Microsoft is clearly trying to market their more human side. In Office 2010 The Movie, Microsoft puts videos of the program managers, engineering team leads and even the director of program management for office up in Silverlight movies that are meant to display the actual people whose hard work went into creating the upcoming Office upgrade. They show some features, discuss the development process and even show you some garden gnomes. It’s like they’re trying to say that this is clearly a different Microsoft. And for some time, Microsoft has been allowing for their employees to blog publicly. The Microsoft Office 2010 team is no different. As for the technical…
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What if Rick Rolled Nirvana?
Well, then you might never have to give up your teen spirit…
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Suspicious About Package Contents?
It’s fairly easy to take an application installer in Mac OS X and repackage it. In the process it’s also straight-forward to include other, potentially unintended information in the package. This is why a number of vendors will sign their packages and then post the signatures for systems administrators to be able to verify the signatures. In Mac OS X you can also view the contents of a package by control-clicking on it and choosing Show Contents in order to be able to manually review the contents. But could it be even easier? Apparently so: Mothers Ruin Software has written a QuickLook plug-in for Packages, called aptly enough, Suspicious Package.…
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WWDC Videos
If you weren’t able to make it out to San Francisco for WWDC then you can still check out the sessions; and for a fraction of what attending the event likely would have cost. The sessions are all recorded, and available for purchase on the Apple Developer Connection website.
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The iTunes Alarm Clock
I know, weak post Charles… Whatever, I think it’s cool so get over yourself – there’s still a little command line fu so it’s ok (right?)… Now on to: How to use iTunes as an alarm clock. I have at times been stuck in hotel rooms and chosen to use iTunes as my alarm clock. Yes, my phones (why does everyone in IT have more than one smartphone these days) can easily act as alarm clocks. For that matter, so can my travel alarm clock, the one they put in the room and the wake-up call. But some of us aren’t morning people and need our fault tolerance. Also, some…
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Using the arp Command
You can delete an IP address from the arp table using the arp command along with the -d option followed by an address. For example, to delete IP 10.10.10.1: arp -d 10.10.10.1 If you’re not sure which IP address you’re looking for then you can look at the arp table to check the IP against the MAC address by using the -a option along with arp. For example: arp -a To delete all of the entries in an arp table (they do regenerate after all) you can use the -d option in conjunction with the -a option: arp -d -a If you then want to manually add an entry into…
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TextEdit for the Web
These days it seems like there’s a low-cost or free alternative to everything up on the web/in the clouds. This could be something like gMail for email, OpenDNS for DNS or even one of the many sites that provides users with file storage. Now enter j.otdown.com. Using this service you can type text to your hearts content. When you stop typing a url will be generated and automatically saved. You can then use that URL to revisit your document at a later time. You can also use the Share button to then email the link to others. For example, this document was created and shared by yours truly. It’s got…
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Engineers without Borders
Engineers without Borders is a non profit with over 300 chapters in the US. Each chapter is chartered with designing, implementing, and maintaining replicable and sustainable projects for target communities, without imposing our own culture on them. Great stuff. Honduras – Short Trip Summary from Israel Lopez on Vimeo.
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Creating Accounts in OS X Server with serversetup
I usually create users by dropping a couple of files or by using a dscl script. But in Mac OS X Server it’s even easier than that. You can use the serversetup command, by default located in /System/Library/ServerSetup to do so with the -createUserWithID option. Following the -createUserWithID option, use the long name, then the short name, then the password and finally the UID of the intended user (that’s position 1 = long name, position 2= short name, position 3 = password and position 4 = UID). Therefore, if /System/Library/ServerSetup is your working directory then the following command can be used to create a user with a full name of Charles,…
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Google Wave Video
Google Wave is Google’s Open Source online collaboration solution – html5 is pretty bad-daddy…: