I recently got my hands on one of those Google ChromeBooks (Cr-48). Interesting to have an operating system that is just a web browser. But, as anyone likely reading this article already knows, the graphical interface is the web browser and the operating system is still Linux. But what version? Well, let’s go on a journey together. First, you need ChromeOS. If you’ve got a ChromeBook this is a pretty easy thing to get. If not, check http://getchrome.eu/download.php for a USB or optical download that can be run live (or even in a virtual machine). Or, if you know that you’re going to be using a virtual machine, consider a pre-built…
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Removing DigiNotar Trust in OS X
DigiNotar got hacked awhile back. And more and more issues seem to continue to surface as a result (most notably spoofing Google). Read this article for more info on it, but I’m not gonna’ rehash it all right now. Instead, let’s correct it. To do so, we’ll use the security command. Then we’ll use the delete-certificate option along with the -Z operator, which allows inputing (or outputting when installing certificates) a SHA1 has of a certificate. Root Certificates (those that appear under the System Roots section of the Keychain Access application) are all located in the /System/Library/Keychains/SystemRootCertificates.keychain keychain and so we’ll specify that as well: sudo security delete-certificate -Z C060ED44CBD881BD0EF86C0BA287DDCF8167478C…
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iCloud, Lion and iOS5
As most people who are going to read anything I write will already know, Apple released their new cloud service today. The Apple pages are already up, with a splash page on the main site pointing to a dedicated iCloud page. Apple has also anticipated some of the questions that most of us using MobileMe were going to ask in a short Kbase article re: the transition from MobileMe to iCloud: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4597 Additionally, an email went out to MobileMe users today that read: We’d like to share some exciting news with you about iCloud — Apple’s upcoming cloud service, which stores your content and wirelessly pushes it to your devices.…
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Hosting Web Sites in Amazon Web Services
Amazon S3 now allows administrators to host simple web sites. Previously, you could host images, videos and other files using S3 buckets, but now you can host full sites. To do so you will need only configure a webroot and some error documents. To get started: Log into the Amazon S3 Management Console Right-click on an Amazon S3 bucket Open the Properties panel Configure your webroot Click on the Website tab Configure error documents in the Website tab Click Save Pretty easy, right? But what if you need to configure the php.ini file or add MIME types, etc. Notice that at the start of this I said “simple.” I’m sure more…
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Amazon S3 File Size Limits
Back in November of 2008 I did an article awhile back on a way to use Amazon’s S3 to hook into Final Cut Server. At the time though, S3 had a pretty big limitation in that it wasn’t really suitable for backing up large video files as an archive device for Final Cut Server. But today, Amazon announced that S3 now supports files of up to 5 terabytes using multipart upload (previously the maximum file size was 5 gigabytes). This finally means that files do not have to be broken up at the file system layer in order to back up to Amazon’s cloud. However, this does not mean that…
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Programmatically Interacting with Google Apps
There are a number of ways that you can interact with Google Apps: there is the website, the new Google Cloud Connect and an API that allows you to integrate Google Apps with your own solutions. The API is available for python and java and can take some time to get used to, even though Google has done a good job with making it pretty straight forward (comparably). Therefore, there are a couple of tools that ease the learning curve a bit. GoogleCL on Ubuntu The first, and easiest is GoogleCL. GoogleCL is a command line version of Google Apps that will allow you to interact with YouTube, Picasa, Blogger…
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Using the CrashPlan Pro REST API
CrashPlan Pro Server is a pretty cool tool with a lot of great features that can be used to back up client computers. There are a lot of things that CrashPlan Pro is good at out of the box, but there are also a lot of other things that CrashPlan Pro wasn’t intended for that it could be good at, given a little additional flexibility. The REST API that CrashPlan Pro uses provides a little flexibility and as with most APIs I would expect it to provide even more as time goes on. I often hear people run away screaming when REST comes up, thinking they’re going to have to…
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Gmail + IE6
Got an email today informing me that Gmail will be dropping support for Internet Explorer 6. Nice of them to let us know rather than randomly killing support for it ’cause it’s old as crap like most vendors do. A win for Google there I’d say. Point of this article being, if you use IE 6 just stop. And if you’re an enterprise admin who doesn’t think you can pull off a massive IE 6 upgrade, this is Google’s way of having an intervention for ya’… MSI installer + a GPO = happier users anyway (be that MSI a newer IE 6, Chrome, Firefox or Safari). PS – Over 5%…