scadblog

How’d I miss this one? From the author of Brickhouse:

Checkmate is a preference pane for MacOS X 10.1 or higher that allows you to generate and compare secure MD5 checksums of critical files. This can be used to detect whether these files have been altered by viruses, root kits, trojan horses, or other possibly malicious programs.

In other words, a tripwire-like solution complete with GUI-ness. You can email yourself status reports and have scans run on a scheduled basis.

Roberto Alsina gives us a good outline of Redhat’s boot process in his entry The Linux Booting Process Unveiled. A good primer for newbies and refresher for the experienced as well.

The fun never stops with Acrobat on Windows. It seems that if you’ve done a default install of Acrobat Pro 6 and you try to patch it to 6.0.1 you may be asked for the installation media. That’s not a problem, just a pain. So if you feed it installer media (I’ve only tried from the local CD) the patch/update should continue. Instead it ends with an error 1706, very much akin to known errors installing MS Office patches.

Anyway, the fix for this sucker seems to be copying the Acrobat Pro directory off of the installer media and feeding the update the .msi file from that location. All seemed well after trying it that way. Again, it may work via a network share, but instructing users to copy the necessary file locally wouldn’t be that bad either I suppose.

To lauch mozilla on the command line use this:

mozilla -remote “openurl(http://www.mozilla.org)”

Where http://www.mozilla.org is the URL you want to launch. This will open in tab in firefox.

More here:

http://www.mozilla.org/unix/remote.html

I like to tackle what I see to be the most challenging elements of an interface first, so when I was first learning UNIX or UNIX-like systems I always ran straight for the command line. These days I find my familiarity with the CLI as useful as it is handicapping. Most of my users are used to GUI interfaces, and I’m often unable to convey how to configure or control something using the available graphic interface on whatever system they happen to be using.

As I force myself to use my RH/Fedora Linux box through the GUI in these early stages, I’m growing to actually like it. I’ve gone for KDE over Gnome; its prettier and just as stable. One thing that consistent annoys me though is that either desktop lacks a GUI for the sudo command. To get around this, each application launcher that requires root needs to have its properties changed. Because there is no GUI password dialogue box, you must check off ‘Run in Terminal’. Furthermore, to allow the root user to find and use your X server, each application must run with the syntax:

DISPLAY=:0 ; XAUTHORITY=~username/.Xauthority ; export XAUTHORITY ; sudo ‘/whatever/your/application’

Omar Shahine is a Microsoft employee and currently lead programmer on Virtual PC for Mac. In a recent entry over at his blog, he graded Outlook, OE, Eudora, and Thunderbird from a user perspective and came up with the following conclusion for the best IMAP client available at present:

“Thunderbird is an almost perfect IMAP client for Windows. If you use IMAP, this is the product for you.”

An interesting read from an unexpected TB fan.

If you are running Samba with its security mode set to user, a little tweaking must be done to set up an anonymous read-only share.

After the workgroup line in smb.conf enter the line map to guest = Bad User. Then, find the line for the guest account and switch whatever default value exists with an anonymous user already on the system (such as nobody or ftp, etc).

You can then create a share with read-only permissions and guest account access enabled that will map without asking you for a username and password in Windows. Note that it will still ask you for the information from a Mac or Linux box, but it will accept blank values.