Having trouble removing some pesky icons that have gotten stuck in the Finder’s sidebar? If you’re on Lion or Snow Leopard, the solution is easy:

1. Click on the folder and drag it away from the sidebar
2. Before you let go of the mouse button, hold down the Command (⌘) key
3. Now that you’re holding down the Command (⌘) key, release the mouse button
4. The icon should now finally disappear from your sidebar in a puff of smoke
5. Hooray!

(Credit: Hybridair at MacRumors Forums)

Update 2011-08-20: Did you find this post helpful? It would be awesome if you’d take a moment or two to check out File Sanctuary, my hosting company. We’d love to help you with web hosting, email hosting, radio station hosting, domain registration, SSL certificates, and even giving you a safe place on the Internet to back your computers up to. We really care about the service we provide, and our prices are really good. Have a look around our website to find out some more, then get in touch and tell us what you need, and we’ll do everything we can to accomodate you. Thank you for reading my shameless plug! :)

Here’s an interesting thing to consider next time you’re looking through your web stats: the popularity of Safari 4 and later (the desktop version, not the iOS one) probably looks way higher than it actually is.

Safari’s “Top Sites” feature checks sites to see if any content has changed since you were last there (and also to draw the preview images), and it does this reasonably often. The way it checks is to load your website behind the scenes, which means your server gets hit, and your stats show Safari’s more popular with each refresh.

Perhaps Apple should make the background thread use a different user agent string so that we can differentiate real requests from the Top Sites updates?

Seeing something like this while compiling libmemcached or trying to install the memcached gem?

checking for style of include used by make... GNU
checking for gcc... gcc
checking for C compiler default output file name...
configure: error: in `/opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.7-2010.02/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/memcached-1.0.2/ext/libmemcached-0.32':
configure: error: C compiler cannot create executables
See `config.log' for more details.
*** extconf.rb failed ***
Could not create Makefile due to some reason, probably lack of
necessary libraries and/or headers.  Check the mkmf.log file for more
details.  You may need configuration options.

Turns out this error is quite misleading: what I was actually missing was the SASL development headers. This was all easily fixed with:

sudo aptitude install libsasl2-dev
sudo rm -rf /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.7-2010.02/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/memcached-1.0.2/ext/libmemcached-0.32
sudo gem install memcached

(Your path to the gem that failed to install properly could well be different, so double check in your error output from the failed install.)

I figured I’d write up my experience with the Facebook Roadblock, as it might come in useful for other people who get locked out.

Last night I noticed Adium started spinning away on my dock, unable to connect to one of its configured networks, which turned out to be Facebook. A few minutes later I closed whatever browser tab I had open, and noticed that Facebook tab I had open behind it was showing the “Please login to continue” dialog over my previous session. Clicking the login button took me to something I’d not seen before, the Facebook Roadblock:

The Facebook Roadblock

A few minutes of checking the SSL certs, retyping bookmarks, checking for DNS spoofing, and even trying from my iPhone over the 3G data network (which still didn’t work, it instantly logged me out once it loaded and didn’t let me back in), I received an email claiming to be from Facebook. And the headers seemed valid too:

Return-Path: <notification+z4o6=66@facebookmail.com>
X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.2.4 (2008-01-01) on
  server01.filesanctuary.net
X-Spam-Level:
X-Spam-Status: No, score=-99.0 required=5.0 tests=AWL,BAYES_50,
  DNS_FROM_OPENWHOIS,RCVD_IN_DNSWL_LOW,SPF_PASS,USER_IN_WHITELIST autolearn=no
  version=3.2.4
X-Original-To: aaron@unadopted.co.uk
Delivered-To: aaron.unadopted@server01.filesanctuary.net
Received: from mx-out.facebook.com (outmail013.snc4.facebook.com [66.220.144.145])
  by server01.filesanctuary.net (Postfix) with ESMTP id CF77B315237
  for <aaron@unadopted.co.uk>; Thu, 28 Oct 2010 19:04:33 +0100 (BST)
DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha1; d=facebookmail.com; s=201006181024; c=relaxed/relaxed;
  q=dns/txt; i=@facebookmail.com; t=1288289073;
  h=From:Subject:Date:To:MIME-Version:Content-Type;
  bh=qEIXppA9YVJnzP16lPu8knjBLI4=;
  b=R8irJgwrt6XVn16hAvSUFeIlM++vWMcDyAYhNXrhKnQ6ItFMnyMlWp5Mpop9/8qW
  RBXeIrBlbl9R+MhQ7tTzmYKGcHpDpA4sMc27xKmYwDphIdANX0rgfCfxLzsRwYvJ
  wu+CZxtaBphfkFdMo0RZabSpGN4v5Q0WCW12jqDxKBM=;
Received: from [10.30.185.191] ([10.30.185.191:35133])
  by mta018.snc4.facebook.com (envelope-from <notification+z4o6=66@facebookmail.com>)
  (ecelerity 2.2.2.45 r(34222M)) with ECSTREAM
  id F6/5B-27367-13BB9CC4; Thu, 28 Oct 2010 11:04:33 -0700
X-Facebook: from zuckmail ([MTI3LjAuMC4x])
  by localhost.localdomain with local (ZuckMail);
Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2010 11:04:33 -0700
To: "Aaron B. Russell" <aaron@unadopted.co.uk>
From: Facebook <notification+z4o6=66@facebookmail.com>
Reply-to: Facebook <notification+z4o6=66@facebookmail.com>
Subject: Security Warning From Facebook
Message-ID: <9202ff1cbcd06add33c763f96edc88cd@localhost.localdomain>
X-Priority: 3
X-Mailer: ZuckMail [version 1.00]
X-Facebook-Notify: roadblock; mailid=333b85fG1e289220G6f8ad57G7b
Errors-To: notification+z4o6=66@facebookmail.com
X-FACEBOOK-PRIORITY: 0
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"

Dear Aaron B. Russell,

We have detected that your Facebook account is infected with a form of
malware, or virus, called Koobface. You downloaded the virus after
receiving a message from a friend, which invited you to view a video.

To restore your account, please log in to Facebook and follow the
instructions you see there. You can also learn more in our Help Centre at:

http://www.facebook.com/help/?topic=koobface

Thanks,
Facebook Security Team

Hmm. So I really was locked out. But was I really infected? As I use a Mac, I wondered if I’d been hit by the (supposedly harmless) OSX/Koobface.A virus (Intego Security Memo). But if that was the case, why didn’t VirusBarrier X6 tell me about it? And why didn’t I get the Java applet warning? My mind wandered back a couple of days and I remembered I’d logged in on my Windows 7-based HTPC recently too, so there was a slim chance that I got infected that way.

So off I went to set some scans running. Kaspersky Internet Security finished on the HTPC first due to it’s relatively small HD, but that was clean, which only left my MacBook Pro as a potential candidate for infection. After discovering just how long it takes to scan a 500gb hard disk (more than 8 hours)… VirusBarrier told me that it didn’t find anything on my laptop either.

VirusBarrier says "no virus detected"

Both Kaspersky Internet Security and VirusBarrier X6 claim to be able to deal with various versions Koobface worm/trojan hybrid, but neither of them picked anything up despite having the latest virus definition updates, so my systems seem to be clean. Having checked my systems meant that I was now “allowed” through the Roadblock (Facebook requires you to certify that you’ve checked your system — that said, it’s only a checkbox to tick and you could easily lie, but if you receive genuine reports that your computer appears to be compromised, it’s better not to chance it), and I went through this sequence of steps…

Facebook give you a few options to prove your identity

I opted for SMS message verification

Facebook then try to educate you about what happened...

... which is a really good idea (though they should detect I'm on a Mac)

... and then they forced me to reset my password (also good!)

And then after a confirmation screen, my account was restored.

So… what the hell happened? Well, from what I can tell my machines are not infected, so either my account was compromised, or it was a false alarm (possibly due to Adium’s frequent reconnects to Facebook Chat, because it drops the connection often). Either way, I think Facebook handled this very well from a security point of view. They also offered me a (Windows-only) 6 month free subscription to McAfee VirusScan Plus on the final confirmation screen, but I skipped that as I’m on a Mac and already use Intego VirusBarrier X6, but it’s good to be offering protection to people who might not be protected.

I’m interested to hear if anyone else has gone through this (especially Mac users), so if you have a similar story to share, please drop me a comment.

This is a pretty huge disappointment: Google’s admitted defeat on Wave, citing poor uptake, and plans to cut it loose later this year.

“despite these wins, and numerous loyal fans, Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects.”
– Urs Hölzle on the Official Google Blog [link to post]

I’ve found Google Wave to be very useful as a meeting and collaboration space for working with people hundreds or thousands of miles away from me, but I guess not enough people saw just how useful it actually is. It does have a pretty steep learning curve initially, so I can see why a lot of people probably didn’t bother, or didn’t get what it was for. I guess it’s back to IRC, IMs and Campfire for now.

I discovered today that FaceTime didn’t work on my iPhone 4: people couldn’t start FaceTime calls with me and I didn’t have any of the FaceTime buttons present. Turns out that this problem is caused when restoring from an iPhone 3G running iOS 4 — it seems the FaceTime on/off setting is imported from the iPhone 3G (which has it turned off as it doesn’t support FaceTime). Going into Settings > Phone and then flipping FaceTime on solved it for me.

Other people seem to have had to jump through a couple of extra hoops to get this to work, if flipping the switch didn’t get you going, take a look at this post over at the Rusty Brick blog.

Update 2010-08-22: Still having trouble? Did you jailbreak your iPhone 4? There’s something else that might stop this working too.

Update 2011-08-20: Did you find this post helpful? It would be awesome if you’d take a moment or two to check out File Sanctuary, my hosting company. We’d love to help you with web hosting, email hosting, radio station hosting, domain registration, SSL certificates, and even giving you a safe place on the Internet to back your computers up to. We really care about the service we provide, and our prices are really good. Have a look around our website to find out some more, then get in touch and tell us what you need, and we’ll do everything we can to accomodate you. Thank you for reading my shameless plug! :)

Just found an awesome guide from Mattias Kretschmann on how to create a perfect AFP file server for Mac clients that supports Time Machine backups over the network out of the box. It worked for me with a Mac OS X 10.6.3 client and an Ubuntu 10.04 server, with just one small change to the /etc/netatalk/afpd.conf file. The final line simply needed to read:

- -transall -advertise_ssh

Beautiful, thanks Mattias. :)

From an Associated Press article:

Twelve administrators of the website Formspring.me, including CEO Mark Baxter were arrested on Monday for data phishing and misleading the public, when the site was revealed to be a “social experiment,” which will culminate in the automatic revealing of users’ private data on April 1, 2010.

Update: seems like this is a hoax…

Just over a year ago, I created a bunch of SSL certs following the instructions here: http://www.devklog.net/2008/05/25/generating-ssl-certificates-that-will-make-firefox-3-happy/

I’m having some interesting problems creating a new certificate to replace an expired one.

When I created a new certificate (as a leaf of a self-signed CA cert), to replace the expired leaf, I got a message saying that the certificate already existed.

I backed up and then deleted the expired cert and tried again, to no avail.

I saw this old thread which seems related to the problems I’m having, but the solutions there didn’t help me (I’m already manually picking serial numbers in the format yyyymmddnn, where nn is the number of certificates I’ve created that day, and deleting the Certificate Authority folder from Application Support in my home library didn’t make a difference either).

Anyone else had similar trouble? How did you resolve it?