A very interesting article at The Atlantic about the Conficker Worm.
Conficker Worm
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Author Archives: hugo
Ipad first impressions
I just spend my first hour helping a client with an iPad. It’s very pretty, a wonderful thing to hold. I did run into some things that stumped me:
- Audible books in iTunes didn’t seem to sync. They didn’t show up in the Audio section of the iPod app. Couldn’t get them to sync by putting them in a Smart or ‘regular’ playlist. Must be missing something.
- Couldn’t get a new Bluetooth keyboard to sync. Also odd.
- Looking for an easier way to move files from the Mac to the iPad other than email. I see that Dropbox will work. Have to look into that.
Audrey and Arlo by a pond
Mac OS 10.6.3 and iCal
Back when I upgraded to 10.6 last year the only problem I ran into was that all my calendars in iCal got left behind. Since I schedule my visits with iCal, this was something of a nuisance, but after a day or two of scrambling, I was back on track.
Last night I updated to 10.6.3. This morning I opened iCal to find lots of events entered twice. I looked back and sure enough my calendars pre-10.6 were there too. Huh – I wonder if this is 10.6.3 related…
Remote Install of OS X
I did a remote install of OS X onto a MacBook Air today for the first time. I’d just had to install a new hard drive in it so I had to use the CD in my MacBook Pro to do a remote install. A little reading lead me to believe this might take 4-5 hours. Perhaps Apple have dramatically improved this somehow since the article was written, or perhaps it was due to the more efficient Snow Leopard versus Leopard, but this only took less than two hours. To make it even more impressive, I was doing this over an old 802.11g network using an old Airport Extreme. Pretty neat.
Books in the Age of the iPad
I found this post by Craig Mod linked at Daring Fireball. Very interesting and something I’m very curious about. The potential of the iPad to change our reading habits is nearly as interesting to me as how much easier it might be for some of my clients to use than their computers.
Keyboard Shortcuts
A quick link to an Apple support page showing keyboard shortcuts – including startup.
Koha, Marcedit, and more
After trying all summer to install the opensource ILS software Koha on our library’s Mac Mini, I finally succeeded in getting it installed on a Debian system I set up on a computer kindly donated by a client of mine. And even better, I was then able to import the records exported from our old library software. Pretty cool. But there are a few issues with the import and apparently I need to use a program called MarcEdit to clean up the Marc file. Trouble is, MarcEdit runs natively under Windows. To run under either Linux or Mac OS X, I need to install Mono on the Mac, or both Mono and/or Wine on Linux. Neither of these seem straightforward. I think I’ll run MarcEdit on the XP machine at the library.
And then I need to figure out what format the Patron file is in. But really – it’s getting close. Pretty neat stuff.
Fax server issues in Windows Server 2003
Finally got a fax server working after uninstalling and then reinstalling the fax service. The problem was that the server realized a call was coming in, but would then say (in the logs) that “the incoming call cannot be answered as a fax call”. After the reinstall and reboot the server picked up calls just fine. Whew.
Mac OS X, 10.5.8, Safari, and JavaScript
Struggled today to find the cause of a client’s browser choking on certain web pages that contain javascript. Not all pages with javascript fail to load but, for example, http://www.nytimes.com did. The problem occurred after upgrading to 10.5.8 and Safari 4.0.3. And, related or not, Mail gets no further than “downloading 1 of 31 new mesages”. Hmmm.