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Yes, this is a nice way to show your users that the service is unavailable.

Great job, Aardvark.  I’ve the additional screens as well.

This week, Facebook opened up their chat service to an industry standard protocol- XMPP, otherwise known as Jabber.  This means that Facebook chat can now be used directly from within iChat. 

Here’s how to set it up-

Go to iChat’s Preferences

Click the “Accounts” tab and add a new account

Select “Jabber” from the options

Type your screen name (.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)) and password.

Set “Server Options” to chat.facebook.com at port 5222 (do not check SSL)

Facebook also has instructions posted now on their site.

In MacOSX, there are two simple ways to make files invisible from the command line: (both methods do require the installation of Apple’s Developer Tools)

Method 1:

Make invisible:

/Developer/Tools/SetFile -a V ~/Desktop/MyDoc.txt

Make visible:

SetFile -a v ~/Desktop/MyDoc.txt

Method 2:

Make invisible:

chflags hidden ~/Desktop/MyDoc.txt

Make visible:

chflags nohidden ~/Desktop/MyDoc.txt

In Snow Leopard, Apple modified the behavior of Remote Desktop and Screen Sharing to send system level commands to a remote computer by default.  This change has made working with remote computers much more difficult for me. 

At long last “MacNoggin” has posted the solution over on MacOSXHints.

Quit Remote Desktop or Screen Sharing, then open Terminal and paste the following codes to toggle these hidden preferences:

defaults write com.apple.RemoteDesktop DoNotSendSystemKeys -bool YES

defaults write com.apple.ScreenSharing DoNotSendSystemKeys -bool YES

If you would like to reverse, re-enter the code, but change YES to NO at the very end.  And of course, you can always send these “System” commands while in fullscreen mode.

The Google doodle today is a set of Christmas cards.  I say, “Merry Christmas” to you as well.

It’s not every day that a major search engine takes a nosedive into 404-land.  I have to say, I’m surprised this isn’t a default IIS error page.

This webpage is not available.
The webpage http://bing.com might be temporarily down or it may have moved permanently to a new address.

Oops

This isn’t the page you wanted.

Try this

Refresh the page.  If you get this message again please check back later.

While not technically a 404, I’m lumping it into my collection as a clever browser error message. 

Well this is embarrassing.

Firefox is having trouble recovering your windows and tabs.  This is usually caused by a recently opened web page.

Gotta love a team that has a sense of humor.  Thanks to Howie for the screen grab.

Apple has ever so helpfully removed ODBC Administrator from MacOS 10.6’s Utilities folder.  The software is now a standalone download from Apple’s website-

http://support.apple.com/downloads/ODBC_Administrator_Tool_for_Mac_OS_X

From Apple:  The ODBC Administrator Tool for Mac OS X enables database administration of ODBC-compliant data sources.  Features include connection pooling, trace log creation, and ODBC driver management, among other administration features.

As expected, The Chromium Experience on VMWare is really just a web browser at this point. 

It did boot in about 10 secs. and I could see how this would be very nice on a NetBook, but for now- it’s just a overhyped browser running in a VM.

The Chrome task manager reveals a few details about what’s going on.

And of course the “Stats for Nerds” shows quite a bit more including Zygote & Sandbox helper.

Just when I had 10 minutes to review my projects, the project management system is down for emergency maintenance.  With the link going to a description of timezones, I found this error to be pretty weak. 

The system is down for emergency maintenance

It’ll be back by 3:00PM Central time.