Macs and Grant Site Just Don't Click
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Scientists, scholars and others planning to use their Macintosh computers to submit grant proposals to the federal government in the months ahead should be prepared for a rocky, or at least error-message-littered, road ahead.
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Microsoft&#39;s Virtual PC software has been lauded by critics as a convenient way for Mac users to run Windows applications on their Macs, but what if you need to do the opposite?
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On Alexander Netkachev's blog today, there's a walk-through of a light and easy method for getting PHP and Apache up and running. It makes use of the Installer Technical Preview utility to make live simpler.    I created the installer, which primary goal is to provide the developer with command-line tools for basic Apache/PHP/MySQL management tasks.    This a preview version of AMP installer and configurator. Although, it is very far from being a real time-proven and tested installation method, with your help and effort we can make it better.    There's a link for the download and a brief How-To on using the package to get things up and running quickly. There's also two things on the To-Do list for upcoming versions - installers for various other databases and support for automatic installation of modern PHP applications (like WordPress, phpbb, etc).
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Ziff Davis - Some users have said that after updating to Mac OS X "Panther" 10.3.6, their computers no longer recognize external Firewire 400 hard drives. Others report no such problems with the update, which includes networking optimizations and fixes for video and font glitches.
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A suite of diskless Folding At Home utilities. http://reilly.homeip.net/folding   Download from http://reilly.homeip.net/folding/  Moved source and bug / feature tracking to SourceForge. Fixed a couple of issues in the SMP hang check - now supports multiple SMP instances (if you have more than 4 processors) and still does the kill if the Autosend text happens after the hang. Also added a check that the download from Stanford didn't error and if it did print troubleshooting suggestions and stop there.
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In early October Apple released a small series of patches for Mac OS X version 10.2 and later. Most of the fixes in this group blocked possible denial-of-service problems that are, to date, theoretical.
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Surfers trying to view President Bush's official campaign website are finding it a tad difficult to get in. No explanation has been given, even though the site works just fine in the United States.
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Half of the web just disappeared Another issue has cropped up with Apple's newly released beta of Safari for Windows.â¦
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A Hawaiian company claims to have developed a $50 software emulator that allows a Windows PC to run Mac OS X. A legal expert says it's likely Apple will have some objections. By Leander Kahney.
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Current versions of FileMaker aren't compatible with the new Mac OS, even though Apple owns the company.
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Office for Mac 2008 incorrectly assigns ownership of some files, Microsoft has confirmed, creating a potential security problem for businesses installing the new application suite.Joel Bruner, a Chicago-based Mac consultant, was the first to notice the ownership snafu. "[Microsoft] moved to Apple's Package Maker (.pkg) installer files, good news for the enterprise, [but] unfortunately, they've created all the packages to install most all of the files with the owner set to 502."In a shop where employees run with limited privileges -- a practice very common in an enterprise -- and IT is the only user with full administrative rights, Office 2008's ownership assignment means that a user who wasn't supposed to have complete control over those files actually does. In other words, whomever is assigned user ID 502 has full read/write access to Office's files."So let's say, Mr. IT installs this on a user's machine where the first user is the admin[istrator] (501) and the standard user is Joe User (502)," said Bruner in a post to his blog on Monday. "Well, when after all's installed, it will give Joe User (502) ownership of these folders and their installed contents:/Library/Automator/ (if it doesn't exist already) /Library/Fonts/Microsoft /Library/Application Support/Microsoft /Applications/Microsoft Office 2008"The screw-up could present a corporate security problem, at least internally, said Bruner, if that Mac's second, standard user -- user 502 -- decides to make changes to the folders and files by, say, deleting some or moving others.A Microsoft developer left a comment at Bruner's blog confirming that the company knows about the problem. "The MacBU (Mac Business Unit) is aware of this issue," said Erik Schwiebert, a software design lead in the group.Microsoft, however, did not immediately respond to queries about how it intends to correct the problem and what users can do in the meantime.Other commenters at Bruner's blog hesitated to blame only Microsoft, however. "The truth is that this is a long-standing flaw in Apple's Installer," argued someone identified as Not Required. "Maybe Microsoft should have known better, but maybe Apple should also have improved their installer years ago. Apple clearly hasn't cared enough about smaller developers to make a fix, so hopefully Microsoft has a high enough profile that something finally gets done."In a follow-up post also on Monday, Bruner added that all the Office for Mac 2008 files owned by user 502 are also erroneously set as executable. "Now tell me does '/Microsoft Office 2008/Read Me.html' need to be executable for you to look at it?" asked Bruner. "Tick, tick, tick, *ding*! No. It does not."
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Setting up a file server doesn't need to be complicated. read more
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Norbet Mocsnik, having just set it up himself, is sharing the steps needed to get DokuWiki set up and working with a simple authentication system.   I promised to investigate the steps needed to set up DokuWiki with the simplest authentication scheme for a friend and I thought others might benefit from it too, so here it is.   There's about fifteen steps in all, including the download/install of the package and creating the basic functionality (like a simple Auth schema - he gives an example). Create the superuser and set up the desired restrictions and you're home free. If you want more information on authentication in DokuWiki, check out this page on the DokuWiki's wiki.
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Last night I changed the way Scripting News is rendered in HTML, and while it works in Firefox on the Mac (the browser that I use) it is broken in a bunch of others. This afternoon I'm going to try to get it working everywhere. The advice from readers, some of it quite confusing, starts here. I've got MSIE 6 running in Parallels, so as I go I'm testing there and in Firefox/Mac. Here are the changes I'm making, in order... 1. Apparently the &lt;a name="xxx"> element is causing a problem, the purpose of it is to enable permalinks to work within the archive pages, Colin suggests making this the name of the &lt;div>, so that's what I did. (This got today's elements expanding and collapsing in IE, but not older days. Very weird.) 2. In the stylesheet, added width:400px; to both .show and .hide and padding-left:15px; to .show. (That successfully widened the body of each post in MSIE.) 3. I eliminated the table I was using to indent the body text. (Now the older days expand and collapse. Hurrah!) 4. Added another 5 pixels of padding for a little bit more indenting.  5. At this point it appears to work in both MSIE 6 and Firefox/Mac. I will now download Opera and try it there. (Downloaded and installed, but I can't get it to display any web pages including scripting.com. Very very strange. If you have Opera installed, could you try clicking on the pluses and minuses on scripting.com and let me know if it works. Apparently it does.)
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Evert Pot has posted about a library he's creating to integrate WebDAV support with PHP and make things simpler for those needing to access the shares.   I intend to make this library as easy as possible to use, without making it a black-box-like system. Focus will not be on everything WebDAV could possibly provide, but instead on the features that are actually supported by the operating systems.   His goal is to make it as simple as making a 'File' and 'Directory' class to interface with the remote system and has two things he's deliberating on as far as features to include in the library - support for the custom properties WebDAV allows and the ability to lock files and directories.   If you'd like to check out the current progress of the library, check out its page on the Google Code site (as well as this discussion group he's set up).
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Here's an interesting Howto on connecting FlickrFan to the Mac desktop. I love this stuff.  Here's a movie that demonstrates this coolest of hacks.
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I've not made much of a secret of the fact that I've been working on a new product, and am getting close to offering it as a public pre-alpha thing for Mac users only.  It's fairly Flickr-centric, sucking photos down from Flickr in a variety of ways and pushing up photos in others. Like Radio 8 and Google Reader, it has the ability to maintain an output feed of stuff you want to pass on to friends and associates. As I was developing this I wished that Flickr had the ability to store simple text files, because I needed a place to put an RSS 2.0 feed with enclosures on behalf of each user. Of course I used Amazon S3, but I had to implement my own lightweight identity system so that Juan couldn't accidentally or intentionally replace Alice's feed. If only every user had a place where they could store stuff that's net accessible so that once and for all we could stop inventing new places. I was inspired to write about this when I read an Uncov review of Pownce where they reminded me that they were reselling S3 storage at a big markup. What if the users had their own S3 storage that they paid for themselves?  Then it occurred to me to ask if people thought S3 could be an end-user thing. I'd like to find out, so if some non-technical users who have Amazon accounts would like to try setting up an S3 account, I'd be interested in hearing how it goes. Here's an idea of how you get started. 1. You must already have an Amazon account. Nothing special about it, if you buy shirts or books or stereo equipment from Amazon, you use the same account for S3 storage. Already that's pretty easy, millions of people have Amazon accounts, right? 2. Visit this page on Amazon, ignore all the stuff about objects and buckets. In the right margin is a big button that says "Sign up for this web service." Click the button. A very familiar page appears, asking you to sign into your Amazon account as if you were going to buy something (you are!). 3. From there, I'm not sure what you see, because I have already enabled my account. But the end result of signing up is that you get two strings with weird names: Your Access Key ID and Your Secret Access Key. Any software that would save a document in S3-space on your behalf would need these two strange strings. In return each document would have a URL just like any other document on the web. Nothing strange about that.  4. You could also use the space to store stuff using an FTP-like app that runs in Firefox called S3 Organizer. It's about as hard to use as the Mac Finder or the Windows Explorer, i.e. it's no challenge for a moderately geeky user. The cool thing about it is that you're able to share anything you upload into S3 space with anyone else. You can even use BitTorrent to access any file to save you bandwidth bills and distribute the load round the net. It's all very easy to do, imho. As a developer who has to pay for his users' storage needs I would very much like to see users learn how to use S3 to store their stuff, so I can focus on writing software and fixing bugs instead of paying to store your stuff.