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I assume everybody who is interested has found out by now, that you can subscribe to Flickr RSS feeds with the new iPhoto ’06 to have them show up as what Apple calls Photocast. The bad thing about it is that several infos are lost and mainly the feed only contains the small images.

A witty macosxhints user has reacted immediately and set up a little web application to convert the Flickr feeds for subscribing in iPhoto ’06, check it out below:

Thank you 3eyes (John Evans) 🙂

edit:
thanks to Jason who pointed me in the direction of a very similar service, with a few extra features, called photocastr.

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I set up scponly to permit some of my users, for whom I host websites, to use sftp/scp to transfer files to the server but refuse them to login with a fully functional shell. After configuring scponly to chroot to the users home directory and some initial tests it worked very well with Transmit on the Mac, Filezilla on Windows and Putty/Terminal. The only thing that didn’t work was using Dreamweaver in SFTP mode to connect to the server.

After a bit of digging around me & Herbert found out that Dreamweaver will only communicate with the SSH server if you change the config from the Debian-standard, refusing “tunneled clear text passwords”, to permiting it in /etc/ssh/sshd_config.

# Change to yes to enable tunnelled clear text passwords
PasswordAuthentication yes

After a quick /etc/init.d/ssh restart Dreamweaver was able to log in as well 🙂

To set up chroot for scponly on a Debian system do the following:

  1. unzip the chroot script in /usr/share/doc/scponly/setup_chroot
  2. chmod +x setup_chroot.sh
  3. ./setup_chroot.sh
  4. type in the user you want to have scponly access
  5. accept the default for home directory
  6. type in the directory to be user writeable (in my case “www”)
  7. choose a password
  8. optional: compile the groups.c file in /usr/share/doc/scponly gcc -o groups groups.c and move it to the chroot mv groups /home/user/bin/.

…simple as that 🙂

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Aside from all the Mac frenzy over todays Keynote by Steve Jobs there was another interesting announcement: Google Earth for Mac.

I won’t write anything here about all the Apple announcements from Macworld’s opening, because you can read about it all over the place and I would just be duplicating old news 😉

Google Earth runs on Mac OS 10.4 and up and is coming out of beta status as of today. All of you who illegally took a sneak peek at it via the leaked beta should update as well, because there are a few features which weren’t quite ready in the leaked version.

? so go for it

edit: looks like it’s PowerPC only! Not very wise, after the first Intel Macs got announced today 😉

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from petefreitag.com

While working today I had to write an error message that a user would see if their session had timed out. I was tempted to write something like:
Sorry your session has expired please login again.
But I quickly realized that the average user has no idea what a session is referring to, and why it has expired. In some cases the user may think that their account has expired. Users may also not understand what you mean by a timeout – that’s where you send the bad kids?

Us web developers often throw technical jargon into our web applications without much thought. I’ve done it, and I’ve seen lots of messages that only a web developer would understand out there.

Lets try to be better about this, ok?

He’s right about that, I never really thought about that aspect of usability when writing error messages in my apps. I promise to amend 🙂