My latest post on Huffington Post is “From Dungeon Master to Scrum Master: 15 Software Development Lessons from Dungeons and Dragons” and is a bit of a revamp of my D&D article from here, but geared towards SCRUM mastering and managing Software Development teams. You may find it fun and kitschy or you may find it dumb. I’m kinda’ ok with both (I’m learning that I can’t make all the people happy all the time). A sampling of that article: I started playing Dungeons and Dragons in about the 5th or 6th grade. I didn’t get good at it for a while, but once I did, I didn’t play much longer…
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Is Imaging Dead In OS X?
I love answering a question with a question. Is asr still in OS X? Is NetInstall still in OS X Server? Can OS X still NetBoot? Does System Image Utility still work? The answer to all of these is yes. Therefore, the answer to “Is imaging dead” is clearly no. Is it on its way out, maybe. Debatable. Is it changing? Of course. When does Apple not evolve? What have we seen recently? Well, the rhetoric would point to the fact that imaging is dying. That seems clear. And this is slowly coming out of people at Apple. The word imaging is becoming a bad thing. But, as a customer…
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What Changed On My Mac?
According to Wikipedia, fsevents is an API from Apple that allows applications to register for notifications of changes to a given directory tree. This means that when something changes, an application (or daemon/agent) can see the change and take action or track what happened. For Linux, there’s a similar tool in iNotify. This time of the year, a lot of imaging and packaging is going on at schools and companies around the world. A lot of people are also moving various settings out of images and into either post-flight packages, automations or managed preferences of some sort. In OS X, it’s easy to make a change on a computer and…
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I
Google recently decided that it was time to force some other company to buy cloudy dispositioned upstarts, Dropbox and Box.net. Google also decided that Office365 represented Microsoft being a little too brazen in their attempts to counteract the inroads that Google has made into Microsoft territory. Therefor, Google thumped their chest and gave away 5GB of storage in Google Drive. Google then released a tool that synchronizes data stored on a Google Drive to Macs and Windows systems. Installing Google Drive is pretty easy. Just browse to Google Docs and Google will tell you that there’s this weird new Google Drive thing you should check out. Here, click on Download…
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Full Screen Terminal in Lion
Command-Option-F will send terminal into full screen in OS X Lion (or most any other app for that matter). You can also use the double-arrow button in the top right corner of an application’s title bar to make it full screen. Command-Option-F (or switching to another app or Window that isn’t full screen) will end your full screen session. For any app, you can have one window that is full screen and others that aren’t full screen. Mission Control then shows all the full screen apps at the top of the screen and those that aren’t full screen towards the bottom. I thought I really needed multiple Terminal windows, but…
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DeployStudio: Rename a Volume with Host Name
DeployStudio has the ability to rename volumes as part of a standard workflow. These are typically set to something like “Macintosh HD” (the default) or “Computer Lab” or something like that. But what if you wanted to name the volume something unique to a given computer, which makes it easier to keep track with what you are doing across a number of servers? You could create a workflow for each computer and change the hard drive name for each to something unique; but that would be tedious and pollute your list of workflows, likely resulting in accidentally running the wrong workflow at times. Instead, you could look at a really…
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Using Podcast Composer in Podcast Producer 2
In Snow Leopard Server, Apple has introduced a whole new way to make Podcast workflows. It’s now simple to use, but still with amazing and powerful new automations that give Podcast Producer admins the ability to configure a host of new options quickly and easily. To get started, first setup Podcast Producer. Then, fire up Podcast Composer and go through 7 quick steps. First, provide a default name, author name and title for your workflow, then click on step 2. In step two you’re going to configure the source of the video and audio. For each of the three options, Single Source, Dual Source and Montage, you’ll have an i…
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Podcast Producer Workflow ACLs
When using Podcast Producer, the Podcast Capture client application will ask each user for a username and password. Armed with the authentication credentials. Once a podcast has been captured then the user will be provided with a list of workflows that they have access to. But where are these configured? They can be added and removed from Server Admin. And each can have a user, users, a group or groups that have access to use them. By limiting access to each workflow, based on the Workflow ACL, you can then limit who can access to different blogs, who can use various automations and even who can publish to an iTunes…
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Podcast Producer Command Line
At the end of the day, Podcast Producer is a fairly straight forward solution. You have a nice little GUI application that users can use to publish Audio, Video, Screencasts or files to an rss feed. Using that rss feed you can then integrate that data with a number of other solutions, including those I’ve discussed over the last few days. You can also use Podcast Producer to remotely fire up bound cameras and begin Podcast Producer workflows, which means you don’t even need to be at a conference, in a shareholders meeting or in a classroom to capture video from cameras. But the real power and flexibility to Podcast…
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DeployStudio: Creating a New Master Image
Once you have been using DeployStudio for a time, you’ll invariably end up creating a new master image. This is a hot topic this summer, given that Apple will be releasing Mac OS X 10.6 later this year and many people integrating DeployStudio want to make sure that they can manage the solution themselves during the subsequent updates. Provided you have been leveraging all of the best in package based imaging this might be a relatively small file, or if you are using a monolithic image for distribution it might be a fairly large file. Either way, DeployStudio makes it fairly straight forward to create a new master image. To…