yamahito

A Call for help:

It’s possible to add users from directory structure 1 (in this case an openLDAP implementation that’s sharing our University’s Novell eDirectory) into an OpenDirectory group (directory structure 2). I can do this on server 10.4 easily using the Workgroup Manager GUI. But doing it for hundreds of students every year is… well, I don’t have the time to do that, either in terms of deadlines or workload, quite frankly.

The information contains users grouped both by groups and containers, but it’s an old gripe that Workgroup Manager won’t show you anything but a flat list of users. There’s a group tab there, but it doesn’t seem to work for me. Also, I don’t have direct access to edit the data or create groups on 1, and the users are already correctly organised by container.

So, can anyone out there tell me if it’s possible? I don’t mind getting my hands dirty on the command line, and if Leopard is needed I had to order it this week anyway…

Yes, you heard me right: forget the MacBookAir, the product that a lot of us have been hoping and dreaming for does exist. But it’s not made by Apple.

The ModBook, made by Axiotron, is a very nicely modded MacBook with integrated Wacom technology to make what looks like a fantastic product. As well as top quality glass and aluminium skinning, it boasts built-in GPS and more levels of pressure sensitivity than standard tablet PCs (the full 512), and still weighs the same as the macbook it was hacked from.
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If you’re administering a network of mac computers, you can’t underestimate the power of altering the default template.

The idea is simple: you can make sure that when new accounts are created, they already have the preferences set up exactly the way you need them. There are several scenarios where this technique can be used or where it presents an advantage:

Network Users - rather than time and hard drive consuming creation of users, customising the default profile will allow Mac OS X to create new accounts as soon as users are authenticated.

fast user churn - I administer some macbooks for a short citizen media course: the users share the macs extensively for a few months, at the end of which the machines need to be quickly prepared for new users. All I have to do is apply any patches, delete the old users, and make new user accounts. The new user accounts are already set-up with all the user preferences, guide documents and iTunes libraries ready to go.

the self-cleaning oven - Great for store demonstration machines or Kiosk-mode. You have computers that you think people are going to mess up. That’s fine, but you need a way to make sure the user account re-sets itself. Setting up a log-out script to delete the user’s files and recreate from the default template is a simple and powerful way of doing this.
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Hiding users from the log-in window used to be a bit of a pain pre-Tiger. But that’s thankfully no longer the case.

In the bad old days, you’d have to change a user’s UID, which is fiddly process involving NetInfo manager and chmod. When Tiger came along it seemed to become even fiddlier; you also had to set the default shell to /dev/null, which isn’t really useful for hidden admin accounts that you actually want to use locally.

However, there’s a dead easy way to do it just by editing a Preference file:
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Sometimes the bredth and scope of the stupidity of the oversights of intelligent people can be staggering. I’m sure many of my friends will agree.

Today is the turn of Apple Software Update (ASU), a windows program that runs once a week to check for updates for quicktime, iTunes, Safari and the like.

As some of you will know, we suffer from an ongoing network issue here at work: every now and then we suffer a small amount of packet corruption. It doesn’t affect browsing the web, or email, or instant messenging much. But it frequently breaks large downloads over http: .iso images and large zipped or compressed files (such as update executables) tend to get corrupted and unopenable.

It’s a lucky thing, then, that ASU has a built-in checker to make sure that the files it downloads are the same files that they meant to download, right?

Wrong. ASU finds corrupted files fine, but then proceeds to deal with them in the worst possible way: after telling you that the file is corrupt (or more accurately, that it has an ‘invalid signature’), it gives you a chance to install the updates again. What it doesn’t do is re-download the update files; someone thought it would be a good idea to cache those. Admirable in other circumstances, all it means is that ASU continually fails verification tests on these files, and the updates are never installed. At least until newer versions are released or the downloaded files are flushed/deleted (not found out where they are yet).

Let me rephrase that: If something goes wrong when it’s downloading files, My update programs inhibits me installing updates.

You’ll probably need a browser with .PNG support to see this (I’m talking about IE 7 for you microsofties)

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Particularly for those of us running parallels across multiple monitors, here is a method of creating a floating Windows SystemTray using Geoshell:

For those of you not running parallels across multiple monitors and who are wondering what the problem is, parallels doesn’t reallly ‘do’ multiple monitors properly. It just resized the windows desktop across all monitors. I’m using parallels 2.5ish, but they still haven’t implemented proper multi-monitor support in 3.0 - it does make me wonder how well they’ll cope with Spaces when 10.5 is finally released. Anyway, it means that the Task bar is spread across both monitors which is a) ugly as sin and b) a right pain, hiding the system tray if, like me, your monitors are on different horizontal baselines.

I’m assuming you can edit the registry. If you don’t know how to do that, I wouldn’t recommend any of this. I am not responsible for you screwing up your computer.
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For those not in the know, I got some new macs in at work, including a 20″ iMac for my desk.

I’m enjoying having a play and trying to get things up and running. It’s actually nice to be a user and a newcomer again.

Lotsawater is a pretty screensaver. And this guy has done other pretty things with it:

No, I’m not talking about going linux or BSD. I’m talking about the latest version of Parallels.

Yes, I know everyone is getting sick of me talking about my imminent move over to Mac OS X. But I think people may not realise how blurry the lines between my two primary OS have become. Check out this video; the last sentence is why I’m ‘making the change’:

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I’m not saying I entirely agree with it, but Robert Scoble wrote an interesting post this weekend about what’s wrong with Microsoft.

I’ve been talking for about nine months about moving to apple as my main desktop OS. It’s also the main direction my career seems to be moving towards. A lot of people tend to think this means that I’m pro-apple and anti-microsoft. Funny, because most of my mac-cy friends have always thought I was pro-microsoft and anti-apple.

The truth is, both companies are doing things wrong. Scoble’s post talks about microsoft’s oversights, but apple surely has some, too. They’re wrong about their attitude to security updates, as SilentBob will tell you. I also think that in the past they’ve been less than adequately open with prospective developers - that almost put them under in the past, and it looks like they’re doing the same thing with the iPhone.

At the end of the day I’m choosing mac because it offers me the most flexibility. I can open a bash terminal on a mac. Applescript, to be frank, has been a revelation to me. These days, I can even change hard drives or add OEM memory/graphics cards. But the deal clincher? Parallels. I can run windows on a mac, but not vice versa.

I’ll be ordering my mac pro in the next two weeks.