yamahito

Well, after talking about it to everyone I know for ages, I’ve finally gotten around to doing it.

I’ve got me a brand new macbook sitting on my desk at work; it has a windows partition on it and an evaluation copy of parallels installed on the Mac OS.

The ol’ green and blue fisher pricing looks even more wrong on a mac screen…

I’ll be having myself a little look at how well the thing integrates the two OS together - mainly in the context of the sort of windows installation that would be expected in the uni. That means I’ll get to see how well novell works inside windows inside mac… the mind boggles.

Suggestions Please!

I know I’ve been mouthing off about how good this thing looks for a while now to various people, and I thought this might be a good place to collect together all those questions and concerns that people posed me: is there anything that you guys out there want me to test or look into on this system over the next week or so?

The British Library have a very nice thing they’ve made with microsoft technology.

It’s called Turning the Pages. And it’s preetty. They have made an interactive ‘hands on’ touchy feely access to some of the world’s oldest, rarest, most beautiful books, from the original Alice by Charles Dodson to the Diamond Sutra, the world’s oldest printed book (well, scroll technically).

Of course if I were feeling vicious, I’d point out the strong design ethic that you’d be forgiven for mistaking for mac design. But I’m not, so I won’t

I think this (see the quote below) is a worrying trend: I suppose they’ve not blocked bittorrent traffic itself, but then again, they’d be hard pressed to.

I don’t use it much personally, but BitTorrent itself is not illegal. There’s lots of reasons you might want to use it. It’s alse pretty easy to track.

When I was working at a college in Oxford we used to have a fine passed on to the college each time one of our IP addresses was named in a cease and desist. We passed this fine - along with a hefty administration fee onto the infractor. The infractions didn’t cease, of course, but we didn’t have as many.

The point is that the real answer to this issue is user education, not technical restrictions that throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Dear All,

Following receipt of a number of copyright infringement notices, Information Services is taking steps to protect the University.

The principle source of these copyright infringements is inappropriate use of peer-to-peer file sharing, for example Bit Torrent.

A number of web sites have been identified which primarily provide access to a high proportion of copyrighted, pornographic or offensive material. Access to these sites, listed below, will be prohibited.

This policy is not aimed at restricting legitimate academic investigation. Should access be required please contact insrvAssist.

Sites with prohibited access:
http://www.torrentsearch.com/
http://isohunt.com/
http://torrentscan.com/
http://www.torrentspy.com/
http://torrent-finder.com/
http://thepiratebay.org/
http://www.torrentreactor.to/
http://www.torrentportal.com/
http://www.mininova.org/
http://skflan.nl.tp
http://www.onlytorrents.com/
http://www.mybittorrent.com/
http://www.torrentz.com/
http://www.torrentradar.org/
http://www.demonoid.com/
http://www.smaragdtorrent.org/
http://www.fulldls.com/
http://www.torrents.to/
http://www.torrentvalley.com/
http://www.torrentshub.com/
http://fenopy.com/
http://extratorrent.com/
http://btjunkie.org/
http://www.bittorrent.am/
http://www.astatorrents.com/
http://www.meganova.org/
http://www.bitdig.com/
http://torrentattack.org/

Your insrvAssist contact for this message is XXX XXXXX.

Thank you,
Security Team

At the day job I administer a classroom/newspaper newsroom with just over 30 macs. One of the recent complaints/problems I’ve had in there is with a network drive that disappears whilst students are working on a document - normally in QuarkXPress. We use a bespoke system for tracking work on stories and news pages that requires this drive to be present to work - it can even cause work to go missing a little more easily than it should.

I think the issue is that the drive is disconnected when machines go to sleep after 15 mins of inactivity. A student may work on a page for several hours, in which time they may be called for a news ‘conference’ with the sub-editors/lecturers, so this happens more often/with more justification than you might expect.

So here’s the challenge: what are the best ways to get a network drive to remain persistant, reconnecting when a machine restarts? A google brought up a few things I’d already been doing: dragging the drive to the user’s start up items to auto-mount at log in; a little applescript launcher for Quark that connected the drive before launching the program, that sort of thing.

Well, I don’t think I’ve cracked it quite yet, but here’s a start: I came across this thread, describing the behaviour I wanted as a ‘nuisance’. Turns out it was all about the screensaver on OS X. Apples do this rather nice thing with a folder of your pics where they zoom in on the pictures (I like it - really brings them to life) - they’ve got lots of default versions of their own, but you can also set it to a folder of your choice. If that folder happens to have an alias to a server, when the screensaver activates, it will remount that drive for you (assuming you have credentials in the keychain).

One hacked-together images folder later, and I think I have something working. I’m hoping that by setting a screensaver time that’s smaller than the sleep time on the macs it will remount the drive in the time between waking up and turning the screensaver off. Watch this space…