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I’ve found over the months my Downloads folder starts to fill up with all kinds of junk. Old disk images, versions of documentation, expense reports, you name it. All this stuff just sits in my Downloads folder until I consciously go through and delete the outdated stuff and organize the rest of it. To help myself out, I put a very basic bash script in a cron entry that removes old files from the Downloads directory. That way, I have a certain amount of time to move it out. If I don’t, it probably wasn’t worth keeping.
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Oh, really simple syndication. How I love you. As the fine folks at Common Craft told us long ago, RSS is easy, and can save you a load of time. I’ve got hundreds of websites in my RSS reader; topics covering everything from Advertising to Art to Blogging to Facebook to Marketing to PR and PPC are categorized beautifully in my Google Reader. Thought leaders on any subject you can think of are pumping content in to my RSS reader daily – just waiting to be read. More »

This, my latest installment in an ongoing series about what was new and cool two months ago, is a quick look at an interesting tool that’s new to me. Therefore it probably comes as news to others as well.

Simulators exist for just about any kind of device you can find, and they’re typically included in SDK’s for various products. They’re tremendously useful tools for woodshedding and testing development, and in some cases are the only practical way to do things. A good example was the earliest micro-computers, where access to one may have been next to impossible, but they could be simulated on the mainframe and Mini-Computer systems. More »

With my first use of iMovie for iPhone 4 I noticed that something was missing. While they offer you a choice of two transitions that can be used between clips in your timeline, they offer you no way of fading from or to black on either end of your project. This got me thinking, More »

For years the SEO world has been using some old AOL click through data to suppose just what kinds of click-through rates certain organic page 1 positions  might fetch. It was limited, old, and certainly out-of-date – but it was all we had. Until now.

In what might be the most useful bit of data Google has ever exposed to webmasters, within Google’s Webmaster Tools you can now see organic impression, click-through and click-through rate data on as many search queries as have impressions.

For me, this is like a really awesome birthday present you never expected. From out of nowhere you get this amazing gift, and it’s up to you to make the most of it. That’s what this post is all about; how to get the most out of this new (amazing) information. More »

Yes, sometimes companies actually do something with Feature Requests

We’re pretty much addicted to Daylite at Iris, and for good reason. It’s an outstanding Contact Management System for the Mac from Marketcircle, and the amount of information we have salted away in its database is both significant and valuable.

Much of this is due to the Daylite Mail Integration feature which allows Apple Mail users to have incoming and outgoing e-mails automatically tagged with Daylite Contacts, Users, and even Projects. I can go back and see emails between a client and our team going back for years, even if  that contact (or our team member) is no longer in the picture. This is extremely useful, and we use it all the time. Every team member has Daylite on their machines, remote or not, and it’s very easy to keep them all synched together. More »

It is a well known fact that Apple’s iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad do not support Adobe’s Flash media player.  While many people complain about the lack of Flash, not many people understand why Flash is not present on these devices.  There are a few primary reasons for this and they are a lack of a mobile version of Flash, HTML5 with MPEG-4 and the App Store. More »

Inspired by a previous post titled Stupid OS X Keyboard Tricks, I’ve decided to mention a few that I use almost everyday, but are not the most obvious. All of these should work on native applications, but you may have limited success with some third party. More »

I don’t get around to saying nice things about Microsoft very often, which I’ll admit isn’t very fair.  They’ve been good to Iris over the years, and we’ve sold our share of Microsoft licenses, too. To give them credit, they are always working on interesting things, and occasionally really interesting work comes out of Redmond. The subject of this blog entry, Pivot, is one of those interesting things. More »

Many companies today have a need to share resources like calendars and contacts across multiple people within the organization.  There might be a need for a CEO to share a personal calendar with an assistant, a public calendar that everyone needs to see or possibly a company-wide group of business contacts.

As an IT consultant, when I’m out in the field many customers ask me about using MobileMe to sync all of their companies contacts and calendars.  For a small business office of one or two people, this might be a viable solution, however, for companies that need more control over their resources, a server based solution is probably a better way to go. More »

Do you ever use the Apple menu item “Recent Items”?  It can definitely come in handy when you don’t know what to spotlight search or, for the extremely lazy (such as myself), if you don’t want to use keyboard to type into a spotlight search what you are looking for.  The basic idea is that it gives you the last 10 documents, applications and servers that you have accessed in an alphabetized list.  Very useful. More »

Are you using a Samba server and having problems with Mac OS X 10.6.3 clients copying files to your shares? You’re probably the victim of “wide links”. This issue seems to arise when someone upgrades to 10.6.3 specifically. The error message “The operation can’t be completed because you don’t have permission to access some of the items.” will appear, with no errors in the smbd logs.
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Wireless networking is ubiquitous, and with their proliferation comes increased security concern. There’s a lot of you other there with wireless networks that are woefully insecure, or are made less secure daily by the people that use them. I’m going to take a few minutes to explain common wireless security standards, and how you can use them to remedy your wireless security problems. More »

Opera Software made quite a big deal about submitting their mobile browser, Opera Mini, for approval in the Apple App Store. This wouldn’t be the first alternate browser to show up on the App Store, but it would be the first one not based on the webkit rendering engine that Mobile Safari uses. The question is, how does it stack up against Apple’s own Mobile Safari? More »

Power and cooling are some of the most over looked or misunderstood components of deploying IT infrastructure. Power in particular poses a problem for the average IT department because it is often considered the domain of the building maintenance or an electrical subcontractor.

Electricians are necessary to install your power receptacles but most fail to understand the needs of your IT equipment. Even electricians with IT infrastructure experience will often only give you a receptacle on the wall. It is up to you, or your IT support team, to know what you need and how to balance the equipment load. More »

The iPad is Apple’s next big venture.  Aimed to fill the gap between the smart phone and the laptop, Apple has equipped the iPad with the next generation of iPhone OS (3.2) and created an SDK specifically for the iPad to allow developers to create apps exclusively for the new device.  This means that it will not only run all current iPhone apps, but it will also run platform specific apps such as the new iWork suite and other 3rd party apps aimed at taking advantage of its hardware. More »

I haven’t done a modo post for a while, so I’m overdue. Here’s an easy one that illustrates some of the cool features in modo that make it fast and easy to do some quick modeling. In this episode, we find your humble, challenged modonaut working on a project to reflect our new Iris Professional Services logo. Part of the project is to build a backdrop of tiles, and I had decided that I’d like to animate those so that a few individual blocks with 6 different colors on their faces would turn through the brief movie.

To do that, I’m using a couple features in modo: Instance Arrays, and Local Action Centers. More »

Ah, the content inventory. Such a fun, yet maddening exercise. There really is no other way to become an authority all the stuff hiding on your website – but wow – it can be one amazingly dull process.

For the uninitiated, the content inventory is an information architecture and design tool used to index the pages of a website. This index is then analyzed for improvement opportunities, content additions/removal, etc. It’s basically a big spreadsheet outlining each page of your website and a number of associated attributes, such as the URL, page title, type of content, etc. You create one, you guessed it, by starting at the homepage of a website, clicking through all the links – all of them – and documenting the attributes of each page. More »

You may disagree with a lot of things President Reagan said, but you can’t deny the utility of one of his favorite phrases, “Trust, but verify”.  Log files, like spy planes, keep honest people honest. Logs can provide proof of unauthorized access, catching employees or others doing things they shouldn’t be doing on your network. In addition, your logs are often your only recourse to figure out what went wrong and when on a system that is heading south.
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The decision has been made – Google is no longer willing to to censor its search results in China.

Pinning the decision on the cyber attacks they announced on January 12, and “attempts over the last year to further limit free speech on the web…” Chinese Google users will now be redirected from Google.cn to Google.com.hk – which displays uncensored search results in simplified Chinese. David Drummond. Google’s SVP of Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer, notes this move “is entirely legal and will meaningfully increase access to information for people in China.”

That is, of course, until the Chinese government just pulls the plug on the whole deal. More »

Low-Cost, Reliable, and Abundant Storage Spaces

I’m always running into situations- seriously, like weekly, where clients need to find some place to put their files. And it’s not just video people that have this issue, although it’s easy to see why they need more room to put their stuff, it’s businesses of all kinds, storing all kinds of different types of data. Anyone storing any data always has one major concern: they don’t want to lose any of it.

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Much like a beehive or beaver dam, PPC account success almost always hinges on the structure of things. I remember back in the good ‘ol days when all you needed was a metric ton of keywords and half a brain to direct a firehouse of traffic to your website.

Those days, sadly, are long gone. More »

The smartphone has assimilated an increasing amount of functionality over the years, from cameras and video, to email, calendaring and the increasingly dizzying array of apps for sale across all mobile platforms.  However, more often than not these mobile implementations barely rise above glorified proof of concept demos.

Today I’m looking at two emerging spaces in the app eco-system: advanced mobile IT management tools & mobile virtualization. More »

How do you perfect on-page optimization? Tough question. There’s no canned answer to that, but there are some pretty clearly defined best practices that allow us to check off the critical bits and, naturally, adjust individual efforts from there. What does perfect optimization look like? More »

Far to often I see folks spending thousands of dollars on new servers and network gear without consideration for improving the server room itself. This oversight can be catastrophic, and the ROI is predictable when proper implementation occurs. The most often overlooked areas, especially with smaller companies, include physical security, electrical power and climate control. More »

If you’ve ever tried to set up NFS behind a firewall, you know that it’s not trivial. NFS relies on several helper applications to do its thing. NFS relies heavily on portmap, which handles incoming NFS connections and coordinates ports for daemons like mountd, statd, and lockd. Each of these daemons listens on its own port (several ports in some cases), and they can be arbitrary in choosing those ports. This makes it next to impossible to firewall a default nfs configuration. We’ll learn how to lock ‘em down in this session, so you can firewall them easily. More »

There are times when you need a decent microphone, whether it’s for Podcasting, conference calls, recording demos or presentations, capturing riffs, recording band practice, etc.

The built-in microphones on computers are great, mainly because they’re built in and you don’t have to do anything to connect them up, but the sound quality is never all that good. Typical Condenser and Dynamic microphones used for pro audio applications sound great, but they require some kind of connection and/or preamp device to connect to your computer. More »

Last time, I wrote about our friend, “Joe the IT guy” and Computer Armageddon. I have been thinking a lot about these things lately, and I have noticed that I’m not getting much sleep. Family responsibilities (and a very active 10 month old) are at the top of the list, but I was thinking about when I was an IT Manager for a medium sized company. I didn’t get much sleep then either. More »

With all the backlash against the iPad and it’s lack of Flash support I thought it would be a good time to reflect on the proper use of Flash on the web. More »

Sometimes it’s the little things that drive you crazy.  Like when you do a tail of /var/log/messages on someone’s linux system only to find a sea of iptables log entries.  Denied DHCP broadcast queries, multicast DNS, everything.  It takes just an extra step to tack on a grep to clear out this stuff, but as any sysadmin can tell you, the little things add up to a lot of time and aggravation.  In addition, the sea of irrelevant denies does little to tell you who’s actually attempting to get into your systems.  With just a few extra switches in iptables, you can send your firewall log to its own file. More »

Regulations and standards such as HIPAA, SOX and PCI-DSS, require many organizations to evaluate their data protection measures.  Moving to the cloud has a direct impact on an organizations ability to comply with these regulations.  Let’s talk about two of the more challenging characteristics of cloud computing that can give organizations headaches while trying to maintain compliance.

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The web is massive. Probably a lot bigger and complex than Al Gore ever thought possible. It’s a gigantic, complex organism that only gets more bigger and complexer with every passing day. As the web has grown and permeated each of our personal and professional lives it has also become more important. For many of us it’s not “the internet” anymore so much as “my life.”

If you’re involved in running any kind of business the web presents a couple powerful opportunities; marketing with near endless reach and business intelligence on an unprecedented scale. Unfortunately there’s a caveat to all this – knowing how to take advantage of it at all. More »

Last week, we got the announcement about the new iPad, and the pundits have been working the Hyperbolic Chamber to capacity. So much has been said, written, and parodied about the thing in the last few days, and while most of it is typical ‘net noise, a few good, solid nuggets of info have emerged from the din.

One of the more significant issue surrounding the iPad is the question about support for Flash. Some see a lack of Flash as a huge negative and a deal-breaker for them, but for others (including myself), it doesn’t bother me that much. In fact, after having waded through hundreds of websites full of bad flash, it’ll be nice to take a break from it. More »

I know, I know: I’ve already had a blog post about spam. This is the last one for a while, I promise.  It just continues to be subject that rears it’s ugly head, forcing me to deal with it even when I think I have it solved.

For a while now, I’ve been moving my clients over to Google’s Postini spam filtering service when SpamAssassin isn’t doing the trick (typically for marketing firms that have a large contact base, spreading their contact information around the globe).  For those that aren’t familiar with Postini, it’s a subscription based hosted spam/virus filtering service.  You point your MX records at Postini’s servers, give them your WAN IP address, and they will act as a proxy to filter your email traffic through.  Easy stuff. More »

I recently spent some time working on an iPhone app (ProPrompter – for all your teleprompting needs!). We wanted to add peer to peer capabilities in order to facilitate a remote control function. The natural choice to get there quickly was to leverage the GameKit framework. The API is deceptively simple – as is the documentation – but as usual, there were caveats I had to discover for myself. More »

Computer Armageddon can start in the little details that don’t seem important.  You’re trying to keep things simple, save a little money, and not think about IT stuff unless you absolutely have to.  That can lead some people to consider hiring “Joe the IT guy.”

I’m going to tell you how “Joe the IT guy” can negatively affect your business. More »

A few years ago I was researching IT authentication solutions for a government agency in Seattle. Biometrics was a buzzword in the industry with social and ethical implications. My research found that it wasn’t the Biometric Authentication model itself that was causing so much churn, but rather the idea that such data could be compromised and with it a person’s identity. Identity theft was already an issue then, but the risk could be mitigated, once discovered, via a password change, new credit cards issued and a few letters to credit reporting agencies.

Biometrics presented a new problem, what you are is always you and cannot be reset. More »

Web standards are a good thing.

Depending on your relationship with the internet, you may have no idea what I am talking about. Web standards have been evolving for many years. They started off with a handful of ‘best practices’ to follow when designing and coding your webpages. Today’s definition of web standards means giving your markup semantic meaning so the information would be understandable even with no design elements applied to it. This means properly coding headlines with headline tags, paragraphs with paragraph tags and so on. It also means giving your markup a structure and using naming conventions that make sense.

HTML5 takes cues from web standards programming and goes one step further. More »

What comes to mind when you see the word ’spam’? The iconic can of smeat (specks of meat)? Unwanted email? Hawaiian food?

To me, spam means search engine results which have been manipulated by tactics the search engines don’t approve of.

An old school example of spam is automating comment submission to Wordpress blogs with a bot. These comments then link back to a website you want to rank in search engines. Another would be dynamically inserting unauthorized links into a website you don’t own via hacking.

According to Aaron Wall, one new school approach to spamming can be seen over at Mahalo.com. More »

Samba is the result of some clever reverse-engineering to create reliable Windows file sharing without the headaches of a Windows server. Mac OS X clients can also use these shares, making Samba a great option for cross-platform environments. It’s not a common scenario to use an Open Directory server to control Linux systems, but here’s how to do it if you have one already, and want to use Samba on Linux with your OD users.  If you are finding the Xserve platform to be a little out of your budget for the amount of performance you get, or you don’t want to administrate yet another Mac OS X Server system, this could be a great alternative to an AFP solution for your Macs.

We could host SMB shares directly on our OD server, but ideally we keep our OD server just as a directory and authentication server, and let other servers do the file sharing heavy lifting. More »

In keeping with my current trend of posting ridiculously easy tips and solutions, I thought I’d post a story about a recent client experience where we used an off-the-shelf solution that’s not always thought of as either cheap or easy. Here’s the situation: my client has videos that he needs to share with his clients in a far away land (LA), and he’d like to do this on his MobileMe website. Ideally, he’d like to have a webpage setup for each of his clients so that they could choose their clip by clicking on a thumbnail of the video, and each page should be limited to just those clips that a particular client would need to see. In other words, the same basic web-based client review process that just about every other creative pro would like to have. More »

For anyone on the Mac platform looking to transfer large documents too big for email, but don’t wish to open up insecure FTP ports and deal with cumbersome FTP applications, Rumpus is worth a look.  It brings the power of FTP file sharing to the masses, and allows for the easy transfer of large media files.   More »

For all the benefits the iPhone has going for it, there is one glaring omission, turn-by-turn navigation. It’s true that the Google Maps app provides some of this functionality (and may provide more in the future), but it is awfully difficult to follow a Google Map on your phone and keep yourself out of danger.

Up to this point many of the top GPS navigation companies have released apps for the iPhone. The only problem here is that they usually hover in the $50 – $100 range or require a monthly fee. On the other hand, Waze is a social and community-driven GPS application that is completely free. More »

It appears like the regulatory heat is about to be turned up on cloud computing services.

Spurred by last years high profile outages amongst cloud computing finest services including Gmail, Windows Azure, and Salesforce.com, the FTC will hold a privacy roundtable Jan. 28th.  The FTC has decided this should be part of the public debate concerning its recommendations for the FCC’s upcoming broadband plan coming early this year. More »

Font management software is a utility that allows multiple users to manage font files. More »

Pay per click marketing has gone from a niche marketing tactic to a staple of any organization’s marketing efforts. And for good reason – super trackable results, data falling out your ears, no more faith based marketing, virtually real time feedback – I know many companies who spend 100% of their marketing budgets on PPC marketing alone (although longer term thinkers will certainly incorporate SEO efforts as well.)

With all the data it products managing PPC can seem pretty daunting. Which metrics are the best for your business – Click through rate? Impressions? Conversion rate? Some unknown uber metric? More »

Apple Mail is the best email client available. That’s a controversial statement (as controversial as a discussion about a mail client can be), but I’ve never found another client that is as fast, easy, and uncluttered as Apple Mail. That said, like any email client, it has it’s own share of irritating problems. I’m going to show you how to solve a very common one. More »

The iChat Server module in Mac OS X Server provides a great interface to the jabberd daemon, getting you up and running quickly with standard and Kerberos authentication using your Open Directory users. Unfortunately, there are a few useful features that are not yet accessible in Server Admin. One of these is a simple tool for automatically setting everyone to be a buddy with each other. In smaller organizations, it’s a great way to get in touch with everyone without having to ask everyone to become a buddy individually. More »

Are you tired of only being able to choose between Helvetica or Arial for a nice sans-serif font on your website. Perhaps Georgia or Times New Roman doesn’t really have the panache you are seeking for your corporate homepage?

For years, the selection of ‘web-safe’ fonts has been limited. Typekit is attempting to undo some of this old thinking when it comes to typography on the web. More »

With the new year comes new worries.  However, some old ones never seem to go away.  Such as it is with spam.  According to PC World, it makes up 86% of all email traffic, and it’s a constant cat and mouse game (more like a Tom and Jerry cartoon) for spam-block software developers to keep on top of it all.

Anti-spam software itself has become extremely complex and relies on learning algorithms, blocklists and other tricks, which makes it a herculean task to keep it all together and working properly.  Of course, like other complex pieces of software, it doesn’t always. More »

Port Channeling – a low cost way of increasing bandwidth and redundancy utilizing existing network infrastructure, such as turning four 1 Gigabit connections into one 4 Gigabit connection (if one link is lost the channel stays up with 3Gig functionality). More »

I’ve been involved in some major Software Development projects both as a Developer and a Project Manager. In fact, over the last year we’ve been developing a large scale Java application to replace a number of systems for our parent company Computer Stores Northwest, Inc (The Mac Store, Bodelin, PowerMax, Iris Professional Services).  We’ll be releasing the software next month for our first round of user acceptance testing. More »

I’ve posted on a variety of topics here, but usually in a long-winded manner. It’s time for me to put something useful for everybody, and to get right to the point! So, today I’d like to offer up three very easy, very productive, but often overlooked shortcuts. More »

In the dark ages of compiler technology, symbol names were frequently only significant to eight characters. This limitation forced a certain brevity and style when choosing variable and function names. You would often find variables with names like ‘empOTRt’ or ‘cur’. More »

As Patrick Altoft recently pointed out, Google has rolled out an astonishing number of search products in the past 90 days. 40 to be exact. Releasing just a handful of new products over the course of a year would be enough for most companies to pat themselves on the back – but what Google is accomplishing here is almost frightening.
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Everyone has heard a story about a lost job, broken relationship or other disaster brought about by ignorance of privacy settings on various social networking sites.  Recently Facebook decided to make some changes to their privacy policies that in effect urged users to share everything with everyone despite the prevalence of these kinds of stories. More »

Data gets lost; it’s not an “if” but more “when”, followed by “now what do I do”. If you’re like most businesses, you have a backup plan in place, and it’s similar to one of these:

1. Your server(s) backup your data. If it isn’t on the server, it doesn’t get backed up. Your users are instructed to save their files to the server.
2. Your server(s) back up, and your client machines are also backed up by the server via a backup client running on each machine.
3. Your client machines automatically store their information on the server (via Remote Home Synchronization, or similar)

Now these are all fine methods for achieving a backup (some better than others), but it leaves out a possible group of individuals More »

If you’re like most IT professionals, you have a gaggle of unfinished projects, and perhaps even have your boss breathing down your neck because his or her email isn’t working quite right, or customers are complaining about the company website. Maybe you’re behind getting the backup system procedures documented, or haven’t gotten the Administrative Assistant a second screen so they have more screen real estate, or how about those server upgrades that you keep putting off?

Here are few options people commonly use; I know that I myself have tried them all over the years, with varying degrees of success: More »

I think I’ve put together just short of 1.6 Zillion quotes for XServe’s and Mac Pro’s for Iris Professional Services, and one of the common “mistakes” I see people making when trying to spec their own Configure To Order machines is the inclusion of an Apple RAID card. By “mistake”, I mean that people will include a RAID card when they don’t really know what it does or may not need it for what they want to do. I thought that this would be a good opportunity to contrast the Hardware RAID card against the Software RAID functionality provided standard within the Mac OS X Disk Utility. More »

Apple’s AppleCare blurb:

“Every Mac, iPod, iPhone, and display comes with complimentary telephone technical support for 90 days after your purchase and a one-year limited warranty. The AppleCare Protection Plan extends your service coverage and gives you one-stop service and support from Apple experts.

AppleCare extends your service and support coverage to three years from the date you purchased your hardware by providing global repair coverage for all included hardware and accessories through convenient service options.”

AppleCare is a product that most businesses purchase for their computers to begin with.  It’s kind of a no brainer for a business.  After all, what’s not to love about having hardware and telephone support for your computer for three years from the date of purchase?  Well, for some smaller businesses, upstarts and consumers, it’s the cost. More »

Mac OS X Server builds on well-known and powerful unix tools, tools which are at your full disposal if you understand how they work.  One of these is the FreeRADIUS server included with 10.5 and 10.6 Server.

As is typical of Mac OS X Server, Server Admin makes it easy to add Apple base stations to authenticate against Open Directory using RADIUS.  But what if you want to use the RADIUS server for other devices?  Most decent managed switches and routers can authenticate to RADIUS.  Wouldn’t it be great to have them authenticate against Open Directory?  Read on. More »

The Mighty Drobo

Standard storage RAIDs are nice.  They provide a decent option for large storage pools, fast data access and drive failure protection.  But what if you don’t need the fastest data access possible, or can’t afford a large storage pool right away?  RAIDS can be costly, and don’t allow for easy scalability once they are setup. That’s where the Drobo comes in.

Data Robotics Inc. looked at the shortcomings with traditional RAID systems, and decided to build a product to overcome them.  On June 5, 2007 they introduced what they referred to as “the first fully automated storage robot designed to ensure that data is always protected, storage capacity is unlimited and is exceptionally easy to expand.”  Essentially, a RAID which can be expanded dynamically and in a non-destructive manner. More »

Search engine optimization is, fundamentally, a process. Understanding all of the challenges and opportunities facing your website (and tactical changes one can implement) is rooted in the all-powerful website review.

The importance of SEO site reviews
Consider building a house. If you wanted to create your dream home you’d need to know a little about the plot it would be built on, the availability and cost of materials, your mortgage and financing options, the most efficient construction schedule, how to negotiate a construction contract, etc. before you ever stepped into the world of building a home. More »

When learning how to write software, one of the first bad habits people tend to develop is to ignore compiler warnings. This is understandable since the warnings tend to be numerous and tedious, particularly to an inexperienced developer. Compounding this behavior is the fact that – despite profuse warnings – the code will still build, and often times appear to run correctly. So if the project runs what’s the point in going back and silencing the warnings? More »

One of the best features introduced in 10.5

Snow Leopard has been out there for a little while now, and most of the little things that aren’t perfect are getting worked on, I’m sure. But the introduction of Snow Leopard reminded me of a presentation I did a while back when Leopard (10.5) was introduced, and I had to quickly get all the new features down. One of the features that I tried out has been extremely useful for me since I’ve adopted it, and that’s Spaces. It took a little getting used to, but it’s been a huge productivity / organizational tool for my daily work. More »

Leveraging iLife, some cheap software, a funky cable, and some earbuds

This is a departure from the usual fare on the blog, but I was describing this workflow to a friend and they suggested that I share it here. It’s one of those things that is so obvious that it’s not really going to surprise anybody. But what really struck me was the fact that there was nothing like this around when I was growing up. Back then, I had to practice my instruments uphill both ways, through the snow… More »

Tough Economic Times, 9.5% Sales Taxes…
Add those together and you start looking for ways to reduce your costs for technology acquisition. What some companies are doing is purchasing equipment online and/or from companies outside of Washington State so that they don’t have to pay Sales Tax on equipment. For a $10,000 purchase, this saves the purchaser $950 – not exactly chump change. Recently I’ve seen promos where out of state vendors tout this sales tax savings as a reason for doing business with them. More »

Recently, my client had some trouble with an upgrade from CS2 to CS4. When they put in the install dvd it looked for CS3 and complained because I sold them the wrong upgrade. I got some bad advice from Adobe sales that said I would have to return the product and re-sell them the correct upgrade.

I called Adobe customer service and things got a lot better! More »

I found this and it works for me:

1. Open print/fax pref in System Prefs
2. Go to + (add printer)
3. Go to IP and drag down to HP Jetdirect.
4. Open Airport Utility and click on express to get IP address (mine was 192.168.10.20) I set the Express to Manual IP outside the DHCP Range.
5. Type this IP in “Address” back in Fax/print.
6. Change the “Name” to whatever you want (for example Samsung ML).
7. Print Driver to use is ML-2010 (look in M’s), not any Samsung listed driver (in the S’s).
8. Restart Airport and the Printer is suggested but mine worked without ding this.
(.You will have to go to all the computers and delete the old printer and re add using the above instructions.

Just updated, still cool
As the only team member at Iris Professional Services that uses a Blackberry instead of an iPhone, I get the pleasure of testing out anything new for Blackberry and Macs. Sometimes that’s not such a good thing, but there are products like Missing Sync that are definitely in the “Good Thing” category. PocketMac is free, but I never was able to get it to work correctly. Of course, that might be attributable to User Error and your experience may differ, but the bottom line is that I finally gave up on it. More »

Apple’s Mac OS X Server Apache install includes some cool modules to interface directly with Open Directory, if you host your sites on a Mac OS X Server box.  If you are working on a Linux system, one of the easiest solutions is to engage the ldap modules to get authentication and authorization.

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The 8-core Xserve platform has often seemed overpriced and overkill for many IT server applications that require less performance, but must have server isolation for industry compliance, security, and high availability.  Parallels has made a welcome step forward in virtualization on the Xserve platform, with Parallels Server for Mac.  For an initial release, it has proven quite dependable despite a few issues with recent X Server updates.  No doubt this product will continue to improve in the near future, and it’s exciting to see the Xserve hardware used more efficiently.

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Taking Advantage of Luxology’s “user-friendly” Licensing

One of the best things I like about modo is the licensing, which is so much easier to live with and work with than other 3D applications. Instead of licensing the software to a machine, or worse yet to a dongle, Luxology assigns the license to you, the user. That means a lot of things: you can install the software on as many computers as you like as long as you’re personally using them and not other people using them. You can install it on your personal laptop, your work desktop, a machine at a client’s site, etc.

Or, as in this example, you can use it to set up your own network rendering “farm”. All without buying any more licenses or installing any network rendering software. Got some older machines that meet at least the minimum requirements for modo, or have some under-utilized desktops or servers in your network? Then you can use that power to speed up your rendering! This capability works on both Mac’s and Windows PC’s by the grace of Bonjour networking.

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A new month, and new toys!
Besides showing some of the new features on tap for modo in version 4.xx, Luxology has released the import/export tools for Rhino and SketchUp. I’ve been trying these out for the last few months, and it’s really good to see these things being released and available to current modo users. I’ve also been kicking around the Mac OS X Beta version of Rhino, and while it’s not quite ready for Prime Time, it is really a joy to use.

Also just released was version 4 of Parallels, and some casual testing on my MacBook Pro has been very positive. Where previous versions simply wouldn’t even start modo, Version 4 seems to cook along smoothly. You can even setup the number of processors in Parallels and you’ll see the corresponding number of buckets in a modo render. So far so good.

But, back to our post. This one is going to show some of the basics in working with the Rhino plugin for modo, and I’ve used the Beta of Rhino Mac OS X to generate the test files.

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Booleans Suck!

Actually, they don’t suck that bad, at least in the right hands. The problem I have when I use them is that they do weird things, and it doesn’t really seem to matter what program I’m using them in. Sometimes they work great, but other times they leave all kinds of nasty things to fix. Usually it’s duplicated and/or orphaned verts, as well as duplicated lines that need to be merged. That kind of stuff.

I had a recent project where I had to cut some slits in a disc that I was modeling, and it got real ugly using Booleans. I even tried stenciling (projecting the curves) on the surface, which helped, but I still had all kinds of things to clean up afterwards. It occurred to me after the project was done that I could have gone about it in a more simplified way if I had planned things out a little bit beforehand. The easy way would have been to cut holes in the surface by beveling a central vertex in the polygon, which is about as “old school” as you can get in poly modeling. And if I duplicated and slid some edges on that polygon, it would make it really easy to cut some slits.

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The simple way to do natural light in Modo 302

When it comes to lighting, texturing, shading, and all that stuff, Modo really is fun and easy to work with. One of the new features in Modo 302 is a simple Physical Sun and Sky setup that gives great results without requiring a lot of tweaks or time. Of course, if you want to tweak, you’ve got all the controls available, but the defaults are pretty good right out of the box.

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More musings on Modo

It’s been a busy first half of the year, including a trip to the Industrial Designer’s Society of America Western Region meetings in Portland last month where we had a great time demo’ing Modo and the integration with Rhino. Many thanks to Bob Bennett and Luxology for their help with that, by the way!

I finally got some time to kick back and explore more Modo, digging through the excellent help files and learning more about how Modo does Animation. All 3D animation applications handle things a little differently and it takes a little practice to get acclimated to each, but the experience also points out how useful it is to use multiple applications in a pipeline. All of the basic Transforms are easy to animate and practically everything in Modo can be Keyed, but Modo has a really cool Morph Map function that can be easily animated, and with it you can really speed up a project.

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If after an update is applied to Mac OS X 10.5.x Server you find yourself unexpectedly looking at Server Assistant upon restart you might try this to get your server backup to normal. At least in my case this problem was solved by doing the following:

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Transitioning from NURBs

Lately I’ve been getting deeper into Modo from Luxology. It’s a poly and subdivision surface modeler (as well as animation and rendering engine) which is great, but I really liked working with the NURBS in Studio Tools and Maya. For some things it’s easier just to lay out curves and sweep the surfaces, at least for me. While Modo doesn’t have NURBs, it does allow you to do some of the same kind of modeling using curves and Patch Curves tools. This is where you find the Patch Curves tool. It’s the same button used for the other Curves.

The Hitch:

If you follow the otherwise great help system, it does tell you how to create the Patch. However, it leaves out one really important step that you have to do otherwise it doesn’t work. I’d lay out four curves, snap the vertices to each other, then try to run the Patch. No such luck. You can extend the curves on the ends for some cool effects, but no surface like you’d get using a Boundary or Square in Alias.

The Fix:
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Here is an introductory guide on how to create an Adobe CS3 .pkg installer ( in lieu of the slient install ) with little to no fuss(1), and more importantly no real manual interaction with all the associated files. I have modified a perl script from Geoff Franks that was created for parsing Microsoft Office update log files to now parse the output of logGen. Please note that Perl is not my primary language ( As of late the snake is eating most of my llama time. ) and so this is not yet as polished as other scripts I publicly post ( I really didn’t have to change too much to get this working. ). I encourage the community to send back code additions and bug reports.
1. Its worth mentioning there are easier to use commercial pieces of software such as composer and other methodologies such as the slightly immature package snapshot feature (Not recommended for CS3, trust me I’ve tried it).

Please read the article below and then download pkgGen

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This is such a hack and is posted mainly for academic reasons

Here is a quick hack for pushing out environment variables via MCX ( Managed Preferences ), This only will work with 10.4 and its a silly mishmash of stuff that is totally unsupported which of-course makes it the best kind of hack.
First a little background on the file that allows us to do this (environment.plist) curiosity of Apple.

From page 24 of the Command_Line_v10.4_2nd_Ed[PDF]

“Another way to set environment variables in Mac OS X is with a special property list in
your home folder. At login, the computer looks for the ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist
file. If the file is present, the computer registers the environment variables in the
property-list file.”

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For anyone interested I am attending black hat and defcon and snapped a few pictures from the iphone exploit talk.

After seeing this post on afp548.com I decided to take the time to dive into a little cocoa as I have been trying to learn it recently. For anyone interested , I have modified the source code to display the size of /Volumes/<logname> so you can have the menu display a home directory perhaps mounted by MCX, loginhook, location file,alias etc. Basically meaning if you have a (Portable | Mobile) account you can see the quota information (free space) of the mounted share,instead of the local home folder’s file system.

Download:QuotaMonitorMenuMobile.zip

note: different name so modify the hook accordingly

Posted with Adam Gerson’s permission

I also made one that uses the OriginalHomeDirectory attribute but it would only work for people using a non-guest pure kerberos automount setup. if you would like it instead feel free to contact me

So ever since iDay I have been looking for a good way to get content on the iphone ( yeah scrolling is fun but seriously ), I have started using Google’s Reader service and I think I have finally found something that I can live with, and find myself using it on my standard size browsers too. If you don’t know much about the service its basically a rss reader that treats the feeds like email messages, a surprisingly efficient concept.

I have added basically every site I normally visit and am now using their mobile version. Might not be news to you but thought I would post it if you have not played
with it yet .

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For anyone interested in deleting Mobile (Portable) accounts after a certain number of days ( most likely a lab environment ) I have created a bash with an accompanying loginhook and package installer(w/postflight). Any feedback or code additions would be greatly appreciated. Static Link here

Elmer “Rabbit Droppings” remover v1.9

These scripts are designed to remove mobile home directories after 15 days of inactivity, test in a non production environment before deploying!

You can find the package maker project ->here<- and the installer package ->here<-

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Backing up share point data on Mac OS X Server.

In response to this article on afp548 and a job I had to today here is a quick, if not old school way to backup share points.

nidump -r /config/SharePoints . >shares.nidump
To restore from the backup.
niload -r /config/SharePoints . <shares.nidump
Perhaps more later…
( and yes I know about ^h^h^h^h^h^h

If would you like to contact me with comments or inaccuracies about this article, feel free but support requests will be ignored unless you would like to sign up for Iris Professional Services service. Thanks

I am waiting at pioneer place mall in portland oregon. Stay tuned for updates.

I’m number 6

KXL New coverage

Oregonlive

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Cool demo of Google Earth at WWDC07 spread across 18 screens using [TG Enhanced Chromium](http://tungstengraphics.com/TG%20Enhanced%20Chromium%20Mac%20OS%20X%20Press%20Release%20June%2011%202007.pdf) from [Tungten Graphics](http://tungstengraphics.com/).

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PowerPoint (gasp!) here for download

Many thanks go out to David Choi, fellow NW3D member, Indie filmmaker, and Maya Guru for his work in putting together the Maya Pre-Viz session for SIFF! Those that attended were treated to a very informative and useful session of how to plan and evaluate their own film projects. If the demand is there, we’ll probably do this session again sometime in the near future. For now, the attached PowerPoint presentation will have to do.PreViz in Maya for Beginners

Update: 8/20/2007 Zack has posted a guide to convert CS3 into a .pkg installer

The instructions in Official CS3 Deployment guide [PDF] are somewhat misleading, and in some cases just don’t include information that you need (of course, if you are using logen or other deployment tools to create a package, you can ignore this article, but this is a resource for those who want to see / use / implement the cs3 silent installer).

1. Understand the that “Silent” installer is just running the normal installer (you get an icon on the doc and everything) with the screen output and dialogs supressed. So instead of prompting on error, the app just quits, with no log or mention of why it did. For example, the installer fails if you have safari or firefox open, the normal install will prompt you with the error, but no mention of why the install failed shows up in the log.

2. It also fails if the installer is not run with Sudo or Root privileges. Again, no error message to tell you otherwise. (this is mentioned indirectly in the ARD part of the deployment guide, but nowhere else).

3. the “deploy over ARD” option is to just copy the installation files to the client machine, and to then push out the unix command from ARD to run the silent installer.
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For those of you out in intertube land who were at our Attainable HD event, I have uploaded our Keynote slides as a PDF for your reference. A note about the numbers in the pricing: each persons needs are unique, so use them as a reference, not a quote. More notes and articles pertaining to the event, and other video / film projects will be posted in the near future, once we are done decompressing from SIFF. Keep an eye on our blog for new postings.

Here is the PDF.

There are many compelling reasons to use SSL wherever possible on your server. We use and deploy Kerio MailServer quite frequently and there is extensive support for SSL certificates built into the product.

By default Kerio MailServer generates a self-signed certificate the first time it is setup. A self-signed certificate is good enough for some types of secure connections and does ensure that communications to and from the server are encrypted, but in many situations you will get errors stating that the certificate is not trusted because it has not been signed by a certificate authority. In short, the connection is encrypted but the other end of the client-server conversation has no way to ensure that your server is who it says it is unless the certificate is signed by a trusted certificate authority.
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like many who have come before, I have cut and paste the sample RSS widget and modified it for our feed. All I can say is I can fix Photoshop more then I can use it.

So start your dashboards as you can download it ->here<-

Awhile ago I posted to the Mac OS X Server list a way for changing/setting the root password in Single User Mode i.e. without a install DVD handy and without having to start any deamons.I even found it the other day on Mr. Shoop’s site (Firefox: direct link Safari: index link) I thought I would write it up and talk about how it works and some caveats. I also included a little bit of of general information about “local” passwords More »

Here are my musings for the [contest](http://www.afp548.com/article.php?story=20070529101455887):

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One of my clients is a small group of Mac users in a large, Windows-centric company. The Mac’s use ADmitMac to authenticate against Active Directory for user login and to mount network shares. One user suddenly stopped being able to mount network shares, either as a login item or manually using “Connect to Server”. The symptom when logging in is an error dialog, one for each share, that states “tss\_check\_cifs is not running”. I checked Activity Monitor and tss\_check\_cifs what gives? I check the logs, and there’s nothing. I try mounting the share manually, and the symptom then is the blue barber shop bar comes up for a few seconds like normal, then nothing no mount, no error, no log, no anything.

I know it’s not Kerberos or time being off or DNS or anything basic like that, because she can still authenticate and log in successfully. I Google the error and there’s two pages, neither has anything to do with this situation. I go as far as uninstalling and reinstalling ADmitMac with no improvement. Sigh.

Finally, after several hours of pulling my hair out, trying everything short of archive and install, I break down and call Thursby’s tech support (I figure I’ve done enough RTFM’ing at this point) and the first thing off the guy’s tongue is “Oh yah, that’s a bug. Apple changed the way startup items work after 10.4.6. Here’s a link to a pre-release build that fixes the issue.” The official update should be out soon. Until then, here’s Thursby’s number: 1-817-478-5070.

I was setting up a brand new MacBook for a client, and when I tested the .inetloc URL for the client’s network share on one of the MacBooks I got a curious dialog box saying “…blah blah couldn’t mount blah blah unexpected error blah blah…”

I checked the system log and found this:

“kernel[0]: mount version mismatch: kernel=103700, mount=103600″

First I reinstalled Mac OS X 10.4.9 Combo Update and Security Update 2007-004, but no joy. Then I did some investigating and, Voila!, I found that the smb daemon version (in Terminal: /sbin/mount\_smbfs -v) and the smb kext version (System Profiler > Extensions > smbfs) didn’t match, the former being 1.3.6 and the latter being 1.3.7. The fix is to locate mount\_smbfs version 1.3.7 on another machine and then copy it (I used cp -Rpv) to the problem machine, repair permissions and then restart. SMB network shares now mount fine.

Updated: 6/6/2007 I added some Apple script for all you Googlers.

First a little background: for a while now I have been teaching about “URL Fun” in my server classes. Its a pretty universal concept that you find server admins implementing on Mac OS X clients: the idea of an alias, link, script or application that connects to a server on login. The windows folks normally refer to this conceptually as a “Mapped Network Drive” which is why I choose it for the name of this article. I actually find it humorous how often I get asked to make a link to the “x” or “q” drive when doing consulting, its actually a testment to how simple this works on windows, people have no idea of the shares name, just the drive letter ( for better or worse sometimes ). Now there are multiple ways of accomplishing this on OS X ,some are better or fancier then others. All of them try at best to get around requiring users to use “Go” > “Connect To Server”

Part 1: “Aliases” and “Location” Files

Part 2: AppleScript and Login items

Part 3: Shell Scripts and Login Hooks

Part 4: Automounts with Directory Services More »