Random Consulting

Indulging your ego

noreply@blogger.com (Random Consulting) — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 02:30:00 +0000

I'm a font snob.

Not in any self-conscious, discerning way - I don't curl a derisive lip at Arial (Helvetica is another issue), but I really enjoy looking at a piece of good design and figuring out why what font was used for what, and what makes a good font. Maybe a better moniker would be "Font Aficionado".

I used to work for a big design/branding agency as their in-house Mac guy, and looking back on that incarnation of myself, I'm keenly aware of what a knuckle-dragging primate I was, stomping around in an Australopithecan way amidst a sea of fabulously well groomed Homo Sapiens. Like any clever primate, I kept my eyes open, and learned a good deal about what good design is, and how it is far more influential and crucial than you might imagine at a first blush.

What I'm working my way up to in a roundabout way is my new-found love affair with fontifier.com. It's a site where you download a template, write (or draw) in a sample of your handwriting, scan it, post it to their magic font-creation machine, and end up with a font comprised of your own illegible scrawl. In my case, it's an experience analogous to scratching the outline of a bison on a cave wall, but it's still an awful lot of fun.

Tragically, my first attempt - Random Serif - is unimaginably awful. I seem to have hands comprised exclusively of thumbs, no, toes, so you can imagine the horror of a font designed by a man with absolutely no artistic bone in his body. Hopefully my next font - Random Sans - will be better...

...and putting them back again

noreply@blogger.com (Random Consulting) — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 02:00:00 +0000

Odd one today: what do you do when your account becomes disconnected from its password?

In this case, you utilize the single user mode, and do the exact opposite of the last blog entry. A client had set up a new machine with a freshly-restored Time Machine backup, and even though he had done everything right, somewhere down the line just lost the ability to log in. Even resetting the password from the install disc failed to do anything useful. As time was more crucial than getting granular with diagnostics, the simple and efficient fix was to blow out the account, then recreate it using the existing user folder.

As I think I've mentioned before, the dscl command is a wonderful thing; now that Netinfo is a rapidly receding memory, we can do a lot more with account creation and deletion than we could even a couple of years ago. Still, I digress. The first step was to use dscl to create a general purpose admin account to access the GUI, and from there it was fairly trivial to delete the old account, tweak the name of the user folder, then create a new account to match the tweaked name. Five minutes and one logout later, all was well.

I have to admit that in small but significant ways, living in the future is pretty cool. Doing this kind of tinkering back when OS X launched would have taken untold hours, and almost certainly resulted in the widespread destruction of data and livelihoods..

Removing Users

noreply@blogger.com (Random Consulting) — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 02:50:00 +0000

A quickie, but a goodie.

I just gifted my last-but-one generation iMac to my cousin (or nephew. It's confusing), and needed to set him up with iWork before wiping the system down for him to set up. Here's how to do this:

1) Once Leopard is installed, set up a temporary admin account so you can configure the system. I call mine "test". It's catchy.

2) Once you're finished configuring, restart the computer in single user mode (hold down Command-S).

3) Mount the filesystem by typing "/mount -uw /"

4) Delete the User folder with "rm -R /Users/test/"

5) Clean out the Library with "rm -R /Library/Preferences/"

6) Remove all traces of the user from the Directory Service with "rm /var/db/dslocal/nodes/Default/users/test.plist"

7) Finish up by resetting the setup assistant by putting in "rm /var/db/.AppleSetupDone"

Took a few minutes to figure out the syntax for step 6, but otherwise, worked nicely!

Farewell, PPC

noreply@blogger.com (Random Consulting) — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 21:38:00 +0000

Writing as Santa Barbara's Foremost ACN Blogger (a title hard-fought for and created exclusively by Random Consulting LLC), it often falls to me to take up the reins as a creator of witty, mac-based bon mots. As WWDC '09 kicked off today, I'm therefore going to reference a common figure of speech, roll that in with a bad joke, and say that today Apple let the cat out of the bag about Intel-only support in Snow Leopard.

You get it? Snow Leopard? Cat out of the... oh, forget it.

It's been a while coming. Apple has been flirting with Intel support for as long time - back in the early nineties the somewhat smaller and more rabid Mac community had heard the drums of Cupertino and were muttering darkly about this ridiculous "Star Trek" project rumor - which turned out to be completely brilliant and also completely stupid at the same time.

The idea, if I recall, was that Novell wanted Apple to port System 7 to the PC, allowing Apple/Novell to go toe to toe with Windows in the marketplace, which we all thought was a fabulous idea at the time, but where it would have undoubtedly been utterly slaughtered and ground beneath Microsoft's bejewelled sandals. It was a bad idea, business-wise, but an extraordinary accomplishment; about a dozen engineers from Apple and Novell managed to port the Finder, Quicktime, and a bunch of other stuff from one platform to another in a few, scant weeks. Then they were all fired, or sent off to work on the Uzbekistani language pack for System 8.

Back when OS X was still NextStep with a fancy name, you could run it on a PC. I did. It was awful, and the other three or four people who had thought it was a neat idea must have agreed, because it never shipped in that form. Still, the idea that Apple should probably have an operating system that could run on the least-expensive commodity processor had powerful traction, and so from the inception of OS X, they kept the codebase in parity for both Intel and PowerPC.

Really, I don't think there's a lot to be too sad about. Sure, there are a lot of legacy machines out there that are running Leopard quite happily, but the day when a dual G5 was the bleeding edge of performance has long since waned - I run a mailserver on a first generation Intel Mac Mini that handily beats the living daylights out of my dual G5 tower in all kinds of performance tests. And there will most likely be robust support for PPC in Leopard for some time to come; Apple has traditionally been pretty good about that - I run into a lot of installs of 10.4.11 from way back in mid-2007 that are still being supported by the mothership.

Shout Out

noreply@blogger.com (Random Consulting) — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 15:24:00 +0000

Had a delightful evening last night drinking Guinness with Preston Holmes, a man who knows a thing or two about a thing or three. Check out his site for additional enlightenment: http://ptone.com/dablog/

Mail a link to a file on OS X

noreply@blogger.com (Random Consulting) — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 18:05:00 +0000

I had an odd query from a client a couple of days ago - he couldn't find a way to email a link to a file on his server in Leopard client, so I shouldered him aside (as is my wont), confident that there was some easy, simple solution in Mail to enable this quite basic solution.

Well, there was and then again, there wasn't. Mail will allow you to send a web link with no problem, and will also allow you to send links to files on a mounted share, but only if you're happy to actually type in the link by hand, which can be... cumbersome.

The answer was to throw together this quick n'dirty little script, turn on the Script Menu in the AppleScript Utility application, then pop the finished product into ~/Library/Scripts. Thus:

-- Activate the Finder and choose a file to link to.

tell application "Finder"
get selection
set PathToFile to (choose file with prompt "Choose file to link") as string

-- Use text item delimiters to strip out ":" and the word "Contents" from the beginning of the string reported above.

set AppleScript's text item delimiters to "Contents"
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to ":"

-- Set the newly-pruned text to a new variable "first_path"

set first_path to every text item in PathToFile

-- Use text item delimiters to put "/" in as the default separator between text items.

set AppleScript's text item delimiters to "/"

-- Take the resulting string and set it to a new variable "second_path" that can be passed down the line.

set second_path to every item in first_path as string

-- Put the address of your server as a prefix to "second_path", then set the result to a new variable "third_path"

set third_path to "afp://domainnamegoeshere.com/" & second_path as string

Use text item delimiters to knock out spaces and replace them with "%20", then save the result as "final_path"

set AppleScript's text item delimiters to " "
set fourth_path to every text item in third_path
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to "%20"
set final_path to every item in fourth_path as string

end tell

-- tell Mail to create a new message, inserting "final_path" as a link.

tell application "Mail"
activate
make new outgoing message with properties {visible:true, content:final_path}
end tell

There are a few things wrong with that script - it's a trifle too cumbersome, you have to hard-code your server's name (although it wouldn't be too hard to add a line or two to allow you to enter or choose that), and it strips out the word "Contents" - necessary to make the script play nice with the result it returns from getting your share, but kind of lousy if you have a folder called "Contents" that you want to link from.

All that aside, its a solution to an annoying problem, and shows how flexible and powerful AppleScript can be...

DD

noreply@blogger.com (Random Consulting) — Tue, 26 May 2009 05:14:00 +0000

Random Tip: DD

This is a rather handy little lesson on some of the neater things you can do with the command line, a dead hard drive, and an inordinate amount of time. Please note: this tip involves opening up the Terminal utility and typing a lot of commands very carefully. Check your syntax. Random Consulting LLC is in no way responsible if your computer explodes. Actually, those who know me swear I’m not responsible, period.

The underpinnings of OS X are murky, ancient UNIX foundations, and dipping into it is often an experience akin to fishing off the edge of some crumbling, dilapidated pier. Sure, you know full well what's down there, and how to bring it all up, but then you stumble across a Coelacanth or two and wonder where the hell that came from, and how you're supposed to cook the darn thing. Butter? Lemon juice? Hot sauce? Absinthe? Is it even legal? dd is probably going to be a prehistoric catch of the day to a few of you, so it's worth spending a minute or two talking about what it is and what it does.

Simply, it's a neat little program that copies standard input to standard output, and it's generally used for copying and synchronizing disks on a byte-by-byte level. Even "dead" disks - if you have the time and the inclination, it can often pull a lot of fairly useful stuff off a drive you may have given up for dead.

Here's how: First, you have to find the drive. I like to keep a couple of assorted enclosures around for putting drives into, usually a nice firewire one for ATA and SCSI, and a bizarre, no-name brand USB2 one for SATA drives. Once you have the drive snugly in its enclosure, hook it up to your mac, and fire up the Terminal. Type in "diskutil list" for a list of all available disks and their attendant partitions. What you're looking for is the identifier for your dead disk - it should be pretty straightforward; look for the disk that isn't one of your currently mounted disks, then identify the partition on the disk that contains the files you want to recover. Hint: it's probably the biggest one. It should follow the syntax "disk(disk number)s(partition number)".

For our example, we're going to use the second partition on the second disk, or "disk1s2". Next, you need another drive to copy everything on to. Note, it can be your main hard drive if you have enough space - we're going to create a disk image of the dead hard drive, so we don't necessarily require a whole other partition. Make sure you have enough space, though - dd will copy the whole drive, even unused space, so if you're trying to revive a 40GB hard drive, you'll need 40GB of free space to put it on to.

Open a new terminal window. I like to put the recovered stuff on my desktop, so the actual syntax (note: type it all as one very, very long string) I'd use for our disk1s2 drive would be:

dd bs=512 if=/dev/rdisk1s2 of=/Users/dave/Desktop/recovereddrive.dmg conv=noerror,sync

Here's what all that means:
dd - the command. Duh!
bs=512 - set the block size for the transfer to chunks of 512 bytes.
if=/dev/rdisk1s2 - look for the device/partition in the invisible /dev directory.
of=/Users/dave/Desktop/recoverddrive.dmg - copy everything to this new location.
conv=noerror - don't stop on any nasty bad sectors or other stumbling blocks.
sync - fill those missing spots with null data.

Hit return. And wait. A long time. dd is great for retrieving data, but it often takes days to trawl through a large drive, byte by byte. The longest I've ever had it run was a hair under three weeks on a dead 160GB drive, and I've heard of it taking up to a month for more complicated jobs. Moral of the story? OS X has a lot of very powerful UNIX tools bolted right into the OS that you'll probably never hear of, and almost certainly never need. Oh, and please, for the sake of all that's good and true, have a backup strategy.

What's another week?

noreply@blogger.com (Random Consulting) — Mon, 11 May 2009 19:11:00 +0000

Well, after years of waiting, and assorted wrangling and shenaniganry, Apple was set to open its newest store in California last weekend. Unfortunately, as this is Santa Barbara ("The Fire Capitol Of Southern California"), plans to have 928 State Street thronged with joyful hordes failed to come to aught, as the whole area was under an evacuation warning.

Now, there is definitely an argument to say that they should have gone ahead anyway, secure in the knowledge that if a sheet of flame were to explode down the main drag, immolating all and sundry, then at least we would have all died happy. Wait, thats not an argument at all. It does kind of sound like a Smiths song, though.

Anyway, the new store opening is now officially back in limbo. When will we see inside the former Pier 1 store? I think I can speak for all of us when I say that nobody knows for sure, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say it'll be Saturday, May 16th at exactly 10am.

This has to be some kind of record

noreply@blogger.com (Random Consulting) — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 05:20:00 +0000

Apparently, one of my servers has been running for more than eight years between restarts:

This Blog Is The Red-Headed Stepchild Of Blogs

noreply@blogger.com (Random Consulting) — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 20:31:00 +0000

Look, mea culpa and all that.

I've been far, far too busy (and far, far too self-important) to write anything for a while, so I've decided to just throw something up here quickly to sum up what I've been doing most recently.

Leopard and Tiger (10.5 vs 10.4) do things differently, particularly security-wise. I've been tinkering around with a little script to open an SSH session between a client and server, then tunnel AFP through it. Thus, no need to open port 548 to the outside world (unspeakably bad idea), or mess around with tiresome VPN shenanigans.

If you understand that last paragraph, then you'll agree that it's pretty neat.

If you don't understand that, then clearly you're a person who actually does something useful and valuable with their life, and probably doesn't spend a significant chunk of your time looking at a command line and occasionally uttering salty oaths. I salute you.

July?

noreply@blogger.com (Random Consulting) — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 19:43:00 +0000

Wow. I've been busy, but not posting since July is inexcusable. Thankfully, there's been little to report, save the regular cycle of saving the day through herculean acts of genius. And modesty.

So, hey, what about those new Macbooks?

Right-o.

A brief note on names

noreply@blogger.com (Random Consulting) — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 18:40:00 +0000

The web page you are currently enjoying is - you may have noted - http://www.randomconsult.com

A trifle confusing, as the company name is actually Random Consulting. What gives?

I would have snagged randomconsulting.com, but that domain is - unfortunately - owned by one Joaquin Rubio down in Argentina. My attempts to buy it from him have been thwarted by our mutual lack of ability to speak each other's language, although I think he'd be amenable to learning something neutral in order to further communication. Dutch, perhaps.

So Joaquin - if you're out there - Oproepen me. Ik wil uw overtollig domein kopen. Spreek.

Fire!

noreply@blogger.com (Random Consulting) — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 02:16:00 +0000

Barring a few brief outages, business is "as usual" even as the Gap Inferno decimates a decent sized chunk of the region.

Please, I beg you all, try to avoid being horrifically immolated until *after* you settle your bills.

I thank you.

Spin the wheel...

noreply@blogger.com (Random Consulting) — Wed, 14 May 2008 23:34:00 +0000

...of professional certification!

Apple finally nailed down their specification for the Leopard certification process, and so I've been out of town for a couple of weeks of intensive operating system kung-fu.

Random Consulting is now fully Leopard certified, and as such is your one-stop shop for installation and troubleshooting of Boot Camp, networking, account management and configuration, as well as web/mail services, all manner of OS X Server work, print, inter-platform connectivity problems and so on. They even changed the catchy acronyms we consultants get to tag onto our business cards, so that we all have to go and get new ones printed. Joy.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to apply ice to my sore brain, swollen as it is with new-found dark knowledge.

Buh-Bye Netinfo

noreply@blogger.com (Random Consulting) — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 22:10:00 +0000

Netinfo was always a kind of anachronism - a directory database stored on a collection of flat files works well enough, but surely we can do better than that in this new millenium of disposable paper clothing, genetically modified vegetables of every hue, and the perennial (and personal favortite) flying car. Hey, I saw the Jetsons. I know how it's going to be.

Well Apple agrees. Over the last few releases of OS X, they've been quietly mothballing Netinfo, and replacing it with Open Directory. All well and good, but with the inevitable removal of the old way of doing things, there are a few, well, snags. It used to be possible to look in Netinfo Manager and get all kinds of wonderful information on users, groups, permissions et al, and tinker around with them in a quick, simple, and efficient way. Of course, most of the time it was equally easy to do something terrible and accidentally break things in a quick, simple and efficient way; Netinfo tinkering sometimes necessitated the actual blood sacrifice of a chicken (or goat with the server product) in order to ensure the desired results.

Now, however, we have to do it all through the command line, which is all well and good, as it's sufficiently intimidating to give one pause before hacking away merrily. Firing up the Terminal is a wonderful way of doing very granular adjustment of your system, but it does have the side effect of making you feel like you're doing Something Terribly Important. Let's start small. To pull up a list of all the users on your machine, type in:

dscl . list /users

What you're doing here is telling the command (dscl) to look at the local domain (.) and list (list) the users (/users - self explanatory really).

I'd recommend reading the man page for dscl if you're likely to want to do any serious work configuring your local users and their permissions. It's also something worth knowing if you work with Server, although for most jobs the regular GUI tools offer a good fit for adjustments.

Using Gmail to soothe your IMAP troubles

noreply@blogger.com (Random Consulting) — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 18:26:00 +0000

I figured this out for the iPhone, but the same basic idea works just fine on a regular mail client as well. This is, admittedly, pretty convoluted, but I've been using it for a while, and it seems to work pretty well:

a) Sign up for a gmail account for each iPhone user who uses email. Go to http://www.gmail.com, hit "Sign up for Gmail", fill out all the assorted answers.
b) On each iPhone, set up smtp.gmail.com as the Outgoing mailserver address. You'll also have to plug in "myusername@gmail.com" (where "myusername" is, well, your gmail user name), and your password in the User Name and Password fields.
c) Click the "Advanced" button in the Mail preferences on each iPhone, scroll down to "Outgoing Settings", and toggle "Use SSL" to On, and make sure that "Authentication" is set to "Password".
d) Go to your Gmail account on gmail.com, click Settings, then Accounts, then add your existing Cox email account to the "Send as" option. It will send a confirmation email to your regular, Cox email account. Click the link in the email you receive to confirm the request. Then log out of gmail, log back in again, go back to Settings, Accounts, and set the Cox.com email account as the default.

That's it. Like I said, convoluted, but now emails on the iPhone will be sent through the gmail smtp server, yet look like they're coming from your Cox account. Better yet, this seems to work whether you're connected to Cox via the Airport network, or connected via Edge when you're on the road.

Not Terribly Exciting

noreply@blogger.com (Random Consulting) — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 22:39:00 +0000

...but some things now work that didn't before. I've added some slightly more helpful contact information, as well as a spectacularly brief bio page. Please feel free to peruse these incremental improvements and ponder them as you wind your way around the scenic byways of the internet. Thankyou.

This Space Left Intentionally Blank

noreply@blogger.com (Random Consulting) — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 02:15:00 +0000

Hey, I'm fooling around with the site. Hopefully I won't break it too badly...

Of Cholera And Leprosy

noreply@blogger.com (Random Consulting) — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 22:03:00 +0000

I'm usually hesitant to write about specific problems that I encounter (and hopefully fix) for clients, but this one has been eating away at me, and now that I've solved the puzzle, I feel like committing the process to the printed page. Well, not exactly printed, as these are the internets, but you get the idea.

I have a client with three retail stores in three cities, who wanted to talk to each other via video iChat. All are using the same ISP, the same iMac, and the same OS. Two of the stores can see each other just fine, one cannot.

All three are using AIM accounts in iChat, so my first thought was that it might be a specific problem with the hardware at the one store. I've seen a lot of occasions where a flaky router or modem can mess up high-bandwidth services like chat, and this was kind of borne out when looking at the cable modem in the store, which was a sort of huge, valve-laden, 1950's Soviet looking job. Also, it seemed prone to randomly losing its connection and resetting itself. Pretty good idea to change that out, I thought, so after making a pretty thorough backup of all the relevant settings, I had Cox come in and replace it with something new and shiny, and all was well.

For about a week.

Then we had a brownout, and the problem came back. The modem tested good, so the next logical step was to look at the router. I like to use a MacBook Pro as a test machine for this kind of thing; I have it locked down nice and clean with no bizarre and funky hacks, so that I have something known-good I can plug in and test with. Lo and behold, even with the router out of the equation, video Chat didn't work. Curiously, it made a connection, then immediately died. "Sounds like packet-shaping," thought I. "I'll call Cox."

The folks at Cox were - and I hate to say this about any IT phone support because it sets unrealistic expectations - polite, well-informed, and helpful. I had them check out the line, and all seemed well. After a modem reset, I was suddenly able to do video chat to other machines running .Mac accounts, but not to AIM accounts. Aha!

Na-ha.

My idea that the problem was .Mac specific foundered on the point that the other two stores - using AIM, were able to video chat without any trouble at all. Bother. I started using some tools to look into what was happening when making these connections, then I stumbled onto something very interesting; IP traffic outbound just... disappeared. Not all the time, mind, but about half the time pings just timed out, and traceroute just kind of sat there accusingly, conspicuously not tracing anything at all. Back on the phone, the friendly folks at Cox affected disbelief, then grudging acceptance after I sent them logs, and vowed to "look into it."

"Looking into" turned out to be sending a tech around to poke the modem with a stick, check that the connection was live, then shrug his shoulders and leave. Tres helpful. After a couple of weeks of wheedling, wrangling, and fighting, I got Cox to reset the routing table for that gateway, and went back to step one. This time, using AIM accounts foundered, but .Mac worked great guns. Gotta love that Session Initialization Protocol, and its ability to play nice with NAT and UPnP.

The thing is, that this is one of those problems where you need to deal with one obfuscation before targeting another; while I was bang on track initially with the AIM/.Mac problem, it was all going to be pretty moot unless Cox rearranged their plumbing to illuminate the problem and thus accommodate the fix. Usually, problems are pretty clear cut, but this was a case of not being able to diagnose Cholera until I'd got the Leprosy under control. Next time I'm holding out for a simple case of Scrofula. Or a disconnected patch cable.

What Did I Tell You?

noreply@blogger.com (Random Consulting) — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 20:54:00 +0000

Meh. Only twenty-nine dollars

You Can Never Be Too Thin Or Too Pretty

noreply@blogger.com (Random Consulting) — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 20:45:00 +0000

Quite the day.

Up at 4am to join Steve Sorbo (of seattlemacsos.com) in the line for the keynote. It's a fun thing to do, if you don't mind the cold, the boredom, and the standing around for four or five hours, and you get to see such public figures as Fake Steve Jobs, and the triumphant, high-fivin', Segway-drivin' Real Steve Wozniak.

The conference and expo are in full swing, and all are abuzz about the MacBook Air - is it the new iPhone, or the new Cube? Do people really want a subnotebook? If so, who are those people?

Personally, I think it's a fine machine. The lack of ports can be fixed with a good USB hub and a USB-to-Ethernet dongle (yours at Fry's for about ten bucks, but probably coming soon from Apple at forty or so), and it really is terribly, terribly, bite-the-back-of-your-hand pretty.

The paid upgrade for the iPod touch smacks of some variety of chicanery, but the AppleTV and movie rentals stuff is welcome if not entirely unexpected. All in all a good show, mostly a well-timed retool or retune of the existing lineup, with a few little extras thrown in.

Update: Don't Drink The Kool-aid

noreply@blogger.com (Random Consulting) — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 04:38:00 +0000

It's bad.

Leopard Server is very, very pretty, and works very, very well. Until it decides not to. And then you're in trouble.

Having hosted the site myself via the wonder that is 10.5 Server, I'm now running back to this older, yet far more reliable iteration with my tail planted quite firmly between my legs. I do, as a matter of fact, know a thing or two about OS X (possibly even a thing or *three* if we're going to get crazy about it), and it pains me to report that this thing is a mess.

Services decide to work, or not, based purely on passing whims, or dependent on our temporal relation to the solstice. Windows sharing, for example, is something I've quite deliberately turned off, yet keeps turning itself back on at the first opportunity. The wiki/blog function is prone to becoming quite badly broken for what amounts to really no good reason. Faced with this, the choice between sticking things out and undergoing the daily equivalent of slamming my head in the car door, or just hanging the whole thing up and, hey, having, y'know, an actual website seemed pretty straightforward.

Anyway, I'm back. For now.

Drinking the Kool-Aid

noreply@blogger.com (Random Consulting) — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 18:50:00 +0000

Well, chances are this is probably the last entry on the new-and-improved Random Consulting blog; as of sometime next week, I'll be putting my money where my mouth is (questionable image at best), and firing up Leopard Server's blog server instead.

How, the enthralled host of readers of this blog, who number literally in the ones, is this possible? Surely your struggles with Verizon are the stuff from which legends are wrought? One word, mes amis: Cox Business Cable.

For a positiviely reasonable chunk of money, they're setting me up with eight static IP's, and a sweet 7-up, 768-down connection; more than enough for the minor web shenanigans I dabble in.

Now, all I have to do is try and figure out how to de-genericize the 10.5 blog and make it more random-specific. Fun!

Leopard hacks

noreply@blogger.com (Random Consulting) — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 20:40:00 +0000

Well, as of today, Leopard is "in the wild" (oh, where do I find these hilarious - nay, hysterical puns?), and every news outfit, opinion, or general geek site is duly listing off the talking points that Apple's been shoving through Sales Web for the last couple of weeks.

So far, it's all excitement about interface, and I'm going to add my own little undocumented contribution to the pile. Back in earlier versions of the OS, you could change the default login screen background by ducking into /System/Library/Desktop Pictures, and substituting your own graphic for Aqua.jpg. Not so in Leopard; now you have to drill into /System/Library/CoreServices, and locate DefaultDesktop.jpg. Rename your new background to match the default, log out, and enjoy.

There you go.

So this one time? At Channel Camp...?

noreply@blogger.com (Random Consulting) — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 17:50:00 +0000

I'm hurting.

ACNs, VARs and other catchily acronymed Apple geeks may seem like your average, unassuming nerds, but years of sitting in the low-market share, high pressure world of fixing and supporting the Mac - mostly in the face of overwhelming pressure from MCSEs et al - have patently left them with the intestinal fortitude and livers of broken-nosed navvies.

Last night we all trouped over to the Apple campus and basically picked the company store clean of every t-shirt, pen, cap, iPod accessory; sort of a biblical plague of very brand-conscious locusts. Having decimated the joint, the good folks at the ACN program fed us, supplied us with ample quantities of booze, and were more than helpful in dispersal of travel arrangements, advice, and probably bail money.

I'll be writing up some Leopard-heavy stuff in the next week or so; the whole thing was essentially a very well-presented Leopard cram-fest, and while I'm keen to blab, I'm going to have to wait until the thing is actually released to the adoring public and thus maintain the sanctity of my hellacious NDA.

Now, I'm going to go detox, and take a nap.