I am in the process of migrating my office to Apple products. I needed a way to install iWorks and Parallels on my boss’s shiny new MacBook Air, but the MacBook Air has no optical drive, and we have not yet ordered an external drive. My assumption was that I would need to make an image and copy it over to her machine; I was wrong. After I launched Finder on her machine, I saw “Remote Disc” as one of her drive options. A little research revealed that I could enable “DVD or CD Sharing” from my Sharing Preferences pane. Doing so made my drive visible from her machine, and the installation went along without a hitch.
From time to time you may need to flush the dns cache on your mac. I had recently moved a site from one host to another, and while the nameservers at the various levels returned the new IP address, my browser still looked to the old IP address.
To resolve issues like this, (in Leopard) open a terminal and type in
> dscacheutil -flushcache
The same issue is resolved in 10.5.1 and earlier, open a terminal and type
> lookupd -flushcache
Facebook’s recent modifications to their privacy policies is causing concern for a lot of people, and for good reason. Facebook is encouraging third-party sites and developers to leverage their developer platform to gain deliver a more social experience for their users. Facebook is referring to this new practice as “Instant Personalization”, and it means that sites will be able to pull profile information about their visitors, as well as about the visitor’s friends. That last sentence deserves some attention because it is possibly one of the bigger threats to privacy that I have seen done out-in-the-open on the web.
Essentially what this means is that if your friend visits a site that you have no affiliation with whatsoever, that friend can pass your personal information on to that site. Meaning that whatever permission that you had previously extended to your friend to use your profile details have now been extended to a site with which you have no affiliation, and with whom you have no knowledge.
This attempted increase in reach is startling. Not starting because Facebook is doing it (research has shown that adding personal information to advertisements results in significantly higher click-thru) but startling because it’s being allowed in the first place. Google received FAR more attention for their Buzz Privacy Snafu, and that was a much smaller risk to my privacy than what Facebook is attempting.
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Gruber over at Daring Fireball posted a great writeup on the Gizmodo iPhone debacle. It’s a great read: Daring Fireball: Gizmodo and the Prototype iPhone.
The scoop of a lifetime occurred for Gizmodo recently when, through intense research and journalistic savvy they managed to uncover the highly anticipated iPhone — months before it’s release. It would be a great day for Gizmodo were that the case, but in fact it’s not. Gizmodo Forrest Gumped their way into possession of the top-secret device by being willing to pay $5,000 for stolen property.
The top headlines on their site right now read like the front page of a supermarket tabloid:
- How Apple lost the next iPhone!
- How Apple missed chances to get the device back
- Why Apple didn’t leak the iPhone to us
- And finally, how Apple asked to get their phone back
- How we put the phone in an envelope and sent it to them
Okay, I made the last one up, but it isn’t too much of a departure from those that it followed.
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Was looking for a quick and easy way to deal with refreshing my db schema in Django. A bit of googling turned up
stonemind consulting » Small Django tips from one newbie to another.
Worth bookmarking as it solved that problem for me, and has a lot of other useful tips and scripts.
A day without shoes
This isn’t related to technology or productivity, but it’s something to help the heart feel good. Tomorrow I will be participating in One Day Without Shoes. This is, as you could have guessed, being done by Tom’s Shoes, a remarkable shoe company that gives away one pair of shoes to a child in need for every pair that they sell. They operate as a non-profit, and are a very easy company to support.
From the site…
- In some developing nations, children must walk for miles to school, clean water and to seek medical help.
- Cuts and sores on feet can lead to serious infection.
- Often, children cannot attend school barefoot.
- In Ethiopia, approximately one million people are suffering from Podoconiosis, a debilitating and disfiguring disease caused by walking barefoot in volcanic soil.
- Podoconiosis is 100% preventable with basic foot hygiene and wearing shoes.
I encourage any of you who can to consider going without shoes tomorrow to help spread awareness about this cause.
