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If you need to sync an old Palm device with only a serial connection to a Mac, you’re going to be up a creek. Modern Macs aren’t shipping with serial ports, but all is not lost. The Keyspan USB Serial Adapter works and works well. I had the opportunity to test a few Palm devices, the earliest being the m105. The devices sync without issue thanks to the fact that a) the adapter draws power from the USB port and b) Keyspan includes a driver disk so your machine knows the adapter is present.

A tool for bandwidth and throughput conversion (please remember that Mb and MB differ!) can be found on multiple sites on the web I’m sure. I most often use this one if I’m too lazy to do the math in my head. If you want to implement one yourself (I might do a sidebar plugin for this site) the authors were nice enough to post the functions that drive their converter. I’ve pasted them here so I can easily reference them later.

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Late last year, OIT began suggesting that departments opt-in to a Force Update policy connecting their Windows machines to centrally-managed SUS. Some departments declined or required exceptions because of machines running processes, acting as servers, etc. In May, the Help Desk added an article explaining this service with an additional option for departments. Namely, that without committing an entire department to Force Update you can apply a registry change to commit machines on a case by case basis.

“Individual Workstations Can Now Participate in SUS Updates without a GPO being applied to their OU
We now have user installable settings to allow machines that are not part of the Princeton domain or exist in OU’s that do not have SUS policies applied to them to participate in OIT’s Software Update Service. To install it:

Log onto a machine with an account that has administrator privileges
Connect to \\ntfileshare\software\security\sus
Read the ReadMe.txt document to understand the policy types
Run the .reg file that corresponds to the type of policy you want to apply
Click OK to complete the install of the registry settings
Reboot the machine or restart the ‘Automatic Updates” service
NOTE-There is a .vbs file that a user can run if they no longer want to participate in having our server give them the Windows Update files. This will remove the SUS settings and restore their original settings.”

“Thanks to its speed and stability, MySQL has earned a place on millions of servers worldwide. MySQL has a simple and effective security mechanism, but administrators must perform a few additional tasks to make a default installation truly secure. The measures we’ll talk about below will enable you to better secure your database, but be sure to secure the underlying operating system too.”

read more off-site

I was talking to my department manager this morning about a phone installation in my office when somehow the conversation turned to the number of phone calls I typically receive. I think I surprised her when I stated that I could count the number of calls for the week on one hand. The number of emails, however, are a much different story. So I just had to go and look up the real numbers over the last few months. Not counting email lists, OPM tickets, or Hostmaster & TSM bulletins, they’re quite impressive:

July - 314
June - 272
May - 313
April - 465
March - 320
February - 317
January - 362

An entry sampled from the Windows & .Net Magazine Network’s JSI FAQ:

“If your users don’t have roaming profiles, a local profile is created when a user logs on. If many users log on to a workstation, these profile accumulate over time. In a computer lab environment, you can have hundreds of profiles that may never be used again.

When a user logs onto a Windows NT-based computer (Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, and Windows XP, Windows Server 200x), their local profile is stored at the location specified in the registry at:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList\[SID]\ProfileImagePath

Using REG.EXE on Windows 2000, from the Windows 2000 Support Tools, or REG.EXE built into Windows XP, and JSIDateM, the general purpose date math routine, I have scripted DelProfile.bat to remove old profiles.

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Scanning software can vary widely in terms of feature set and quality. One such feature that is absolutely essential to my users is PDF creation. So when I discovered an older scanner in one of my labs, a CanoScan 1250U2F, didn’t have the software capability, I immediately started looking for the shortest route to PDF output. The answer I found may apply to other scanner software packages as well.

If the scanner software has a copy feature then it has the ability to send the scanned image directly to a printer. Instead of sending it to a standard printer, you can install PDFCreator on a Windows machine or simply use the Save As PDF function available in a Mac’s Printer Dialogue box. No matter what the limitation of your scanning software, this is a way you can assure any user that they can scan directly to PDF.