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".)

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.

I wanted to turn this off, but without turning off other auto complete functionality:

• I want to retain the autocomplete in forms (which can be managed from Tools -> Options -> Privacy)
• I also want to retain the autocomplete in the search box on the right (which can be turned off by right-clicking inside the box, and then checking off "Show Suggestions")

But the Location Bar is a somewhat more involved beast. After hunting in the innards of "about:config" I discovered that this was possible. Just follow these steps:

1. In the location bar, type about:config. The location bar is of course the place where you type URLs. Note that this is your internal Firefox configuration. Don't mess with it.
2. In the text box that appears at the top of this page, enter browser.urlbar.maxRichResults as the preference name. (Tip: copy it from here and paste it into that box.)
3. Set the value to 0 if you wish to disable the auto-complete altogether. I have it set to 2 so I get some suggestions but it doesn't crowd up the experience.

Here is how I did.

1. First, close Safari. This is VERY important, as it does not work otherwise.
2. Start Terminal. (Go to Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal, or type Terminal in Spotlight).
3. Under Terminal type "sudo –s" without the quotation marks to log in as root.
4. Then enter:

   defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE

5. Go to the blue (or gray) apple at the top left of the screen, then select Force Quit. From the menu of items, click on "Saft" and click on the Force Quit button.
6. Then, in the same Force Quit window, click on "Finder" and click the "Relaunch" button.
7. In the Finder window, on the top right bar (the Filter spotlight bar), type "saft" without the quotes. Delete with delight any file called Saft. Note: This may reveal a few other files that may contain the word "Saft" such as threads.py in my case (a Python file). Naturally, you want to NOT delete these. Just get rid of the Saft files.
8. Empty the trash. If there is a file that won't delete because it's in use, then Force Quit "Saft" again as in Step 5 above, and then Empty Trash again.
9. Go back into Terminal, and type "sudo –s" again without quotation marks. Then enter:

    defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE

   This will set the Finder back to the way it was before. Then type "exit" and it will exit out of the root.

10. Now navigate to the folder: /Library/InputManagers. Note that this is NOT the "Library" folder in your Users folder. This is the Library folder from the root. Inside InputManagers is the "saft" folder — get rid of it.
11. Empty Trash (again). If it says Saft is in use, reboot the machine and empty it then. Or if you use some excellent utility like MainMenu you can "Force Empty Trash".

Go back to your happy, problem free Mac! 

Problem: Nokia's WLAN option kept prompting me for the WEP key *everytime* I would connect to my email or any website.

After googling for a good many days and bumbling around on Nokia's forums, I have finally figured out how to make Nokia remember the cotton-picking password. Simple answer: you need to lose your cached WLAN entry, which may be stored as a non-WEP access point.

Here are the more detailed steps:

1. Delete your current WLAN access point you've created for the E61i. This is the secret sauce.
2. Now, under

   Tools > Settings > Connection > Access Points

   Select Options and create a new access point using "default settings". We'll tweak them below.

3. Under Connection Name, pick a name for your connection. This doesn't have to be your wireless network's SSID, but you can keep it under the same name.
4. Under Data Bearer, select WLAN.
5. Under WLAN Network Name, select manual entry and type in your SSID name.
6. Under Network Status mark "Hidden".
7. Network Mode will be the default: "Infrastructure".
8. Under WLAN Security Mode, choose your security type. For instance, mine is WEP, so that's what I selected.
9. Under WLAN Security Settings, go to WEP key settings and define your encryption level, format, and key. For instance, for WEP you might have 64 bit, ASCII, and "xyzabc" as your level, format, and key respectively. If you don't know this stuff, this entire tutorial is perhaps not for you, otherwise you know what these values are. (You can always login as admin user into your wireless router and reconfirm these settings for your specific case.)

That's it. You can now connect to some website or your email server on your mobile phone, select the WLAN with the name you chose in Step 3 above, and your Nokia e-series phone will remember your WEP password for good. Finally.