Dan Wood: The Eponymous Weblog

Dan Wood Dan Wood is co-owner of Karelia Software, creating programs for the Macintosh computer. He is the father of two kids, lives in the Bay Area of California USA, and prefers bicycles to cars. This site is his weblog, which mostly covers geeky topics like Macs and Mac Programming.

Useful Tidbits and Egotistical Musings from Dan Wood

Categories: Business · Mac OS X · Cocoa Programming · General · All Categories

Thu, 18 Mar 2004

Pricegrabber tool fixed to use live category feed

permanent link · Topic/Watson
/Watson
|

Watson's PriceGrabber tool got an update today to deal with the problem of the tool always falling behind when Pricegrabber.com would change their product categorizations.

Until now, I've just made sure that a new release comes out every so often to keep up with the changes at their site. But now, the nice folks at PriceGrabber have created a live 'feed' of their categories; all Watson has to do now is to get that file to have a fresh version of their categories.

Of course, the categorization isn't changing that fast. So the hierarchy is cached for a week.

Enjoy!

A Handy Reference of Mac OS X's port numbers

permanent link · Topic/MacOSX
/MacOSX
|

This tech note is a long time coming -- a handy list of what TCP and UDP ports Mac OS X uses. I've been longing for this whenever I have to deal with firewall configuration problems.

Of course, it doesn't cover ports used by ports — port numberws used by third-party programs not included with Mac OS X. You can always look at your local file system's /etc/services file; some lists like this one can be found on the web as well.

But for Mac OS X applications, you may just have to look up documentation for a specific product. SubEthaEdit, for example, uses port 30729 for its document sharing, as it states here.

Does anybody know of a technique for detecting that a particular port is blocked by a firewall, so that an application could defensively check and warn its user, rather than just failing to connect?

Mon, 01 Mar 2004

Weather and Packages: fixes to the fixes

permanent link · Topic/Watson
/Watson
|

A couple more Watson updates today:

  • Packages, to 1.7.5.2. Airborne has merged with DHL, so a couple of weeks ago, we removed Airborne from the list of carriers. The trouble is, those packages couldn't be deleted anymore! So we've put it back in, even though Airborne packages can no longer be tracked. Aren't corporate mergers annoying?
  • Weather, to 1.7.5.4. Last week's fix to restore forecast icons to certain locations wound up breaking other locations. (The Weather tool is tricky to maintain, because it's not just connecting to one server, but many different servers across the country, some running Windows and some running Unix, each one slightly different than the others!)

Hopefully this will help!