There are a number of ways that you can protect your WordPress site from spam bots. The first is to only allow authenticated users to post comments. Doing so can still be a bit unwieldy, but this feature is built into WordPress and so pretty straight forward to use. Some, who deal with large amounts of spam bots then choose to completely disable the commenting feature outright (Settings -> Discussion -> Uncheck Allow people to post comments on new articles), but comments can still be made on existing articles and commentary is one of the best features of WordPress for many. To stop comments on older articles, also disable commenting…
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AutoCAD and the Mac
Apple computers and AutoCAD once worked together in a harmonious land known now as 1990. Yes, grunge was on the way in, NES was already in, big hair on the way out and architects across the land embraced and loved their Apple computers. Then, AutoCAD 13 (the unluckiest of numbers) was released and suddenly, in 1992 there was no more AutoCAD. I sadly never knew AutoCAD for the Mac in my professional life. But I’ve heard the tales, sung by Bards (some named Bard) across the land. And the tales are sweet, sung with love and heroism and everything you could want out of the marriage of two great products.…
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Guilty Thor
I have been feeling guilty for being too busy to write much these past few weeks (well, I’ve written hundreds of pages, just for something else). So, to tide ya’ over, enjoy a little trailer of a comic that was always one of my favorites, despite the peer pressure to fall for the X-men.
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Pushing Wireless Networks Out
If you need to push a wireless network into your image in Mac OS X, you can do so with the networksetup command. Networksetup has a few options that are specifically geared to working with wireless networks. In order to obtain a list of all of the networks that your system has used, you will use the networksetup command along with the -listpreferredwirelessnetworks option. The man page lists that you will follow this command with the hardwareport. The hardwareport is the name of the wireless network adapter, which can be seen in the System Preference pane. By default this is called AirPort, so the default command to see all wireless…
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Exchange 2010 Installation Error
When installing Microsoft’s Exchange 2010, the installation will force you to correct some errors with the system before it will complete. One of these will indicate the error that “The start mode for the Net. TCP Port Sharing service must be set to Automatic before Setup can continue”. When you encounter this error, there is a quick and easy powershell command that you will need to run. To proceed, click on the powershell icon in the system tray of your server. Then run the following command. Set-Service NetTcpPortSharing -StartupType Automatic Once run, the setup check will complete the indicated step as intended.
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Missing Option w/ OD Presets
When you are using a preset with Open Directory, it will copy a number of settings from a template, or preset, that you have created. But the preset will not keep the managed preferences. But you can copy the managed preferences you have defined. I know that this has been covered before by a few different people, but it has mostly been for Local MCX or other types of uses. But if you are using Open Directory and you want to create a template, here’s what I do. Once I’ve configured a group’s managed preferences as I want them, I will save the group in Workgroup Manager and then open…
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Observing Game Day
In Part I of our look at college football this season, we discussed how you never know what’s going to happen. Trying to figure out what a bunch of college kids are going to do is like trying to write regular expressions when your slashes are flipped the wrong way and you are making typos at the same time. And boy, Ole Miss sure made some serious fat fingers when they lost in an embarrassing debacle against a team in a lower division than them, Jacksonville State. And then there was Kansas, only managing to put up a field goal, which is 3 points, against North Dakota State in the…
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Defaults & symbolichotkeys in Mac OS X
Front Row is awesome. Hot keys are awesome. Typos are not. While zipping along, typing my fool heart out, I tend to fat finger about enough to drop my words per minute in half at times. Occasionally, my typos will land me in an annoying spot, with some application opening: often that application is Front Row. Which led me to unmapping the hot key. But then of course, since I reimage my machines a lot, I wanted to put that into my image… Hot keys are stored in com.apple.symbolichotkeys.plist, in a users ~/Library/Preferences. You could setup a system with the exact key mappings that you wish to have, use managed…
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Optical Sharing
I recently needed to temporarily enable optical disk sharing on a couple of machines at a number of different sites (don’t ask why, long story). There were enough to where I wanted to do it sending a script. But where is this stuff stored? Snapshot says: in com.apple.NetworkBrowser.plist. Which keys? diff says: EnableODiskBrowsing and ODSSupported, both boolean. Resulting command to enable sharing out my DVD drive: defaults write com.apple.NetworkBrowser EnableODiskBrowsing -bool true defaults write com.apple.NetworkBrowser ODSSupported -bool true Not the kind of thing I wanted to leave running, so to then disable it again: defaults write com.apple.NetworkBrowser EnableODiskBrowsing -bool NO defaults write com.apple.NetworkBrowser ODSSupported -bool NO
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Game Day is Finally Here!
For those of us who like football (and specifically college football), we’ve been waiting all year for this. Many of us have watched with great embarrassment as our teams collectively made some of the worse off-field blunders since the beginning of time (which is for me is since 1892 when the University of Georgia played their first football game). But now we’re ready to put all the locking of players in oubliettes, smacking around players, coaches suing coaches, coaches suing schools, court battles over whether or not coaches can sue schools, coaches driving hammered and both coaches and players beating people up behind us, pin our ears back and play…