I love my iPod.. but Apple has this nasty habit of trying to tell me what I can and can not do. So I found a cool piece of software called “Yamipod” which lets me use my iPod the way it SHOULD be used from my Mac, my Linux boxes and my Windows boxes. What this means is no longer will I get the nasty-ass message about my Windows formatted iPod on the Mac telling me I need to reformat it to work on my play lists etc. I just run Yamipod, turn off the autorun on itunes and whammo.. I can play music, delete sounds, move songs from the iPod to and fro and generally use it the way I want to use it, not the way Apple thinks I should use it. And it’s a FREEBIE… but I did send a donation of a few Euros since it’s so damn useful to me. And Apple, kiss my ass about trying to force me to use iTunes just to manage my own music. And yes, for those who care, all of my music is either mine that I ripped or I bought from Apple’s own store. So who want to carrry on about “stealing companies blind”, kiss my ass too. If I sound bitter, I am after being screwed by the music industry for so long on the CDs.

Since I put about 500 gig of disk space online and since I finally got Tiger yakking to the Windows 2003 server, I have been putting all my digital images in one place. Fancy that, I’m getting organized But, at last count I have over 25 gig of pictures!! So just having them all sitting there is not going to work very well. Enter a Mac (and Windows) application called “Portfolio 7.0” from Extensis. This is a very cool piece of software for gathering up all these pictures and making nice groups and digging out the metadata and even adding custom fields. So far I have been impressed with it but the cost is a bit much at 200 bucks a copy. Ouch! But, I have yet to find anything else that works as well. I just used it to gather all of the past 6 months worth of baby pictures into a single place, add the date of the shoot, make a self running slideshow CDR and print out the contact sheet. All without having to pick up the directions once. I guess I should not complain too much about the cost.. but it still hurts. They have a product called the Photo Imaging Suite which looks nice but it’s *only* 499.95.. come on people, say the truth, it’s FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS!!! forget the lousy headgame of the 99 and 95s.

Now, in their favor, the added software does sound impressive. A app to scale up a print 1600 % and not lose quality? I knew I should have studied my math in school Photoshop plugins for frames and masking. And lets be honest, in PS, masks are your friends! So maybe Christmas will come early.

Yah know, this damn Mac is getting expensive with all the cool software I have to buy Still, I dont miss the crashes and AV/Spyware crap at all.

In my last post, I used Google to bring up the cached version of a web page that Apple inisted to be removed. In today’s Wall Street Journal (7-27-2005) there is a very good piece about lawyers using the internet “wayback machine” to find proof of “things” such as old websites, statements, articles etc. You do need to be a paying member or at least a temp user to read the piece. But, I find the WSJ to be worth the annual fee. So take a look at it and remember that anything you put on the web can come back to haunt you much later than you think. I keep trying to tell people this on the newsgroups and people just dont get it. I sat in a deposition with a legal case against a very large ISP and the legal beagles from the ISP’s team had pulled up my own site from several years ago and had questions about it. The graphics were not there but all the text was. Not a problem in my world but it was interesting to watch the lawyers wave it around like they had dug up some gold.. not this time people

Now, a disclaimer, I have not done this (yet). I do not have an Intel Dev box to try this on but Apple took it seriously enough to press the orginal author to take down his directions. But, through the magic of Google’s cache, you too can read the directions. In my case, I printed off the pages as a PDF for future reference. Shame on Apple professional or not with the take down order.

Apple got where they are today by hacking in a garage. Hackers will take Apple to the next level when they finalize the move to Intel chips and they damn well better get used to the idea. The genie is out of the bottle, Elvis has left the building and he isnt coming back any time soon. Apple would do better to enlist the aid the hacker/maker community and see what cool ideas could come of it. Go to MAKE magazine and put out a challange, smallest OSX portable clocked at 3Ghz (just an idea!), run your boat off an Intel based OSX running embedded controller and so on. Sounds alot like Linux doesnt it? I use Windows as you may have guessed reading the blog and I use Linux of several types. I now use OSX on a daily basis. They each have good points and bad points but one of the best points to have is an OPEN system where people can tweak to their hearts desire. Linux wins that race hands down and some amazing things have come from it. Although the self-piloting SUV running OSX as the brains definitely makes the grade.

With the migration to Intel chips, Apple is at the tipping point of it’s life. It will tip over one way and take over the world (Thanks Pinky and the Brain) and if Apple tips the other way, it will go the way of Kaypro, Osborne and many other “coulda-beens”. I understand that Apple is trying very hard to maintain control of the software/hardware to keep up the famous quality of Apple, but with that said, we are talking about Intel chips and there are billions of them waiting for a copy of OSX. There are many, many people who would sacrifice some stablity to have OSX running on their Dell, HP, Compaq, E-Machine(well, maybe not an E-Machine) and others. The chance to dump Windows and all the daily crap that goes with it. In many cases, if the video worked well enough, they had sound and the damn thing booted up each day with a bluescreen or lockup, they would be happy campers. These folks do not need nor do they want perfection, they just want the damn PC to work 95% of the time with the understanding that very little is perfect (my wife excepted ). I know my in-laws just want to use the word processor and get their email and yet, they are being force into becoming virus and spyware experts due to the constant barrage of crap hitting their Windows box. I personally dumped my Windows box for the Mac after spending HOURS and HOURS trying to stay on top of the AV, the spyware, the registry cleaning etc..etc..etc. I resented Apple in way for making me have to buy yet another box (the iMac) when I have perfectly good hardware already in the form of a Dell intel based system. I really did think about stuffing Darwin on it but I have already played the Linux game and I did not have time for a repeat with Darwin.

Maybe Apple will get the message but I dont have high hopes. I lived through the dark days with Apple when they killed off the clones and almost went under themselves. Closed systems never prosper and I pray they do not repeat history.

Some of you might have noticed that my entire site was offline for the better part of three days last week. And that some files are now missing The hosting service I use took a really, really bad power hit at a really, really bad time. I know this since I actually went down to the shop and inspected the site before I started using them and meet with the crew. OC Hosting is a great shop and the staff is helpful but the important part was that the building is on the same circuit as COX cable and the local firestation. Pretty safe yah? Well, it was until a contractor put their backhoe through the grid feed line. Twice..

The admins said they were down the first time for a few hours and it cost them a drive in one of the mega-arrays they use. Several hours later when the array was rebuilding, the contractor who had so much fun the first time, repeated the act of stupidity. This time the array did not bounce back. Something like 86 percent of the data was lost which included alot of my site. So after 3 days of no email and no site, I was told to start uploading any backups I had.. great.. just f**king great. Well, I did have backups for the site itself and I had most of the extra files. I did not have a backup of the forum database and some of the site I did not have documented. Things like the various paths I had set up for things like this blog. So it took a few days to work out most of the details and get things back. The blog should be working fine now including the archives. The funny thing is that 90% of my site I re-uploaded using my Mac and Fetch

Now.. on to Mac stuff The next project now that Apple got the wireless straighted out is to install and confgure Open Door Networks two applications, “Who’s There” and “DoorStop” which is a Mac firewall and firewall management tool. I was going to do this installation this weekend but with all the “fun” of this week, I decided to hold off for a few weeks and let this dust settle.

Good news on the wireless front!!! There is a new 12 meg patch available for the Airport card and after installing the new patch, keying in my 128 bit key… VOILA! Connection to the hacked Linksys just like everyone else in fact, this post comes to you over the 54Mbs link between my Linksys and iMac. About damn time… I am glad to see Apple is ontop of things in a timely manner. Now I need to reconfigure my DMZ to allow SMB traffic back to my server. It never ends.. and dont ask me about my Small Biz server from MS.. I like the idea but what a pain in the ass. It’s just different enough to give an admin serious heartburn. The bigger issue is that it’s too easier to screw it up and good documentation is non-existant. There is a cadre of hard core users of SBS with blogs and that has saved my butt a few times in the last two weeks.

I’m off to enjoy the fruits of my patching labors

I read a post where there is a new Apple announcement in the wind. Rumors have it that it could be a media center. Hot Damn!! I will be one of the first in line. Right now I have a tivo clone I built using XP and Snapstream software. While it works pretty well, it is running Windows and needs to be rebooted once a month or so. The most damning evidence of Windows inablity to run something as simple as a PVR is from Snapstream themselves where they tried to use dot net for the database and after a year, gave up and stripped it out of the current release of software. Between patch issues, system lockups, corruption and so on, Snapstream gave up and went with a more conventinal database. It has to make you wonder how is it that something like dot net which has had millions of dollars thrown at it can not run a PVR without puking on itself.

I just read another piece where people are so mad at their systems (PC) because of viruses, spyware, etc.. that they are tossing them into the rubbish bin and buying a new one at three hundred bucks or so. Now, this brings up a security problem, are these people taking the time to wipe the disk before they toss the PC? Probably not.. One person interviewed by the NY Times reporter was showing off her new Apple notebook which replaced the normal ugly ivory colored PC.

Yesterday I went back to Entourage instead of using Mail. I really need an intergrated mail application and Mail was not doing it for me. I’m not sure Entourage is it either but it has some features which work better for me. It’s certainly not as configuration friendly as it could be but it is working so I guess I cant complain. I use IMAP here in the office so I can switch between several mail clients and keep all my mail right where I left it without any issues so that helps alot with this “testing” of mail clients.

Well.. I had to take a breather and go get my copy of Harry Potter at midnight. It was alot of fun and to be honest, there were some not so balanced people wandering around there. But I digress…

So, I installed the newest developement kit (XCode) from Apple to get fun things like gcc so I can compile some non-apple approved software Like Ettercap, just as an example of course. So I get the SDK installed and I find a site called “Darwinports” which gives the tools to use the BSD port ability to install packages(ports)

I used the binary installation for Tiger but I did have to use this :

export PATH=$PATH:/opt/local/bin

This was all I need to configure for port to work as you can see here:

sudo port install ettercap-ng 0.7.1

And Port was off and running downloading the various requirements that ettercap needed.

MAC-G5:~ mikesweeney$ sudo port install ettercap-ng 0.7.1

—> Fetching libnet11
—> Attempting to fetch libnet-1.1.2.1.tar.gz from http://www.packetfactory.net/libnet/dist/

—> Verifying checksum(s) for libnet11

—> Extracting libnet11

—> Configuring libnet11
—> Building libnet11 with target all
—> Staging libnet11 into destroot
—> Packaging tgz archive for libnet11 1.1.2.1_0
—> Installing libnet11 1.1.2.1_0
—> Activating libnet11 1.1.2.1_0
—> Cleaning libnet11
—> Fetching libpcap
—> Attempting to fetch libpcap-0.8.3.tar.gz from http://www.tcpdump.org/release/

Good News!!! The newest patch for OSX is out, 10.4.2 and it really did help on response times using SMB. My wireless is still broken trying to talk to te Linksys that hope died. There was also a 40 meg “patch” for iPhoto which I have installed but not tried yet.

The reg tweak and GPO for domain controllers really worked well. The bit stayed flipped over night and I was able to access my share points without any issues. I might play with active directory just because I can right now. I just moved over 20 gig of photos to my new share points and another 200 gig of PDFs, applications and crap. Time for some clean up

My 500 sheets of microceramic photopaper arrived today. 500 sheets at 4 cents a sheet. Pretty damn cheap for those quick and dirty prints I always seem to need.

We plan to start a loft room addition in a few weeks.. and hopefully get it done before the new baby arrives. This will be number 3 for the girls and I’m soooo done with girls. I’m badly outnumbered now so I’ll quite while I’m not too far behind. With the loft comes a new home office in a cooler section of the house AND MORE BOOK SHELVES. A geek just can not have too many book shelves!

Damn, it actually works now!! Whats that? what works? Oh thats right, you were not here I FINALLY got the G5 to login to the new Windows 2003 SBS server and mount a share point. What a total pain in the ass in no small part to Microsoft being Microsoft.

I followed the directions for turning off the SMB encryption using a GPO and no joy. I reboot, no joy. I get no error on the Mac side, just a bad password or username. POS!!! So I’m screwing around tonight and I decide to work on it some more. Given that the remote Outlook doesnt want to play with the NAT on the firewall but thats a different story. I do some googling and I find it.. the one tip that MIGHT work..

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSetServicesLanManServer\Parameters

The value of RequireSecuritySignature needs to be changed from ‘1′ to ‘0′.

I did not even need to reboot!!! OMG.. I have a share mounted on the Mac from the new server. Notice I did not say anything about Active Directory Who needs it when all you want is a share point. So much for the vaunted Microsoft GPO way of handling security. Bunch of crap.. this is twice today that a system policy did not filter down like it should have.

Anyways… now it’s off to copycity to move files to my 500 gig share point

More! I found that my 2003 server had rewritten the reg hack this morning. A quick dig around shows that the directions I had tried in the very beginning were not for a BDC which my 2003 SBS server is. I needed to go to the Domain Controller Security Policy Editor and then go to: Security Settings, Local Policies, Security Options and set the “Microsoft network server: Digitally sign communications” to disabled. Now we should be golden, I’ll find out tomorrow AM