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.

I’ve considered leaving Facebook altogether (and I still may) I have deactivated my Facebook account as more and more of these privacy violations have surfaced. Below, I detail some of the steps necessary for setting your privacy preferences to prevent “New Instant Personalization”

Select Applications and Websites

Choose Edit Settings under Instant Personalization

Uncheck the “Allow select partners…” checkbox

Uncheck the Allow select partners... checkbox

Confirm that you are sure you want to disallow instant personalization

Confirm your selection

Go back to the privacy setting screen and edit what your friends can share about you

"Edit Settings" for what your friends can share about you

Uncheck all of the things that you don’t want your friends sharing about you

Uncheck what personal information you don't want your facebook friends to share about you

These issues will continue to surface.  As long as people are not actively protecting their privacy, and as long as sites can get higher click thru by posting and sharing personal information, your privacy is at risk.

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.

For those unfamiliar with the story, apparently an engineer in possession of the iPhone lost it at a bar, another patron found it, it exchanged hands a few times, and somebody offered it to Gizmodo who happily purchased it for 5k.  Gizmodo then proceeded to dissect, photograph, and then blog about the device.

It is being debated as to whether they legally did anything wrong.  Some have pointed to California penal code indicating that found property is essentially stolen if it is used for profit without making a reasonable effort to return the property to it’s owner.  Gizmodo makes the claim that they (or somebody else) called AppleCare to attempt to return the top-secret-prototype.  To me, that seems akin to notifying a McDonalds drive-thru employee that I have found their lost copy of the secret-sauce recipe.

Beyond the legal issues are the ethical issues, which seem all to clear to me.  Gizmodo did not do any investigation to get this story.  They bought stolen property, and are profiting through increased exposure.  Add to that, the fact that they aren’t really covering technology here.  This story has become pure sensationalism.  How Apple lost the next iPhone?  How Apple missed chances to get the device back?  These “stories” may gather more pageviews, but so would filling the pages with pictures of scantily clad women.  But it doesn’t seem like that follows your implied mission.

What’s done is done, and a lot of people support Gizmodo’s efforts (a lot of people read TMZ too.)  I for one, have lost respect for a site that I considered to be a credible source of information on technology.  Enjoy the increased ad-revenue while it lasts fellas.  I hope you have some equally sensational stories to follow this one, because it’s going to be difficult to buy your soul back on an honest man’s salary.

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.