I’m not really a Microsoft fan, nor do I consider myself a Microsoft hater. I generally like Linux and free Open Source software, and as a network and software engineer type I really like the power and flexibility of Unix-like operating systems. I made the switch to Mac because I wanted to see what all the fuss was about, and if I would benefit from a “Unix like system that just works.” Though there were a few bumps in the road, I’m pretty happy overall. Sometime maybe I’ll post about my Mac experience and thoughts in a broader sense.

This post is about Entourage. When I started this fall, my employer was using Zimbra for our mail and calendar platform. A few weeks ago we migrated to Microsoft Exchange. As a Mac user, I’d gotten very happy with Mail.app and iCal; suddenly I was in an environment where my iCal couldn’t sync to the server like it did previously with Exchange. The only real solution was to either use the web-based client OWA (Outlook Web Access) or to switch to Entourage. I decided to give Entourage a shot.

Entourage is like Microsoft’s Outlook for Mac. It has most of the same features, but a very different interface.

One of the most annoying things I immediately noticed was the layout of the message list pane. By default there’s a three column view, folders (etc), message list, and message preview pane. I’m ok with this in general, but the message list was not very configurable. Sure you could change how messages were sorted, but the messages were ALWAYS displayed using two text rows, even “conversation” headers with only tiny text like an arrow and the work “mail” used two lines, wasting tons of space and limiting the info and number of messages I could see at any one time. I could change that, but I switched to a two column view with message list above the preview pane. This works pretty well as the messages in the list now only use one line and the columns displayed are fully configurable.

This has seriously been my biggest beef so far, though there are others. But I’m really tired… I’ll come back to discuss the other issues. Bottom line though, since I need some of the Exchange functionality, I don’t have a lot of choices, but it’s not too bad once you get past some quirks.

I recently had an odd situation come up, though it’s not incredibly hard to imagine. I needed to create a staging web server, identical to production, but it should live on a different hostname (eg, staging.sherman.bz, instead of www.sherman.bz). The content should not accessible to the public, nor to search engines. This isn’t really so much a privacy or security issue as it is a convenience and customer service issue. If search engines somehow picked up on our staging site (and they would, given it’s full of SEO triggering info, google analytics scripts and the like) then our search information could become poisoned with the staging URL. Also bad would be if a customer found the staging site and posted information to the wrong place. I’ve actually seen both of these happen in the past when measures were not in place to prevent it.

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I keep the WordPress code on this site up to date with security and bugfix updates as they come out. Same for Gallery and the plugins. But today I saw that the WPG2 plugin had been updated from version 2.x to 3.0. This plugin integrates my gallery with my wordpress blog. In the old version, I had to hack up my theme and add custom widgets in order to display random image widgets and get a “Photo Gallery” tab to show up in my page list by the header of the page. Now the plugin does all of that automatically and more! It’s cool, because I can switch themes much more easily now, without all the custom stuff. Hurray for improvement!

Update: most of this information is still correct but an update for combining service definitions into one file and setting an icon is available here: http://holyarmy.org/2008/11/bonjour-avahi-addendum

In my last post I outlined how I followed others’ directions to enable netatalk on Linux and Time Machine backups to a shared AFP folder. Originally, I also described how to put all your shares on netatalk. I suppose if only have Mac clients or you REALLY want to use AFP, you can do so. As I worked with files over AFP shares, I started noticing that the performance seemed to be quite bad. No, I didn’t benchmark, but copying large video files to a shared folder over my gigabit network was substantially slower over AFP (netatalk) than over CIFS/SMB (samba). I use my network shares pretty heavily, so this was a concern. Also, netatalk tries very hard to replicate an HFS filesystem complete with resource fork support. This means that your shared directories end up with lots of extra folders named “.AppleDouble”(and a few others) containing Mac specific info. (Note: even on CIFS you’ll get the “.AppleDB” folders unless you disable a setting in Finder. I can deal with .AppleDB better than .AppleDouble AND .AppleDB) So, because of these two issues I decided to try using CIFS and samba again.

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Tonight Stephanie and I attended Mike Huckabee’s “Huck and Chuck” rally.

I’ve posted a few of our photos here.

My foray into the Mac OS X world is fraught with daily challenges as I try to learn my way around this new environment.

Firefox has long been my browser of choice on Windows and Linux. So now, I’ve used it on Mac, and while I still like it, I’ve felt the urge to try out “Mac native” apps such as the bundled Safari web browser. For the most part, switching to Safari meant learning new keyboard shortcuts, but one thing that was really killing me is that if I closed Safari or it crashed, I lost all my tabs. I am a pretty heavy user of the auto session save in Firefox.

So, I found ForgetMeNot. This great little GPL’d plugin for Safari does exactly what it says, it saves, then reloads windows and tabs when I relaunch Safari. No frills, no extras, no money (but please feel free to donate). I’m a fan of tools that do their job well. This one does it.

So there I was, poking around in some java / j2ee code, trying to learn how it all works. I did some testing on a Linux server and realized, something is broken. It seemed something was corrupting ALL the Jar files in WEB-INF/lib/.

A co-worker guessed that the token filtering Ant was doing might be the culprit. He was right. It seems Ant has issues with detecting whether files are binary or not, given that it uses a Reader class which runs the files through a character decoder. This is specifically a problem on Unix systems since they commonly use UTF8 character set, and in that case Ant hasn’t a clue if its looking at UTF8 text or binary data.

So, I used a trick suggested in the Ant docs:

Another trick is to change the LANG environment variable from something like “us.utf8″ to “us”.

On the Linux box, this meant we had a default character set of en_US.UTF-8 and it needed to be en_US. In this case we already had a bash shell script that runs ant, so adding a line export LANG=en_US to that script before Ant ran solved the problem.

Reference:
http://ant.apache.org/manual/CoreTasks/copy.html#encoding

So, I’m a MacOS newbie, just switched over from Windoze / Linux. I figured, it’s cool, things “just work”, and it’s got a Un*x/BSD core. What else is there? Hehe, the interface has definitely been a challenge.

So, the first huge problem that drove me nutz was that in Firefox, I couldn’t tab to checkboxes, some buttons, multi-select boxes, etc. I asked around, but found others with the same problem.

Google to the rescue! I found this summary of how to fix the problem: http://www.tonyspencer.com/2006/05/02/tab-skips-select-form-fields-in-mac-browsers/

Network directory services are core to Internet functionality. The Domain Name System (DNS) provides a global (and/or local) directory of hosts and services. Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) servers can provide some of the same information as DNS (or be used to back DNS), but are more frequently used to create network user databases, store user group information, providing centralized account information and password storage.

I recently completed an upgrade of these two core services on a network I manage. We had been running outdated (but functional) BIND v8 and OpenLDAP v2.0 instances for of DNS and LDAP servers. Also, throw a Windows Server 2003 into the mix, which, as an Active Directory domain controller has to run its own DNS and LDAP (AD is tweaked LDAP) servers.

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