Rumors are that Apple OSX Leopard might be shipping as early as March this year. The same goes for the new iLife '07, and iWork '07.
I can't wait to get my hands on Leopard, and iWork '07. iWorkr is rumored to have a spreadsheet-like program called
Numbers. Finally an 'alternative' for Microsoft Excel. iWork's Numbers will probably still be overkill, but it beats the rosetta version of Microsoft with the gazillion features and tools I never seem to use.
No idea what iLife '07 will bring (haven't had the urge to find out, since '06 still works fine). I guess I'll download a trail ;-) , and decide then if I really need it.
Leopard and iWork will definitely be purchased by me (if it has the spreadsheet program).
I'm not that much into widgets and all that stuff. But today I found one which is realy cool. it's called
iStat nano. It displays the following things on your Dashboard:
- Fan speed
- CPU, Chasis, GPU and ambient temperature
- Network connection (throughput, bytes sent and received)
- Memory overview
- Current processes
- etc.
The developper has several other nice widgets and programs which are all system related.
Arstechnica has an article explaining OEM (mainly the difference between the Microsoft Vista OEM and retail versions)
Buying OEM versions of Windows Vista: the facts
It seems that anyone who can install software is eligible to purchase a Vista OEM copy, without extra hardware.
Can I buy OEM?
Yes, you can. Microsoft licenses OEM software to "system builders," which the license defines as "an original equipment manufacturer, or an assembler, reassembler, or installer of software on computer systems" (emphasis added). You can install software on computers, right?
When asked, Microsoft says that OEM software is not intended to be installed by end users. Off the record, Microsoft spokespeople have told me that the big concern in Redmond is for Joe Newbie. They don't want inexperienced users buying OEM software, but the fact of the matter is that anyone can buy OEM versions of Windows.
Truth be told, Microsoft is not opposed to the practice. Rather, the company says that people who purchase OEM software will simply be expected to abide by the terms of the licensing agreements.
Last year, I bought a
HP iPaq hx2790. Partly because I'd been without a PDA for a couple of years, but mostly because I don't want to boot up my laptop to see my mail or calendar.
The hx2790 comes with Windows Mobile 5 (WM5), wireless, bluetooth, fingerprint scanner, and built-in encryption. All very very nice.... Well, there is a downside to this nirvana;
- Wireless broke down after a couple of weeks (also see an old post on my old blog). The first time they fixed it... they didn't fix it at all. So it had to go back for repairs again.
- On the weirdest occasions all my synced e-mail bodies were complete gibberish or they were just empty. The only way to solve this was break the pairing with ActiveSync remove everything from the PDA, and sync it again.
[SOLUTION: disable the HP Encryption Tools crap]
- 9 out of 10 times I had to reset the device when I powered it on. So most of the times it would be more time efficient to boot up my laptop.
[SOLUTION: don't use the HP Encryption tools for securing your device. Just use the simple standard PIN code for logging on to the PDA]
- Applications would crash easily. Result: more resets.
[SOLUTIONS: do not install third-party software]
As long as I stick to this everything works just fine.
This makes me wonder why would I buy an PDA with a gazillion megabytes of free space, and lot's of SD/MMC/CF slots for adding even more bytes. Every program I add makes the device more unstable.
During these periods of complete misery I also tried a PDA encryption suite of Utimaco. I just wanted some sort of encryption to protect the data on the device. Their latest software version includes support for the hx2790 fingerprint scanner, but after installing the software everything went berserk (again). Uninstalling didn't work, so the only solution to get back in control again was to reset the damn thing to factory defaults.....
One more thing; why is it that EVERY older Windows Mobile version has an iPaq backup program for backing up SETTINGS, and the WM5 OS doesn't have this. Every time when I needed to reset the thing to factory defaults (about 8 to 10 times so far), I had to setup my mail accounts, etc manually. This feature isn't even available on ActiveSync for WM5.
No more Windows Mobile devices for me in the future. I just hope that this crappy piece of software holds on till the end of the year when the iPhone is being released.
Most companies/institutions use Windows clients (Windows 2000, XP), but their backend might be different. There's the
Microsoft Active Directory, [cough]
Novell eDirectory (former NDS)[/cough], or a more Generic LDAP (like the
SUN Directory ONE).
The problem with network authentication with the use of Microsoft clients is that the authentication process uses MS-CHAPv2. This is a Microsoft mechanisme for authenticating. This means that the RADIUS server used for authenticating should also be able to authenticate using MS-CHAPv2. The Internet Authentication Service from Microsoft is pretty MS only, so not much of a help with other backends. So there's a need for a RADIUS server which talks to different backends. One option is the great RADIATOR RADIUS server. It's fully customizable, but
not for free.
Today, I stumbled on
FreeRADIUS. This RADIUS server is free (duh), and is also fully customizable. Downside is that you need to compile the software yourself, and the documentation is not that great.
Tried to compile/install it on my FreeBSD 'server', but
make was missing. So I downloaded
make, and installed it, but the install script kept saying that
make wasn't installed.... Well I guess that's one of the reasons why Linux won't be adopted by the masses soon. Spent about an hour to fix it, but I just have to give up.
Well, time to download a precompiles Win32 version from
freeradius.net
OK, the title might sound a little weird, but trust me..... I work on a daily basis with digital certificates (end-user, and SSL certificates). These things get more, and more common these days. More and more webservices are being 'secured' by SSL certificates. The only problem is that the technicians who run the services don't know shit (well, most of them do) about SSL and/or PKI. I don't blame them, because it tends to be a little complex. SSL certificates can be generated as selfsigned certificates, or you might wanna get a commercial SSL certificate from Certificate Authorities like VeriSign, Thawte, GeoTrust, etc. Anyway, in every case, you need to generate a certificate signing request (CSR), and submit it to the Certificate Authority. The problem is that there are some applications that stay in a pending mode if you generate a CSR, and wait for the resulting certificate to come back from the CA. This might take a couple of days. It would be a lot nicer if you can request the certificate on another platform, and import it in the application when you get the thing. There are several ways to generate a CSR on the different platforms;
- OpenSSL - equivalent to rocket science for most people, since it's a commandline tool
- Via webserver tooling (IIS, JAVA Keytool, etc.)
- XCA - Not very user friendly if you're requesting just one or two certificates a year.
- And probably some other 'obscure' ways
But what if your application needs a SSL certificate, or your webserver is located on the other side of the world (and you have no way of accessing it directly)? How the hell do you generate a CSR? The Windows platform itself doesn't have any tools for creating certificates (only if you use IIS or have a CA running on the platform). I hope to solve this by creating an application (cross platform off course) which creates these CSR's, and create pkcs12 (or .pfx) files when you import the resulting certificate in the tool. This pkcs12 file can be installed on the server as needed. Finally, a challenge for me to start programming again.
Fiddling with my (Windows) mail server ended up in a 'serious' crash. The result was one week of mail down the drain :(. Even though I still had all my mail offline in my Mail.app, there was no way (at least not that I could find) to import it again in the IMAP folders.
I still have those mails in a backup of my Mac book Pro, so I could find the info with SpotLight.
If anyone has any ideas to import them back into the IMAP folders, please drop the ideas in the comments.
That was a Fridays night well spent :(
According to
AppleInsider,
Parallels is preparing a humongous
update on its virtualization software 'Parallels for Mac. Here are a couple of the new features:
- Drag and drop of files between the Virtual Machine and the Apple desktop.
- Seamless scaling of the virtual desktop.
- Bootcamp support, which enables the user to boot the Windows OS on the Mac in Parallels without the need for a reboot.
Apart from the Bootcamp feature all these things will also be incorporated in the upcoming
VMWare release for the Mac. And since VMWare is the biggest name in the virtualization market, I hope that Parallels can cope with the competition. Especially, since the VMWare Virtual Machines can (or will) be used on both platforms. So all the VM's created on Windows (or Linux) can be used on the Mac.
On the other hand, Parallels will provide a migration tool for migrating VMWare virtual machines to Parallels.
Time will tell.
Hamachi is a great tool of connecting to your server / PC at home while you are on the road (or at work). The program allows you to create a Virtual Network between (configurable) clients without the need of opening ports in your DLS/Cable modem or router [
screenshots].
I use Hamachi at home where I can access my servers as if it were on the same network.
After a long beta period, they finally released an official final
1.0.1.1 version of this tool (available for Windows,
OSX). If you need some tool for administrating servers on a 'shielded' network, this is the tool to use. Another practical use is for remote assistance for family or friends. Just have them install Hamachi, and when ever they are in need of any assistance, they launch their Hamachi client and you can access their PC for troubleshooting.
How Hamachi Works
Hamachi is a UDP-based virtual private networking system. Its peers utilize the help of a third node called a mediation server to locate each other and to bootstrap the connection between them. The connection itself is direct and once it is established no traffic flows through our servers.
Hamachi is not just truly peer-to-peer; it is verifiably secure peer-to-peer.
Believe it or not, but we are able to successfully mediate p2p connections in roughly 95% of all cases we have dealt with so far. This includes peers residing behind various firewalls or broadband routers (aka NAT devices). It is high-tech and it is really cool :)
Don't worry about other people getting in, because the Hamachi client needs to run, you need to know the name of the created network, AND you need to know the password created for that network.
I noticed today that Internet Explorer v7 showed up as a
critical download (according to Microsoft). Since I like to experiment (I know... it's wrong), I decided to give it a try. What can happen? I use
Firefox as the default browser.
I played with IE7 in Vista RC2, and seemed (!!!!!) to work fine. After installing it, I might have lost all my bookmarks, or perhaps I didn't have any to start with in IE6 :) . Anyway, that's something to remember when I upgrade IE on my laptop from work.
Here are some annoyances I ran into:
- Clearview
Lame ass anti-aliasing. I thought I had some sort of eye-disorder. (can eventually be switched of in the advanced options, and it needs a restart of the browser).
- Anti-phising
More pop-ups asking stupid questions... Somehow it wanted to check my own website against a phishing list.... disabled it immediately.
Flickr bagde
Can't get it to work in IE7. Not even if I remove all security restrictions. So if you don't see any pictures in my flickr badge, it means you're using a fucked-up browser.
Solved: I needed to install the Flash player component AGAIN especially for IE7 (/me wonders why IE7 doesn't mention that it doesn't have the necessary components to view the page correctly)- Menu bar
Is disabled by default, and if you enable it, it's not at the top of your window (???)
- ....
Strangely enough, WordPress seems to work fine, since I'm using IE7 to write this post. (correction: when I wanted to submit this post, there was an
error on page according to IE7....)
Well, back to good-old
Firefox 2.0, and leave all the IE7 annoyances behind me :D.
Conclusion: Microsoft created a great (visual) copy of Firefox. Too bad that they had the urge to add bugs and annoyances to it. I can hardly wait for Vista and the new Office suite :)
