Archive for April 21st, 2008

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There’s been some speak about PayPal blocking Safari from using its services, and I’m among those concerned about it… even if only from a convenience standpoint. Originally the news was gleaned from statements by PayPal Chief Information Security Officer Michael Barrett regarding browsers without phishing protection — which most assumed included our beloved Webkit-based compass. But in a brief addendum to a post at the Wall Street Journal last week it was reported that — while Paypal will be blocking older browsers (IE4-era) and older operating systems — Safari is safe from the cut.

I’m relieved, at least from the previously mentioned convenience standpoint. I prefer Safari as my surfing browser1 and I frequently use PayPal. It’s too bad that there are still a good number of sites that, while not blocking Safari, just plain don’t work with it yet. Add to that some of the great plugins available for Flock/Firefox and you’ll almost always find me with multiple browsers open. In much the way that the iPhone is preventing Gargoylism* by consolidating peripherals, I’m hoping for a day when I open just one browser in the morning. I’m getting a little teary-eyed thinking about it.

1Since I know it will be bandied about in the comments, I’d like to offer these reasons for preferring Safari: It’s faster (in general). It’s more elegant (or prettier, either way it’s subjective). It’s AppleScriptable (which I make daily use of). And it’s more elegant (redundant, but worth mentioning again).

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One of the nice things about the Airport Extreme Base Station is the Airport Utility application used to manage it. Most other routers these days are managed with a web interface which can sometimes be a little wonky. So it was with some interest that I discovered Port Map, from the Coding Monkeys of SubEthaEdit fame.

Port Map is not a full-fledged management application, but it does bring Cocoa lickability to one standard management task: port mapping, an essential task for iChat or Back to my Mac. If your router supports UPnP / NAT-PNP Port Map provides an iPhone-esque Ui for setting up specific ports, including “presets and URL templates.” You can see it working above with my DD-WRT Linksys router (don’t worry, I turned it off after the screenshot).

Port Map is a free download from The Coding Monkeys. They’ve also open-sourced some of the coding goodness that makes this possible and created a framework available to other developers on a Google Code page.

Thanks constantin!

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