Category: Information Technology

Make Safari’s windows behave properly

Posted by Shane – March 4, 2009

via: MacLife

I have not used Safari as my primary browser in OSX primarily because I prefer the tab behaviour of Firefox. This was true until I found this interesting article (See #4) on MacLife about changing the way Safari handles tabs.

Simply open up the Terminal and enter the following:

defaults write com.apple.Safari TargetedClicksCreateTabs -bool TRUE

This little gem tells Safari to open new windows in new tabs instead of in an entirely new window, just like Firefox does. Hopefully Apple will make this simpler in the future via an option in Safari’s Preferences, but until then I think this will suffice.

Now all I need Apple to do is to get auto-complete of URLs working like Firefox…

Google Sync

Posted by Shane – February 9, 2009

Google has added Sync! What does this mean, well if you own an iPhone or other compatible device and you have a Gmail account you can now wirelessly and automagically sync your contacts and calendar with your Gmail contacts and Google Calendar. This is a really nice feature which makes the iPhone + Google combination every bit as capable as the BlackBerry and Microsoft Exchange combo. With this latest release from Google, an enterprise is no longer tied to Microsoft Exchange and RIMs Blackberry for enterprise class mobility.

Posting from iPhone

Posted by Shane – August 4, 2008

I just downloaded the WordPress application for the iPhone and iPod Touch. It was painless to setup and seems to work really well. One thing I would already like to see is automatic completion for tags. Other than that, A+!

Ruby & Rails using Passenger

Posted by Shane – July 28, 2008

I have been toying with a MySQL server at work for loading data from a legacy database and creating user accounts in Microsoft’s Active Directory. I am using linux along with MySQL, Ruby and the Rails framework. While I am certainly no über-expert at this, I am finding the task not only manageable, but altogether pleasant. My current workflow looks like this:

  1. Mount Windows share using Samba
  2. Load data into MySQL and perform a bunch of transformations on it
  3. TODO: script creation of Active Directory accounts from MySQL Database (Python??)

I found that I needed to view the data as I was testing the MySQL transformations, so I turned to Ruby and Rails. I have not had a great deal of luck in the past with configuring Apache to serve up dynamic content via Mongrel or lighty, so I decided to give Passenger a go. For those of you that are unaware, Passenger works directly with Apache and requires almost no configuration. It is dead simple to use. So, within a matter of minutes (minus the time to tweak my database to conform to the Rails conventions) I had a web site up and running to display my data as I was testing it!

Open Source Software is becoming (for me at least) a more viable solution to the problems I face than the proprietary alternatives. The wealth of information available and the relative ease with which a great deal of work can be done is amazing.

iPhone 3G

Posted by Shane – July 17, 2008

So I finally got my new iPhone 3G! This is an amazing little device. In a matter of minutes I was reading my Gmail, corporate Exchange email, syncing contacts from Gmail, syncing calendars with Exchange, using Twitter (via: Twitterific), remote controlling my AppleTV and listening to Last.fm. Setting all of this up was ridiculously simple and I had no issues whatsoever.

My next task is to get the VPN working (there is an issue with my work’s VPN that is causing problems when issuing keys to new connections). Once that is up and running I should be able to work, from my iPhone!

The UI is fantastic, the built in applications are solid, the downloaded applications are seemless. It is remarkable how simple and effective the entire device is. It is also remarkable that nobody else has been able to accomplish this yet.

Email Click-Through Tracking

Posted by Shane – June 4, 2008

In my work as a Network Administrator for a school district, I run into problems with email click-through marketing techniques rather frequently. The specific problem is with click-through tracking of email advertising campaigns. Since we are a school district that provides internet access to minors, we tend to filter our internet traffic rather heavily. This filtering wreaks havoc with most click-through advertising emails.

For instance, an email is received inside of our network with a link to:

<a href="http://www.rs6.net/?kna76dv978y34qtib33t897jk1bt4hq3fr897&site=www.theactuallink.com">www.theactuallink.com</a>

The user thinks that when they click on theactuallink.com that they will be taken to theactuallink.com, they are instead taken to rs6.net and then bounced through to theactuallink.com. This causes a great deal of frustration with our users. We constantly receive phone calls that our internet filter is blocking theactuallink.com, when it is in fact blocking rs6.net, and rightfully so.

I imagine that this problem will only increase as more and more companies increase the amount of internet filtering they do to comply with various laws and regulations. So, what is the solution?

I would highly recommend never, ever rely on a 3rd party to bounce your links through. If you need to track the effectiveness of an email advertising campaign, then invest the time and resources to roll your own tracking. That or use a tool like Google Analytics that will not break the link even if the tracking itself gets blocked. I know that a large number of the emails are generated by non-profit organizations or businesses with limited budgets that are running their email advertising campaigns through a 3rd party, but I think the time has come to abandon the 3rd party and either hire the talent or develop it from within to avoid losing your audience entirely. There are a large number of free, open source applications that will allow you to run email advertising campaigns so the cost for software would be negligible. Hardware costs and requirements are ever decreasing as well, so the excuses not to are few.

WSUS 3.0 SP1 & 0×80190194

Posted by Shane – May 22, 2008

I know that the title probably makes no sense to any one of the 2 people who read my weblog on a semi-annual basis, but I have decided to try to post more stuff related to my work as a Network Engineer. That being said…

Today I ran into a problem with our Microsoft WSUS server. Recently I upgraded the WSUS from 3.0 to 3.0 Service Pack 1 (SP1). This is the second time our WSUS has been broken by an update. Usually Microsoft’s updates are pretty solid, but WSUS updates seem to be a tad iffy. The upgrade from WSUS 2.0 to WSUS 3.0 broke completely and I had to completely rebuild the server, luckily I run the WSUS on a virtual server using VMWare’s ESX server, so rebuilding it was very simple.

The particulars of the problem are that the client machines would not download updates! Normally I don’t check on the update status of machines very often, but I was creating a new image for a laptop and the thing just would not download updates. I checked the WSUS log on the client machine and noticed that there was a 0×80190194 error. A quick search on Google pointed me to a number of forum posts that state this is an HTTP 404 (Page not found) error. Unfortunately, none of these posts had any information about a solution. A bit more searching led me to a post on Microsoft’s TechNet Discussion Groups that had the solution, Re: WSUS 3 sp1 do not distribute patches to clients in Windows Server Update Services (URL is rather deep and may be broken, no warranty). The noteworthy part of the post:

  1. Create a new virtual directory called ‘selfupdate’
  2. Set the pathname to
    %programfiles%\Update Services\selfupdate

Hopefully Microsoft will put some more resources into testing the updates for WSUS, it is a really nice product, but the updates always seem to break it!