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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 All this stuff just sits in my Downloads folder until I consciously go through and delete the outdated stuff and organize the rest of it.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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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 It was limited, old, and certainly out-of-date – but it was all we had.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 »

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 »

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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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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

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 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 »

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 »

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.

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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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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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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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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You can Download the Application ->here<- and the “Source” ->here.<-

I often teach classes to administrators who are new to the command line, I on the other hand ssh more then I sleep and so no matter what the class ( for better or worse ) I tend to throw one liners on screen every 10 mins . Because of this I often start class out by showing people how to make a simple “.command” file. The rational being that if they don’t think they’re going to remember the commands then just saving them in a file ( perhaps on a thumb drive ), will probably suffice while they are learning. If your not familiar with these files, they are a handy way to have a double clickable “scripts” , sans the hash bang i.e. #!/bin/bash or what could almost be referred to as a “batch” file. Creating one of these files is as simple as opening TextEdit.app changing the format to”Plain text” Format->Make Plain Text + Shift + T ). More »

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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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 »

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 »