This article takes a look at what i have been working on recently, integrating OSX clients and OSX server into an existing eDirectory network system.

Our main goals were as follows:

• Users able to log on with there std eDirectory Username and Password.
• Mount there osx home directory on the OSX server, meaning that they have roaming profiles.
• Finally also mounting there Std Novell H:\ Drive (Windows Home Drive) on a novell file share.
• The server running OSX 10.4 also allows us to perform management of the clients and provide other Services like Print management for the machines.
• Last but not least, easy roll-outs with Netboot imaging and the ability to assign preferences to the workstations such as one to sleep the machines at 5pm.

Read on for more details.
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Well it looks like my widgets have found there way into an june 2007 apc article, which is rather funky. You can check out the article with also mentions other great aussie widgets over at the apc website.

In other news there are some cool things on the widget front, coming to you soon!.

-Rich

Relevant section from the article follows after the break.
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I love error messages that mention how to fix an issue, however its not so great when what they suggest doesn’t actually solve the problem your having!

Over the last week or so i have had a hell of a time getting the new version of Adobe CS3 installed on my OS X 10.4.9 machine.

I originally had the Photoshop 10 beta installed, and although i uninstalled it before installing the Final version, as well as running the cs3clean script from Adobe i was unable to get the apps to run after installation.

The Installer would run and finish correctly. I would then go to run one of the newly installed apps and it would pop up a message saying “Licensing for this product has stopped working“.

Well i searched and searched on the internet and had no luck in finding how to fix this.

After a week of trying i eventually worked out a solution for this issue after installing and uninstalling CS3 maybe 25 times. (boy o boy is that installer slow.)

You need to delete the folder found here “/Library/Preferences/FLEXnet Publisher”.

After that all the apps should open correctly.
I cant believe how simple it was in the end, and i cant believe that Adobe couldn’t work this out.

Post your success and failure stores in the comments below!

-Richard

This is one utility that will make your whole archive experience more pleasant. With support for almost every archive format known to man, and the ability to rejoin split .rar files as well as natively unzip .Jar files its all the rage on the scene atm.
Best of all you can set it to by default show the files that its just unachieved in the finder, alleviating that whole, wheres that stinking file that i just unzipped.

So my advice, get this cool utility, it will make your day!

Home – The Unarchiver

iStumbler is like this totally cool wifi tool. It lets you see all those pesky invisible networks around you as well as find open access points for you to jump onto and get your groove on! If your ever out and about with your computer this one is for you!

The best bit, as with all of the Cool Apps featured on this blog, its free! So go and enjoy this find.

Find a sexy screenshot & link below:
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Chicken of the VNC is a VNC remote desktop viewer for the Mac, its free software which makes me happy and the icon is funky as to! If you have the need for a VNC Client this is the one to get these days. A VNC client allows you to display and interact with a remote computer screen. In other words, you can use Chicken of the VNC to interact with a remote computer as though it’s in front of you.
The best bit, as with all of the Cool Apps featured on this blog, its free and OSS! So go and enjoy this find.

CotVNC – Home

June 11th, 2007 – June 15th, 2007

So here is the big news for this Month, ive been awarded a scholarship by the AUC to attend the Apple 2007 WWDC in San Francisco. I cant really believe its happening as its seriously the coolest thing to happen to me for ages!

I will update everyone with more information once I actually calm myself down a little, but its enough to say that i’m excited!

Looks like ill be jetting off to California in a few months. So Happy!!!

(Well ok in reality those dates arnt free, there smack bang in the middle of my exam period, but im stoked and as if i care about exams being at the same time)

Burn is a really nice, simple CD / DVD burning application that allows you to do all sorts of burns, including: Data, Audio(CD), Video(VCD, SVCD, DVD, XviD) and finally Clone Disks and burn image files.

The best bit, as with all of the Cool Apps featured on this blog, its free and OSS! So go and enjoy this find.

Burn – Home

I find it useful to have a local apache server set up for all my web-dev work so that i can see changes to files in real time, which makes it easier to develop server side web apps.

Up till a month or so ago i had been editing the DocumentRoot line in my /etc/httpd/httpd.conf every time i wanted to work on another project. This has slowly been driving me crazy so i decided to use virtual hosts to do all the dirty work for me.

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Hop Theif….. Hop….. :)

Montastic at JamesX

It is good isn’t it, i just stumbled across Monastic while Dreamhost was down.

So the idea behind the Green Page, or in my case the Red Page is that it basically shows red if any of your current sites are unavailable. This allows you to see if any sites are down if you have a machine with that page open in a browser.

I guess its for people that don’t have email or something.

Enough to say that mine was Red for a few hours today. :)

-Rich

Well I have just poured myself a Black Russian to unwind some more, and thought I would take a moment to announce the fact that i have got a new theme running on my blog. If you can’t tell, well you must be stupid!

No! On a serious note, it blends in with the home and other pages much better than the old one ever did, not to mention the dated 2005 look that it also carried.

The current leader-board image is from a shot I took in Melbourne, a rather nice piece of graffiti i thought. Now heres a challenge, if you can find the piece and take a photo of yourself with it i will you $5!(Only the first person to do so i might add, lest i end up going broke from 100,000 hits for free and easy money.)

Yes, this is just the first of many competitions to appear on multimeter v4.00, so stay tuned for more coming to you soon, very very soon! Not to mention more in the way of Mac how-to content and more news to.

-Rich

The Last few days have seen me in Sydney hearing all the latest and greatest developer level features in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard from Apple. To get an idea of some of the consumer level features that will be coming with the next release have a look at Apple’s Leopard Sneak Peak.

Many many cool peaces of kit are to be made available in terms of developing new software for the platform, and i would go further except that i am under NDA in terms of all the pre-release stuff that i have seen so i cant really say much more than what is already available on the web.

While up here in Sydney i had heaps of fun seeing family and friends, and i also took the opportunity to meet some cool people (German Students @ 2am), see some cool stuff (Google AU Office, Leopard) and have a great night out in-between the 2 days of lectures.

I can possibly fill you in a little more if i see you in person, and until then have a good day.

-Rich

I found a really cool pdf reader for windows the other day.

it loads in about a second
and so does the IE plugin
and it looks exactly the same as adobe reader.
but its super fast

Foxit Software PDF Viewer

As a Bonus it is Free.

Chicken and egg debate unscrambled:
How interesting. its always puzzled me.

Just now Chris reminded me just how much this company and their website both suck. I was looking for a link to a copy of stuffit expander the only bulk package from the company for the mac platform. It ended up taking me a good 10mins looking for it until i finally found it on my hard-drive here at home.

So for future reference here is the link to the lite expander version:
Stuffit Expander 10

I will also mirror it here for future reference, just incase the link changes.

Richie

Before and after shots:

fairly cool.

Recently my Apple iBook G4’s CD Drive has been creating a sticky mess on the bottom of any CD that i care to insert into the drive. So last weekend, determined to get to the bottom if the problem proceeded to pull apart my ibook and to fix the CD-Rom Drive.

In order to do this one must remove a whole list of parts just to be able to get to the drive in order to remove it. In no particular order:

• Battery
• Keyboard and RAM Shield
• Airport Extreme Card
• Memory Card
• Bottom Case
• Bottom Shield
• DC-In Board
• Top case
• Top Shield

(Go here for more info on pulling apart all sorts of Apple gear. Service Manual’s )

The results of doing this are as shown in this photo.

Next came removing the CD-Rom drive from the Metal frame.

And finally opening up the drive to work out the problem and correct it if at all possible.

Turns out that it was a sticky felt pad (on the left in this photo) that had some-how managed to work itself loose from the bottom of the drive and invert itself, placing the sticky side towards and disk that was inserted.

After all that ithen had to re-asemble the drive and put the entire machine back together again! All up it took about 3 hours, however i have a working cd-drive again which is a good thing.

till next time,
Richie.

I came across this funny psp rip the other day up in the Queen Vic Markets here in Melbourne, Australia.

Its so funny, what these guys over in China / Taiwan try to do in-order to sell there products to consumers. However you would have to be rather stupid to buy one in the first-place, if you ask me.

If only you could get a real PSP for $12AU.

-Richie

Just now, while looking for the shortcut to force shutdown of my mac i stumbled across a couple of cool shortcuts for Apple’s Mac OS X.

firstly while your CMD( / apple / win) + Tab’bing through open applications if you hit “q” the currently selected application will be quit. this in the long run becomes a great way to close multiple applications in quick succession.

The other shortcut involves cycling though windows in an app with more than one window open. You can achieve this by pressing CMD( / apple / win) + the “`” (back tick / ~) key located just above the tab key.

Im putting these here so as to not forget them in the future, and it also means that the all you other users out there can also benefit from these shortcuts.

To shutdown gracefully the command is command-option-control-eject , however i still haven’t found the force shutdown command. If you know it, leave a comment.

Richie.

Now heres some good news for us mac people, Windows Media® Components for QuickTime is now available from Microsoft for free.

This plugin allows you to watch wmv files in Quicktime, which until now was only available by purchasing a plugin from a small company called flip4mac. Microsoft seem to have taken the plugin from flip4mac and are now distributing it for free from there website.

Good news for all i guess.

-Richie