No more. You can make it remember that you trust a certificate.

When on a secure site, click the warning icon on the location bar. The precise icon may change, but at the time of writing, it's a red cross.

Then click on the "Certificate Information". This will bring up a small popup window like this:

The certificate icon there. Just drag it to your desktop.

Double-click the .crt file on the desktop.

Then click on "Accept Certificate".

This may ask for your admin password. Enter it, and you're done. Revisiting this site will never show you the ominous red page again.

Very useful for working with our own CPanel/WHM sites, for instance.

Apparently I am not the only one with these issues.

I tried a few fixes gleaned from a bunch of separate threads on the Apple forum, and off the web. Not everything is a smart suggestion. Here's what finally works, so hope this saves some people with similar problems the time:

[You need root access for the "sudo" bits of the following code to work, of course.]

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sudo bash -c "echo 'net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack=0' >> /etc/sysctl.conf"
sudo bash -c "echo 'net.inet.tcp.recvspace=40960' >> /etc/sysctl.conf"
sudo bash -c "echo 'net.inet.tcp.rfc1323=0' >> /etc/sysctl.conf"

Make sure the single quotes remain single quotes in the above code share. These new sysctl settings will take effect after a reboot.

Another useful suggestion is to disable the IPV6 stuff. Not needed for now. Done using:


System Preferences ->
Network ->
Airport (or your WiFi listing) ->
Advanced (button) ->
TCP/IP (tab)


Change the IPV6 to "Link — Local".

Biggest problem: my bank website, which uses Java applets for secure logins, stopped working. In the area where the login form should have been I saw a message that said: "Inactive Plug-in". Same problem across Firefox, Safari, Chrome — all updated to their latest versions.

I installed the latest Java for OSX Lion from the Apple website. In hindsight, this was not necessary as the "Software Update" from the Apple menu, as usual, takes care of everything including updating the latest Java.

So the problem was clearly not with the browsers. The listing of plugins in Firefox showed me that "Java Applet Plugin" is in fact active.

The problem was annoyingly simple: the update to OSX Lion 10.7 and above often (not always, apparently) disables Java inside browsers for some odd security reason.

All I had to do was go into "Java Preferences" and enable this back again. Apple hasn't made it easy, but it's a simple command in Terminal:

/Applications/Utilities/Java\ Preferences.app/Contents/MacOS/Java\ Preferences

This will bring up a window as in the screenshot below. Just enable the bit that says to allow applets in browsers, and you're all set. (It will work when you restart your browser.)

(Edit: You can also search in Spotlight for "Java Preferences".)

Turns out the Terminal.app stores logs of previous sessions and over time this grows. Even apps like MainMenu, that delete the "User Cache", do not delete these files.

These files are stored in an esoteric location, hidden from the regular user. The files have the .asl file extension.

Here's the command.


sudo rm -f /private/var/log/asl/*.asl


Execute that in a Terminal window. Then quit and restart Terminal. No more delays or lags. Much faster Terminal. The lack of logs to seek really speeds up Terminal.

This has been tried and tested in Snow Leopard, Leopard and OSX Lion. Wonder why Macs don't come with this already!

With the tmp partition full, the server will experience many random issues such as server crashes. Your sites will quickly go down and leave you head-scratching.

Fortunately, it's quite easy to resize the /tmp partition on cPanel servers — especially if it is the default one created by cPanel installs. There's a handy script at /scripts/securetmp.

Open this file:

pico /scripts/securetmp


And find this line:

my $tmpdsksize = 512000; # Must be larger than 250000


Change it to a larger number than 512 MB. Say you want it to be 2 GB:

my $tmpdsksize = 2097152; # 2GB for the /tmp folder


Now close and save the file.

We need to stop all services that may be using this folder. For me, this includes MySQL, Apache and Nginx.

service mysql stop
service nginx stop
service httpd stop


Now we will simply unmount the /tmp folder and recreate it. Here's the sequence of commands to create it:

lsof /tmp
umount -l /tmp
umount -l /var/tmp
rm -fv /usr/tmpDSK
/scripts/securetmp


Done. You can verify the size of the /tmp folder among others:

df -h


This should show you something like this:

...
/usr/tmpDSK ext3 2.0G 996M 1.1G 51% /tmp
...


NOTE: If you have any problems, for instance, the size of the recreated /tmp folder is not really 2GB despite that code in the /scripts/securetmp we changed, it may be because of some settings you have in the /etc/fstab file. Take a look at it and comment out any lines that interfere with the LABEL for /tmp mount.

Download iRinger. It used to be a Windows app, but is now available for Mac OSX!

A very intuitive application. Select a song (mp3 for example), it clips it and shows you the ringtone-worthy segment of it, you basically export it as a ".m4r" file.

When done, just open the file and iTunes will automatically open it. Done.

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SELECT * FROM TABLE
WHERE NOT COLUMN ~ ( '^('||
 $$[\09\0A\0D\x20-\x7E]|$$||               -- ASCII
 $$[\xC2-\xDF][\x80-\xBF]|$$||             -- non-overlong 2-byte
  $$\xE0[\xA0-\xBF][\x80-\xBF]|$$||        -- excluding overlongs
 $$[\xE1-\xEC\xEE\xEF][\x80-\xBF]{2}|$$||  -- straight 3-byte
  $$\xED[\x80-\x9F][\x80-\xBF]|$$||        -- excluding surrogates
  $$\xF0[\x90-\xBF][\x80-\xBF]{2}|$$||     -- planes 1-3
 $$[\xF1-\xF3][\x80-\xBF]{3}|$$||          -- planes 4-15
  $$\xF4[\x80-\x8F][\x80-\xBF]{2}$$||      -- plane 16
 ')*$' )
;

Or, if you have iconv on your system, as most UNIX variants do, you can pg_dumpall a database and run the following command on it:

if (@iconv($input, 'UTF-8', 'UTF-8') == $input) echo "Good UTF-8!"; else echo "Nope."

Then take a plain text pg_dump of the database in UTF-8. Let's call it "db.orig.dmp". Strip all problem characters:

iconv -f UTF-8 -t UTF-8 -c <db .orig.dmp >db.stripped.sql
</db>

Compare both files:

diff -u db.orig.dmp db.stripped.sql

That output will show all lines containing a problem character. Now the tedious part: Use "db.orig.dmp" to find out which tables they belong to, locate the records in the database by primary key and fix them. Alternatively, you can use iconv's auto-repair if you know which bytes give you a problem.

For example, if you know that the trouble stems only from 0x80 bytes that should be Euro symbols, you could:

iconv -f UTF-8 -t UTF-8 --byte-subst="&lt;0x%x>" < db.orig.sql | sed -e 's/&lt;0x80>/EUR/g' >db.fixed.sql

The resulting "db.fixed.sql" could then be loaded into the new database.

But this doesn't account for those rare but possible times when you are not on your machine, or don't have access to a browser set up to your tastes. No extensions available.

That's where "KeepVid" comes in. Just enter your URL and it automatically extracts any video(s) found on that website and allows you to download in both FLV and MP4 formats. The MP4 would play on your Nokia, iPhone, or Blackberry too. The FLV file is a flash viewer file, and easily played using common video players–if you don't have VLC, get it pronto.

Here's a straightforward screenshot:

The ALTER TABLE ...ALTER COLUMN...TYPE... command is useful only if you want to alter the data somehow, or change the data type. Otherwise, it'll be an aeon before this finishes even inside a transaction on a database of any meaningful size.

Until now, I was not familiar with any sensible mechanism to simply change the size in PG. But yesterday, Tom Lane himself suggested something ubercool in the list.

Let's assume for the sake of simplicity that your table is called "TABLE1" and your column is "COL1". You can find the size of your "COL1" column by issuing the following query on the system tables:

SELECT atttypmod FROM pg_attribute
WHERE attrelid = 'TABLE1'::regclass
AND attname = 'COL1';
 
atttypmod
-----------
24
(1 ROW)

This means that the size is 20 (4 is added for legacy reasons, we're told). You can now conveniently change this to a varchar(35) size by issuing this command:

UPDATE pg_attribute SET atttypmod = 35+4
WHERE attrelid = 'TABLE1'::regclass
AND attname = 'COL1';
 
UPDATE 1

Note that I manually added the 4 to the desired size of 35..again, for some legacy reasons inside PG. Done. That's it. Should we check?

d TABLE1
 
TABLE "public.TABLE1"
COLUMN  |  TYPE                 | Modifiers
--------+-----------------------+-----------
COL1    | CHARACTER VARYING(35) |

Such a simple yet effective trick. Of course it'd be nicer if this is somehow included in a more proper way in the database, but this does the job.

To cut the geek-speak, this simply means that you hard disk may have certain files that may have "bad sectors", or are corrupted in other words.

Fortunately, this is a common enough problem in our technically advanced world of external storage. I recommend solving this on Windows (I use both XP and OSX Leopard at the time of this writing).

Step 1: CHKDSK

Use what Windows offers you by default. The chkdsk command. Just open an MS-DOS command prompt window and go to the drive you wish to check (I'm hoping you already know your way around a command prompt; if you don't please consider Step 2 below). With the command prompt showing the drive letter of the disk you wish to check, enter this command:

e:> chkdsk /R

Here, "e:" is my drive to be checked. The "/R" attribute asks the chkdsk command to "recover" whatever bad sectors it finds during its scan. In most cases, and if you're lucky, this ought to do it.

Step 2: CDCheck (Free)

Only if the problem you were facing still remains after you have run the chkdsk command, should you consider doing this. This is a freeware program that makes it super-easy to check/recover your disk. It can be any disk–your current hard disk, a CD or a DVD, or even an external hard disk. The interface is pretty simple as you can see in the screenshots here.

Step 3: SpinRite (US$ 90)

If all else has failed, just save yourself some heartburn and go straight to SpinRite. This is hands-down the best software for this purpose, as anyone in a dire need of data recovery will confirm. I would trust any piece of software from GRC. Only catch: it's not free, but when you use it you know why it's worth every last cent. It gives you a simple option to save an ISO file, which you can then easily burn on to a CD using any CD writer tool (including Windows' own right-click). Then reboot your machine so it starts from the CD. SpinRite will automatically report and recover whatever is recoverable.

Next Steps

Basically, a CRC error is the beginning of the end. If this is on an external hard disk, I highly recommend that you consider backing up the data immediately.