.:justwerks software:.

Llllllllloyd IM'd me to ask for my top 3 tips of using OS X so I figured it would be a quick and short post. I have 3 sections instead: OS Tips, Apps I Use, Etc!. These are only valid for Leopard 10.5.2+.

.:OS Tips:.

Get a mouse with many buttons and set the non useful ones (e.g. beyond left/right/middle) to things like show desktop, show Spaces (a.k.a virtual desktops), show all windows of app. Very useful.

I don't use TimeMachine. I do regular backups with CarbonCopyCloner. This reminds me to donate some funds to the project...

I am not paranoid enough to turn on FileVault but I do use the screensaver password utility.

I have a UPS plugged into my Mac so it will gracefully shutdown when (not if) the power goes out.

Install Bonjour on Windows clients and you can do printer sharing with 2 clicks on the Mac.

.:Apps I Use:.

I use apps that have lots of goodness and/or Mac'ness baked in so ports of Windows apps and ugly Java apps really need to kick bottom for me to use them. Cool doesn't cut it for me.

Email/RSS feed management: GMail and Reader - I just find it easier to keep it all online (or in the cloud as the cool kids says these days) than sync with various products. Mail is nice but meh, Calendar is nice but meh, Address Book is really lacking.

Skype: IM & Voice calling

AdiumX: Instant messaging for everyone

VoodooPad Lite: a personal wiki, still kicking the tires on this one to see if I should buy it or not (i.e. do I use it regularly)

Firefox3 and Safari: some sites don't like one or the other. FF3 wins on plugins/extensibility and Safari wins on native OS integration.

VirtualBox: for free virtualization - it runs Ubuntu Server 8.04 lovely

AppFresh: keeps everything up to date or at least lets me know when I am lagging

OpenOffice 3 Beta: works, a bit buggy, definitely an early beta in the classical sense

.:Etc!:.

I will not use MobileMe/.Mac. It costs too much and doesn't offer a compelling feature set for me to use. I am savvy enough to emulate the functionality through other means or just don't need the tools they offer at that price point.

iPhoto: you will either love it or not. I love it but wish it had better metadata gathering functionality.

I really like our HP printer it works great with OS X.

Always, Always, Always buy AppleCare. Always.

I spent waaaay too much time figuring out this one and the web is full of half-answers to this problem.

To configure a Tomcat 5.5 server realm to work with Active Directory you can crib from the following setup.

Make the following changes to the %CATALINA_HOME%/conf/server.xml file.

<Realm className="org.apache.catalina.realm.JNDIRealm" debug="0"
connectionURL="ldap://<AD SERVER ONE HOST NAME:PORT>"
alternateURL="ldap://<AD SERVER TWO HOST NAME:PORT>"
connectionName="<"DOMAIN"\"USER NAME TO BIND TO AD">" <!-- e.g. internal\serviceacct -->
connectionPassword="<YOUR PASSWORD FOR THE ABOVE ACCOUNT>"
userBase="<DN TO YOUR USERS IN AD>" <!-- e.g. OU=Users, dc=foo, dc=baz -->
userSearch="sAMAccountName={0}"
userSubtree="true"
roleBase="<DN TO YOUR GROUPS IN AD>" <!-- e.g. OU=Groups, dc=foo, dc=baz -->
roleName="CN"
roleSearch="member={0}"
roleSubtree="true"
/>


Then make the required security changes to your web.xml file for your application and you will be able to authenticate against your AD installation.

We have been rolling out internal instant messaging at the Big Green N for a few months now in a grass roots/guerilla technique. It has been a rousing success.

One of the major risks of using the publicly available tools (Yahoo, GTalk, MSN) is that all your corporate data is flowing over the public internet. Unencrypted and ready to be analyzed by the purveyors of those networks. Any reasonably company should realize that putting corporate data over an insecure public network is akin to letting competitors have a peek at your future product strategy.
This is not sensible.
When an organization has awareness of all avenues of communication their employees can use they can relax knowing that collaboration is still occurring, but within the rules defined by the organization. No public virus laden spam-bots sending messages, annoying your employees, while not denying the edge that instant messaging and presence notification provides.

One of the initiatives I have taken upon myself while under the N has been to roll out secure internal instant messaging. The major requirements of the system was for it to be open (as in standards), extensible (as in the programmable sense), architecturally compliant (Java & Oracle), scalable and finally - easy to administrate and use (less end user training and better cross-company adoption).

I have been running Drupal since about 2003, thanks to Boris. (Take that either direction you want BMann... ;)) And now that is is starting to "get popular and take over the world" - in quotes because I am sure Boris has said this at some point in the last few months - I am getting slammed by spambots.

I have about 13000 spam posts on my personal blog (it Googles quite highly) and less on this site. I used to use the Spam module when I was running Drupal 4.x but when I moved to 5.x that module was not ready for prime time so I skipped the installation.

Whoops.

Now, I have remediated this fact by putting the more capable (hopefully) Akismet spam module in place. Sure, it required me to get a WordPress.com user account (took all of 30 seconds - good work Lloyd & Co.) to get an API key to use this module but when I had the thing up for a grand total of a minute and the spam blocked count was already at 1, I know I had a winner.

If you run Drupal - use a spam guard of some sort. Or enjoy pressing Delete 260 times, as I will when I finally get around to removing the backlog. I guess I should file a feature request "Ability to purge an entire queue"...