A week after the iPhone is launched in the states, there is a rumour of an ‘inferior’ clone on its way from china
No, not really, it’s a spoof article. But it raises a couple of interesting objections.
Being involved in a VOIP company, of course, the ones that strike home for me are the lack of voip integration for the phone’s 802.11x connection and the tight control of 3rd party software cripple the phone’s potential somewhat.
I still want one, though.
Just to prove Microsoft can still do some things better.
Does anyone know if there’s any reason why font rendering would be different on different platforms?
–Edit–
Codinghorror seems to be slashdotted or otherwise down. Here’s a graphic from the original post which shows what we’re talking about: the top line is safari, the bottom line is IE with ClearType.
I was recently asked to disable internet access on a suite of macs for an exam. Easier said than done: I don’t have any router/firewall control for the network they’re on, and they would still need network printing access.
There were a few things I could have done: blocking port 80 and 443 on the machines’ local firewalls, or changing the proxy settings to point the web browsers to some bogus proxy. Problem is that the machines will need internet again within minutes of the end of the exam, and I’m just not confident enough that changing such settings won’t bugger something up.
So I went down a different route: this is a script for running at the start of an exam. It only runs on a management server with Remote Desktop, so no worries about buggering up the client machines. It monitors the current application of each machine, and if someone runs firefox or safari, it will log their machine name, the application, and the timestamp, then bring up an observation window on their computer.
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I’m not very good at it: perhaps I should try one or both of these?
Contrary to popular opinion, there are some things about apple that really grind my gears. This one’s a good example:
I left a macbook backing up over firewire last night. I need to use that image to prepare nine or ten other macbooks for a course next week. So I kind of needed it done this morning when I got in (late, again - what’s wrong with me?).
You’ve probably guessed that it had failed. ‘Disk is Full’.
Well, OK, the mac server I use is old and recycled, and the second disk could be bigger in there. Plus I was surprised to find out that the image would be approximately 14 Gigs, compressed. Fair enough, since the machine is used for a lot of multimedia work, but the disk only had 9GB left.
Emptying the trash left it with 22GB of free space.
I mean, c’mon. The whole point of putting something in the trash is that you don’t think it’s worth as much as the space it’s taking up. Keeping it around whilst you’re not using that space makes sense, but as soon as an application needs that hard disk space, it should get it at the expense of whatever is in the trash. Running out of disk space when there’s 13 Gigabytes of data in there, that’s stupid.
End of Rant.
I love that the technical requirements for something that looks like WordPerfect on Dos are ‘10.4 or later’.
I’d love to know whether this made a real difference to those creative types who have to do some serious writing, writing you gotta get involved with. I like that idea.
Well, no luck on the apple forums, so I’ve resorted to working around the problem I talked about yesterday.
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As much as I like it, I’ve had a problem with Apple Remote Desktop (ARD) for a while now. I administer a fairly large number of macs using it, and since I’ve started doing so, I’ve changed their DNS records. Before, their DNS names were more or less random. Now, they match the ID number stuck to the front of each machine, and can be used to rename the macs after imaging.
Only I can’t make ARD pick up the new DNS addresses.
The first time I asked for advice about it, someone suggested that it was the DNS cache on the server ARD was running for that was keeping the old information, but flushing that cache didn’t do me any good. I even tried deleting the computers from the list, and re-adding them by IP address, but something somewhere is still remembering the old DNS names. I can edit the DNS name for each computer manually, but that makes it a bit meaningless.
The DNS name information must be cached somewhere. It doesn’t seem to be on the client computers, as this problem has persisted through numerous reformats, reimaging and nv/pr-ram resets. It doesn’t seem to be on the server OS’ DNS cache. I’m reluctant to uninstall/reinstall ARD, as there’s a lot of configuration data and management tasks saved on there that I don’t want to lose: but I suspect the information is cached somehow within ARD itself.
The ARD manual says that the DNS name field is set using reverse-dns lookups when the machine is added. But this seems not to be wholly true. Reverse-dns lookups all seem to work correctly, from the web and elsewhere. Perhaps the reverse-dns happens when a machine is originally added, but after that point, it seems to remember details even if the computer they’re associated with is deleted from ARD’s management list.
I’ve thought of a nasty hacky way of doing it, but I’m going to give the apple discussion forums a bit of a chance before I try tackling it. Anyway, if anyone has any suggestions, please be my guest…
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?
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…