We’ve been encrypting our Ubuntu laptops for a while now, but there hasn’t been a good whole disk encryption option for the Mac until today. RSA is a little behind schedule in the release, but it’s out today.
Installation was a snap. Encrypting the boot drive was easy as well. 5 mins of your time and the takes care of the business in the background while you work. Reboot when it’s done (about 90 mins later for me) and your drive is secure.
Sweet.
Mongrel has served us well for the past year or so, but the simplicity of deployment in passenger along with the ever reliable apache has lured us into extensive testing. We’re getting slightly better performance numbers from passenger over mongrel with about 2/3 of the memory footprint. Please let us know at support@imapenguin.com if you see any wonkyness with any of our services. As we migrate over night.
Apple uses the tightvnc protocol for remote desktop. So install tightvnc:
sudo apt-get install xtightvncviewer
Then update your default programs to use it instead of what’s included in Ubuntu Desktop:
sudo update-alternatives --set vncviewer /usr/bin/xtightvncviewer
That’s it. In ubuntu’s RDP client, select the vnc protocol when connecting to a mac.
You’ve got port 3306 (MySQL) firewalled off and you want to use a MySQL GUI every once in a while (or maybe a bunch).
This is a snap with ssh.
On your local Linux/BSD/Mac/Unix machine (works in cygwin too) edit your .ssh/config file and add:
Host somemysqlserver Hostname server.mydomain.com #your mySQL server FQDN or IP User bob #replace with your valid ssh server username LocalForward *:13306 localhost:3306
Now do:
ssh -f -N somemysqlserver
You can now connect to your localhost port 13306 and it will forward to your MySQL server’s port 3306.
Plus, it’s free and probably already installed on your systems.
Need help? support@imapenguin.com
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According to an Appleinsider article today, certain Seagate drives, specifically those with model numbers ST96812AS and ST98823AS are flawed and can cause data loss.
Make sure you back them up and get them replaced.
To see if you have an affected drive:
Email support@imapenguin.com if you need assistance.
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Get it here, while it’s hot off the presses. I know, we’re such nerds…
Here’s an emulator screenshot.
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We’re not going to “cover” tomorrow’s launch of OS X Leopard, but we are heavy users of OS X. We will be upgrading ourselves and helping our customers upgrade. If you need help or just need to ask a question, support@imapenguin.com is the place. Advice is always free 
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Zultys auto attendants need an 8bit Mono U-law format wav file. Most recording software will give you a stereo 16bit format at the very least. To convert via sox (available for Unix machines including Macs) simply do:
sox -c 2 Audio.wav -c 1 -r 8000 -U Audio2.wav
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Dave Benjamin just updated his step by step guide to install Rails on a Mac.
Mongrel + Ruby + Rails + Mac = Yum.
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I’m as excited as the next guy about some of the things introduced with the now famous iPhone introduction in the Macworld 2007 keynote. There are two (maybe 2 and 1/2 if you count having to switch to Cingular) reasons I wont have the version that Steve Jobs introduced:
Keyboards are essential to what business users are using their phones for - email.
I have an aging Treo 650 which has BOTH the touch interface and the keyboard. You use your fingers on the Treo to press the virtual keypad on the screen when dialing phone numbers. My accuracy rate for hitting the flat button is probably about 50% in a 10 digit number. So if I dial 703-555-1212 10 times, I’ll get all 10 digits correct half the time. Can you imagine typing emails with that kind of accuracy?
Most Treo/Blackberry/etc users type hundreds of emails a week on their devices. They bought the thing BECAUSE it has a keyboard.
The #1 reason for my Treo over Blackberry choice was the thousands of third party apps for Palm devices. I have 10 which I simply cannot live without.
Apple, can you say TomTom?
As an open source and Apple developer, this to me is just incredulous. What’s the point of having OS X on the thing if I can’t put my OS X apps on it?
The answer: marketing hype.
So close, yet so, so far away.
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