon kann man im WebM-Format exportieren.

Ein kurzer Test mit dem VP8 Codec hat sogar noch kleinere Dateien als mit H.264 Codec erzeugt – allerdings muss ich das erst noch genauer unter die Lupe nehmen.

As a Webkit lover, of course I love the Safari browser. It is fast, reliable, powerful and easy to use. I wish Firefox would use its engine, but there are lot of discussions in the Mozilla forums, that it will remain using the Gecko engine.

From a technical perspective, Gecko is now very solid and no longer lags behind WebKit.

Arstechnica

Alternatives

The only alternative I know what uses Webkit is the Google’s Chrome. Unfortunately, they say, a Mac version is not available, yet. But there is! You can download the developer edition, which is a completely compiled and ready-to-use application. Install it by just dragging the icon to the Application folder like any other program.

After the first start it asks for importing bookmarks. So I did, and it works very well. The passwords are taken from OS X‘s Keychain Access and you do not need to enter all your identifications, again.

At the first look, compared to Safari

• it looks a bit more stylish,
• the preferences are easier to use,
• performance feels better on loading pages, working on sites containing Flash objects,
• the developer menu can be found at View, instead of a own menu column,
• no need for an extra search bar, just type into the address field.

Unfortunately I am missing two features, but I can shortly live without:

• Syncing the bookmarks with MobileMe or back to Safari,
• the option to merge all windows together

What Safari does not have is

• the function “New incognito window”.

Pages you view in this window won’t appear in your browser history or search history, and they won’t leave other traces, like cookies, on your computer after you close the incognito window.

• opening every tab or window as a own thread
  • if one crashes, not all of the browser activity is lost,
  • if one gets unresponsive, you can work with all the others.
• jumping through search results initiated with CMD+F.

Conclusion

I am using it now for a several time. It works very stable and fast. The workflow is great, everything works fine so far. This my new default browser!

The handling is easy, and even greenhorns get good along with it. Just find a nice template, punch it in, create some headlined pages and every user can deal with it.

I think the blogging features are almost perfect and there is not much what needs to get improved in my humple opinion. I would prefer native support of multiple languages.

Therefore I like the developers way asking the community to vote for the most wished functions. As the results show, they will concentrate for better multimedia integration. So let’s get excited for the WordPress 2.9 release at about end of October?

A browser is one of the most important tools nowadays and so it is important that it behaves fast, easy to use and recource saving.

On Youtube they introduced “Google Chrome Frame” which is a plugin for the Internet Explorer. This makes it possible to render websites with the Chrome engine with all its advantages on speed and quality inside Internet Explorer.

I am not sure, if that is good, because I absolutely dislike the Internet Explorer because of all those uncomfortable differences compared to the other browsers. Any further existing options on testing websites makes it harder for a web developer to test it out. My web dream is without beeing Internet Explorer.

Credits: Logo was re-created by myself from their respective owners Google and Microsoft.

If you want to make a simple, but sexy poll, you can use twtpoll for free. Unfortunately the results are displayed as a flash animation.

In the interface you can set the questions and if the answer should be unique or multiple. Also an expiration date is possible and you must not keep it alive forever.

The best to use for twitter is, that it generates a short URL direcly from it’s own host. That is is looking like this

http://twtpoll.com/kedhqx

Test it out to get quickly and easily public without complicated setup surveys.

In my eyes, in the twitter terminology “friend” should be only called a “friend” if you follow him and he or she follows you – so that there is a direct relationship.

Watch out the friendorfollow.com website which shows you all that relationships in a customizable order and organized by a good terminology, grouped in tabs called “Following” showing people you are following. “Fans” are people following you and “Friends” are people you follow and they follow you.

That tools is great to clean up your profile from people you probably should not follow.

The iPhone checks frequently for new mails and you will be up to date of what has been sent to you. Every mail is marked as unread and until now I do not a see a built in function in the iPhone to mark them all as unread.

This is really nerving me, especially if I do not use the iPhone for some hours. I do not want to click every single mail to get it marked as read. Here is my workaround:

1. Login to GoogleMail and go to the “inbox”
2. Select “all”
3. In the first line, you can select really all mails of your inbox and not only those which are listed on the first page.
4. “Archive”
5. On the iPhone, start Mail
6. Leave the inbox
7. Go back to the inbox

Now, all mails are even in the archive on the iPhone and nothing is unread anymore, besides you receive new ones meanwhile.

With the help of my favourite remote application LogMeIn.com I connected to his windows computer with my Mac. Installation of mySQL was done in a few seconds and ActiveState perl, too.

So we copied my scripts to his machine and did the first run which stopped, because some perl modules are missing. Ok, that is normally no big deal and they can be easily installed with the package manager – I thought.

A big suprise came up when I typed in ppm and saw a GUI. Huh? A Interface for modules in perl? Nice done and easy to use, but DBD::mysql is missing.

The next step was to try to use it with the command cpan which gives me the classic command line interface shell of the origin ppm. Installation ran quickly thru, but the packages could not be compiled. So I tried to get the ppd file and that lost success, too.

We solved the problem by recognizing that in perl 5.8+ the drivers are not available at all. Using the GUI ppm and adding the repository

http://theoryx5.uwinnipeg.ca/ppms/

made it. Then we just searched for DBD-mysql and it went thru without any further problems.

Merge windows

To feel as fit as a fiddle on my Mac’s screen I need to have it clean with only that windows in front I am currently working in.

For how to hide unwanted applications without termination I blogged the article The secrets of hide and seek.

The Eventbox is my best friend when getting updated on RSS feeds, Twitter, Flickr and Facebook. When clicking the arrow to see the original or full details it opens the source in Safari as a new window.

If you click many details, you will get many Safari windows open. You can configure Safari to put them in tabs. I have not enabled this, because I prefer that when applications open a browser it should be a fresh window.

When having lots of Safari windows, but you want to have them just in only one and seperated by tabs, you can go to the menu Window and select merge all windows.

Currently, many sites are integrating multiple Sign-In technologies with accounts from other sites like OpenId, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Yahoo and more. That can be a cool thing, but require to re-authentificate by logging in to your primary account.

One problem is coming with that! The site you need to put in your username and password is not the same as you would visit to login, where the formdata of your browser is stored. And how do you get your password back?

Normally, you could request a password reset, but that takes time, because you need to wait for the email, confirm the link and sometimes to change the password. That is too nasty and it is much easier. Use the Mac’s Keychain Access utility.

Keychain access

1. Go to Application/Utilities/Keychain Access.
2. Put in the domain of the website your forgot the password.
3. Doubleclick the appropriate name.
4. Put in the checkbox next to “show password”.
5. If you are asked for your Mac password, put it in.
6. See the password and use copy & paste.

Leave me a comment if it helped you.

My unique color

The amount of available colors is really huge, so it is possible that everybody can have his own color. Colors are mostly compound with the RGB color model. They are mixed out of three values, where R is red, G is green and B is blue. The shading is zero for none and 255 for full power. If you think in lights and mix all colors together you reach white equals RGB(255,255,255). Black would result in RGB(0,0,0).

When you are dealing with HTML, then hexadecimal codes are used to describe the colors. So white would be FF (255) and black 00 (0).

Combining all color shades together there are 255*255*255 = 16,581,375 single colors! Ok, there are more people living on planet earth than just 16 million. Coulourism had the idea to combine your name and birthday to find your unique color.

My unique color is a nice Purple (#9208A1).

So what is your color? Post it as a comment.

The greatest feature I like is to make screenshots of Safari. You can specify a screen resolution and it is rendered with the Safari engine and stored as an image.

This is nice to have all your links pictures or thumbnails. Unfortunately you can only either add a URL or take the active one from Safari.

LittleSnapperBatch

But I want to have all open tabs as websnapshots. And to solve that I wrote my first Mac Application called LittleSnapperBatch.zip using the powerful AppleScript. I hope you find it useful, too.

Step 1: Open your favourite flashvideo – let’s say on Youtube. Then open the Activity Window using the menubar.

Activity Window

Step 2: Now you see the activity window which shows every data file transfer from the current open tab. When the video is playing, then you will notice that the download is still in progress and the transfered size is increasing. But, if the video is already stopped, then it will be line with the largest file size. Just do a doubleclick and watch the flashvideo downloading.

File List

Step 3: That’s it! Once downloaded you can play the flv-file with Quicktime.

Downloading flv

Hint:

When you are not able to watch and listen to flv files, then you need the codecs! You may download Perian to have your Mac enabled playing those and AVI videos.

Super Remove Dead Tracks

On a Mac almost everything is scriptable, and so is iTunes. One of those free cleaners is Super Remove Dead Tracks. Install it as described, then restart iTunes. From the scripts menu bar select the Super Remove Dead Tracks and just wait for completion. At the end, a logfile is placed on the desktop, so that you can see what was removed. If something went wrong, you can restore the files from the trashcan.

Speedport’s original firmware has some bad properties. After login it resizes the browsers window, the interface is ugly and some items seem to be misplaced in my opinion. But, all in one it is ok.

Due to I am having T-Home, I am forced to use the Speedport router because of the built in Modem. I just wanted to use my TimeCapsule only, but that did not work, because I do not get any internet connection then.

In former times I already a had FritzBox and was impressed how far it succeeded with useful options. It was even possible in those days to connect a USB capable printer and to print wireless via WLAN. But now, AVM has implemented state of the art features which are really useful for home users or small networks. It provides now USB-support for harddrives and memory sticks and even sharing them with FTP and SMB, VPN tunneling, call answer machine, fax sending/receiving and many more.

Refering to that article mentioned above, I began some research and found some solutions how to get the AVM firmware to the Speedport.

It is not working by just uploading it the normal way! You need to somewhat compile your own thing out of both firmwares. See my steps, and it will work really easy.

Here is my installation guide for Mac users, but with some fantasy you may adapt it for your own purpose:

Disclaimer! YOU ARE DOING ALL THAT AT YOUR OWN RISK! YOUR HARDWARE MAY GET DAMAGED. Read carefully and make sure to understand before doing anything.

First of all, get the Debian businesscard edition (36 MB). The compiling scripts do require some apt libraries which are not available on OS X by default. The stable CD/DVD of Debian 5 crashed during my installation within Parallels Desktop 4.

Begin to create a virtual machine with Parallels by running the assistant. Set the just downloaded Debian 5 ISO file as the CD/DVD drive. Parallels will automatically detect everything what is needed. When the machine starts for the first time and asks you for the installation method, I recommend you to go to the options and select the graphical unattended one. The installation will download everything what is required.

When done, log in as a normal user, because no root access is required. Use the browser icon from the menu bar to download the master script doing all the nasty work for you. For the ease of use, I have created a short URL to type less. You can use the samehttp://kURL.de/opupiin your address bar. If you get a hint, that you have no internet, have a look at the top right corner of your menubar left next to the clock and calendar. There should be a tiny icon and if you click it, you can select a cable network connection. Then reload the script and you should see it’s source text. Store it with menu file, save as. Change the download folder to Desktop!

Open a root terminal window via the menu bar applications, then tools. Go the Desktop directory where the downloaded shell script is located by typingcd DesktopPay attention to the letter case on unix systems! Start the script by typing sh ./download_speed-to-fritz.shThis will do some downloads and may take some time. Now, we change to the new files and run the first script, which will install some needed libraries to continue.cd trunk/speed-to-fritzsh ./install-start

Follow the instructions and read carefully. If everything is done it will start the module configurator which has a nice interface where you can use the cursor keys to change options. Then it downloads the needed firmwares and will re-image them. When you are prompted to reset the router, turn it off! Wait 10 seconds and power it on again. Then the firmware will be installed. Do not interrupt until it is complete!

Then you can access the router over same IP as before or just with http://fritz.boxAll the settings are still kept.

If you made a mistake, you can re-run the last script and restore to the original firmware or just customize other things.

Now I am so happy beeing able to receive faxes and missed calls running on my answering machine by mail to my iPhone!

Safari 4

The new Safari browser is my favourite browser since the the release 3. It is so fast, that no other browser can beat it and the display is really great.

Due to I am developing websites I love Safari, because it supports DOM, CSS and XML so well like really no other does. Safari and Firefox, are cool, but anyhow I am more familar with Safari.

Now, Apple just has released the Safari 4 with innovative features that are really cool. You may have seen some of them as plugins for Firefox, but now it is built in natively and it works so damn fast and reliable. I am absolutely juiced up.

The interesting part is, what’s new? You can read the details on Apple’s website, but let me tell you with my own words.

The tabs and its plus sign are now embedded into the title. That looks weird, but I needed some time to get used to it. In the end, it saves some space on the screen and that is absolutely what I do prefer.

A new overview is embedded as a grid icon into the bookmark bar and clicking on it shows a 3D thumbnail page of the most visited ones. Clicking on a icon zooms into the page with a really nice and fluently transition. It can be customized by nailing favourites or the amount of thumbs to be displayed.

The history search went much faster and you can browse through it using the great cover flow previewing the visited sites. So you fill find back much more easier where you have been before.

Apple did not forget the developers and the tools gained some features and display options like Javascript error detection and more.

If you need to find something, the search eventually inherited a live find feature during typing.

The zoom function is now completely different. Before it just scaled the font, but not the images. Now everything is zoomed in or out. This gives also a nice option to make screenshots of large websites.

It is still beta, but I love it! By the way, there is a version for the PC users available, too.

CSS frames

I am a big fan of creating websites with CSS. You may know, that is possible to have a frame like behaviour without having real frames using the iframe tags.

The secret is to put some divisions at the right place and to give the right properties. It results with only having one section scrollable and the rest of the site will remain and keep a great design. A good inspirating example is given by Stuart A Nicholls.

I have made a design using that technique and was testing it on the iPhone. But anyhow I did not know how to scroll the scrollable content. By accident I took two fingers, and that’s it. You can scroll those areas by using two fingers!