Mobile Multi Display has hit the AppStore

One of the projects I have been working on at the lab has made it to the iPhone AppStore. It's the Mobile Multi Display, and you can find more information about it on its website: http://www.graphics.rwth-aachen.de/software/mmd/.

Mounting the iDisk in Linux

Ok, so the Apple iDisk of me.com fame seemingly cannot be used from within Dolphin, the KDE file manager. Either something in Dolphin or me.com is rotten. However, I solved the problem by installing wdfs, the FUSE based webdav mounter. Using wdfs and rsync on the command line is much easier anyway...

Switching flyspell dictionaries on the fly

Since I am using Emacs for most of my text processing, and it comes with the nice Flyspell mode, and I do write English and German the most, I found this nice snippet from the Emacs wiki:

(defun fd-switch-dictionary()
    (interactive)
    (let* ((dic ispell-current-dictionary)
    (change (if (string= dic "deutsch8") "english" "deutsch8")))
      (ispell-change-dictionary change)
      (message "Dictionary switched from %s to %s" dic change)
      ))

(global-set-key (kbd "<f8>")   'fd-switch-dictionary)

On OS X, I recommend to use emacs-app or emacs-app-devel from MacPorts. For flyspell to work correctly, also make sure to install aspell and e.g. aspell-dict-de. Otherwise the above function will complain, most probably.

Cisco VPN Client triggering system crashes?

I am not quite sure, but I suspect my Cisco VPN Client for OS X is triggering some crashes on the MacBook Pro. Only when I have been using the VPN Client, suspend the machine, then wake it up again, the system becomes unstable in some cases. Once, I got a OS X death screen right away, the other time I just got the blue screen, and the activity LED on the front was just off. This so far only seems to happen after I have been using the VPN Client. The current release of the client is 4.9.0180, and is already pretty old. Funny enough the Cisco webpage lists only OS X 10.4 and 10.5 as supported, and not 10.6, which has been out for what... 9 months or so? If I find anything new on this, I will update this post.

Update: There is Tunnelblick, a free UI for OpenVPN, which can be used as well. Trying this out now, to see if it is any better.

Update: So far no more crashes. I've used Tunnelblick for some weeks now. So I guess the Cisco client indeed is the culprit