tech help

Evaluating software features

business, security, tech help, technology / By / 2 November 2010

When developing software, it’s important to rank your features, as you can’t do everything, & not everything is worth doing. One way to rank features is to categorize them in order of importance using the following three categories:

  1. Required/Essential/Necessary: Mission critical features that must be present
  2. Preferred/Conditional: Important features & enhancements that bring better experience & easier management, but can wait until later release if necessary
  3. Optional/Nice To Have: If resources permit, sure, but otherwise…

Of course, you should also group your features based upon the kinds of features they are. Here’s a suggestion for those groups:

  • User experience
  • Management
  • Security

My response to the news that “Reader, Acrobat Patches Plug 23 Security Holes”

security, tech help, tech in changing society, technology / By / 6 October 2010

I sent this email out earlier today to friends & students:

For the love of Pete, people, if you use Adobe Acrobat Reader, update it.

http://krebsonsecurity.com/2010/10/reader-acrobat-patches-plug-23-security-holes/

But here’s a better question: why are you using Adobe Reader in the first place? It’s one of the WORST programs for security you can have on your computer. And most of the time, you just don’t need it!

If you use Windows, give Foxit Reader (http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/reader/) a whirl. It’s free!

If you use a Mac, you already have a great PDF reader installed with your operating system: Preview. Use it.

The ONLY reason to use Adobe Reader is to fill out tax forms. When I need to do that, I download Adobe Reader, download the PDFs from the gubmint, fill out the PDFs, send ’em to the Feds & the State, & then remove Adobe Reader. I encourage others to do the same.

A vote for CrossOver

business, tech help / By / 30 August 2010

Let me recommend Codeweavers’ CrossOver, a commercial implementation of WINE that works on Linux & Mac OS X. It’s reasonably priced, & it makes setting up & configuring both WINE and the programs that run inside WINE much easier. Plus, the company is made up of good people, & they’re very upfront on their site about what works with WINE, what mostly works, what kinda works, & what doesn’t work at all.

http://www.codeweavers.com/

A solution to two-way task list syncing on a Mac & iPhone

personal, tech help / By / 11 December 2009

I just published a page on my website about a solution I’ve found to an important issue: how to keep task lists on my Mac & my iPhone that are synced. I used to use The Hit List, but the developer’s failure to come up with an iPhone solution has led me to abandon it. To read about my solution, check out “Two-way Syncing Task List Software on a Mac”, at http://dev.granneman.com/techinfo/tools/tasklistsoftware.

Linux Phrasebook in Russian

business, language & literature, personal, tech help, technology / By / 29 November 2009

My book, Linux Phrasebook, which is still selling well & still just as useful today as when it came out in 2006 (& will be for another decade or two, given how consistent the Linux command line is), has been translated into Russian. You can find it at this Russian website, where I found out that it’s translated title is Linux Карманный справочник, which looks pretty cool. The other cool thing I found out from going to the page is how to display my name in Russian: Скотт Граннеман.

SMS gateways you can use to get around high texting charges

business, cool stuff, tech help / By / 21 November 2009

Tired of high SMS charges? Use these SMS gateways, which translate emails & IMs into SMS text messages … for free (well, to the sender, anyway – the recipient still has to pay). And when recipients reply, those replies come back to the sender in the same format; in other words, you email someone, they receive a text, they reply, & you get it back as an email.

One more caveat: you obviously have to know which carrier people are using in order to send them a text message, so ask.

Sprint: phone#@messaging.sprintpcs.com

Verizon: phone#@vtext.com

T-Mobile: phone#@tmomail.com

AT&T: phone#@txt.att.net

AIM: +1phone#

The information here came from “The Great Text Rip-Off”, originally printed in the June 2009 issue of Popular Mechanics.

A fix for Apple Mail’s inability to search Entire Message

tech help / By / 7 May 2009

Spotlight
Creative Commons License photo credit: Ti.mo

When using Apple Mail, you should be able to search for a term in From, To, Subject, & Entire Message. However, today I could no longer search Entire Message. It was grayed out & completely unavailable.

I found interesting info on the following pages, with the last being the most helpful:

  • http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=6653445#6653445
  • http://www.bronzefinger.com/archives/2006/04/apple_mail_sear.html
  • http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=5934412#5934412
  • http://forums.macworld.com/message/425508
  • http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20080201111317585

I closed Mail and tried this, which re-indexes the entire hard drive in Spotlight:

sudo mdutil -E /

But it did nothing. Then I did this, which re-indexes just the Mail folders in Spotlight:

mdimport ~/Library/Mail

That fixed it.

My new book – Google Apps Deciphered – is out!

business, education, history, personal, social software, tech help, tech in changing society, technology / By / 5 February 2009

I’m really proud to announce that my 5th book is now out & available for purchase: Google Apps Deciphered: Compute in the Cloud to Streamline Your Desktop. My other books include:

(I’ve also contributed to two others: Ubuntu Hacks: Tips & Tools for Exploring, Using, and Tuning Linux and Microsoft Vista for IT Security Professionals.)

Google Apps Deciphered is a guide to setting up Google Apps, migrating to it, customizing it, and using it to improve productivity, communications, and collaboration. I walk you through each leading component of Google Apps individually, and then show my readers exactly how to make them work together for you on the Web or by integrating them with your favorite desktop apps. I provide practical insights on Google Apps programs for email, calendaring, contacts, wikis, word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, video, and even Google’s new web browser Chrome. My aim was to collect together and present tips and tricks I’ve gained by using and setting up Google Apps for clients, family, and friends.

Here’s the table of contents:

  • 1: Choosing an Edition of Google Apps
  • 2: Setting Up Google Apps
  • 3: Migrating Email to Google Apps
  • 4: Migrating Contacts to Google Apps
  • 5: Migrating Calendars to Google Apps
  • 6: Managing Google Apps Services
  • 7: Setting Up Gmail
  • 8: Things to Know About Using Gmail
  • 9: Integrating Gmail with Other Software and Services
  • 10: Integrating Google Contacts with Other Software and Services
  • 11: Setting Up Google Calendar
  • 12: Things to Know About Using Google Calendar
  • 13: Integrating Google Calendar with Other Software and Services
  • 14: Things to Know About Using Google Docs
  • 15: Integrating Google Docs with Other Software and Services
  • 16: Setting Up Google Sites
  • 17: Things to Know About Using Google Sites
  • 18: Things to Know About Using Google Talk
  • 19: Things to Know About Using Start Page
  • 20: Things to Know About Using Message Security and Recovery
  • 21: Things to Know About Using Google Video
  • Appendix A: Backing Up Google Apps
  • Appendix B: Dealing with Multiple Accounts
  • Appendix C: Google Chrome: A Browser Built for Cloud Computing

If you want to know more about Google Apps and how to use it, then I know you’ll enjoy and learn from Google Apps Deciphered. You can read about and buy the book at Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/Google-Apps-Deciphered-Compute-Streamline/dp/0137004702) for $26.39. If you have any questions or comments, don’t hesitate to contact me at scott at granneman dot com.

Preserve links after a website move with mod_rewrite

tech help / By / 11 December 2008

My blog was at http://www.granneman.com/blog, but I then moved it, after several years of living at its old address, to http://blog.granneman.com. I wanted to preserve all my links, however, so that someone going to http://www.granneman.com/blog/2008/04/20/after-a-stroke-he-can-write-but-cant-read/ would instead end up at http://blog.granneman.com/2008/04/20/after-a-stroke-he-can-write-but-cant-read/.

To do this, I edited the .htaccess file in http://www.granneman.com/blog to read as follows (For =LT=, substitute a < , and for =GT=, substitute a >):

=LT=IfModule mod_rewrite.c=GT=
RewriteEngine On 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^granneman.com$ 
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://blog.granneman.com/$1 [R=301,L] 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.granneman.com$ 
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://blog.granneman.com/$1 [R=301,L]
=LT=/IfModule=GT=

Works perfectly.

Mac OS X settings to reduce PDF sizes

tech help / By / 28 November 2008

From Adam Engst’s “Slim down your PDFs” (Macworld: 5 November 2008):

Though few people realize this, you can reduce the size of PDF files using the Leopard version of Preview. To shrink a PDF file, open it in Preview, choose Save As from the File menu, and, in the Save dialog box, choose Reduce File Size from the Quartz Filter pop-up menu. If when you compare the compressed PDF with your original, the images are too fuzzy for your needs (the default settings are pretty severe), you can make your own Quartz filter with different settings.

To do this, launch ColorSync Utility (in Applications/Utilities), choose New Utility Window from the File menu if none is showing, and click on Filters in the toolbar. Click on the arrow to the right of Reduce File Size, choose Duplicate Filter from the drop-down menu, and name your new filter. Enter different values for Image Sampling and Image Compression, switch back to your original PDF in Preview, and save a PDF with your new filter in place of Reduce File Size. With some trial and error, you should be able to arrive at a compromise that satisfies you.

The X Window System defined

tech help, technology / By / 21 November 2008

From Ellen Siever’s “What Is the X Window System” (O’Reilly Media: 25 August 2005):

X was intentionally designed to provide the low-level mechanism for managing the graphics display, but not to have any control over what is displayed. This means that X has never been locked into a single way of doing things; instead, it has the flexibility to be used in many different ways. Both the simplest window manager and the most complex desktop environment can, and do, use the X Window System to manage the display.

…

When you run the X Window System, the X server manages the display, based on requests from the window manager. The window manager is an application that is itself an X client, with responsibility for managing the appearance and placement of the windows on the screen.

X itself has no role in determining the appearance of the screen, or what users are allowed to do with windows. That is the job of the window manager. For example, some window managers allow you to double-click in a window’s title bar and roll up the window into the title bar like rolling up a window shade (this is referred to as shading). Other window managers don’t have that feature. X doesn’t care; it’s a window manager concern. The X server’s job is to provide the low-level support so the window manager and other applications can shade or not, as they choose.

…

The X server manages the display hardware. The server captures input events from the user via keyboard or mouse (or other input device) and passes the information to a client application that has requested it. It also receives requests from the application to perform some graphical action. For example, if you use your mouse to move a window on the screen, the X server passes the information to the window manager, which responds by telling the server where to reposition the window, and the X server performs the action. If the client is a calculator, such as xcalc, it might request that digits be displayed into the window as the user clicks on buttons to enter a number.

…

The window manager controls the general operation of the window system; in particular, it controls the geometry and aesthetics of your X display. With the window manager you can change the size and position of windows on the display, reshuffle windows in a window stack, and so on.

How to run a command repeatedly

tech help / By / 2 October 2008

You can use the watch command, but it unfortunately isn’t available for Mac OS X. At least, from Apple. Sveinbjorn Thordarson (great name!) has a version of watch that you can download and compile on your OS X box. It’s available at http://www.sveinbjorn.org/watch_macosx.

Or, you can use this shell script:

while true ; do foo ; sleep 1 ; done

This will run foo every second until you press Ctrl-C to cancel the script.

Dropbox for Linux is coming soon

business, tech help, technology / By / 1 September 2008

According to this announcement, a Linux client for Dropbox should be coming out in a week or so:

http://forums.getdropbox.com/topic.php?id=2371&replies=1

I’ve been using Dropbox for several months, and it’s really, really great.

What is it? Watch this video:

http://www.getdropbox.com/screencast

It’s backup and auto-syncing done REALLY well. Best of all, you can sync between more than one computer, even if one is owned by someone else. So I could create a folder then share it with Robert. It shows up on his machine. If either of us changes files in the folder, those changes are auto-synced with each other.

Very nice.

So check it out when you get a chance. 2 GB are free. After that, you pay a small fee.

Fat footers

tech help, technology / By / 25 July 2008

Jerry wrote this & sent it to a client;

A fat footer is a means of showing secondary navigation, or
showcasing primary navigation, or reinforcing selected pieces of your
navigation. Here are some examples:

On a long-scroll blog page, put some choices at the bottom:
http://bokardo.com/

Put sales and branding at the top and navigation at the bottom:
http://www.dapper.net/

Promote the pages you really want them to visit:
http://www.blog.spoongraphics.co.uk/

Pizazz at the top, decision-making choices at the bottom:
http://www.apple.com/iphone/

We think it’s usually best to have a color change for the footer:
http://billyhughes.oph.gov.au/

What actions change MAC times on a UNIX box?

tech help, technology / By / 20 April 2008

From Holt Sorenson’s “Incident Response Tools For Unix, Part Two: File-System Tools” (SecurityFocus: 17 October 2003):

Various commands change the MAC [modify, access, and change] times in different ways. The table below shows the effects that some common commands have on MAC times. These tables were created on Debian 3.0 using an ext2 file system contained in a flat file mounted on a loopback device. … Experimenting with your own system to verify the information in the tables below is encouraged. These tables can serve as a general guide, however.

How common commands change MACtimes for a directory (foo):
Action atime ctime mtime
creation (mkdir foo) X X X
directory move (mv foo bar) X X
file creation (touch foo/foo) X X
file creation (dd if=/dev/zero of=foo/foo count=1) X X
list directory (ls foo) X
change directory (cd foo)
file test (-f foo)
file move/rename (mv foo foo_mvd) X X
permissions change (chmod/chown <some_perm> foo) X
file copy (mv foo_mvd foo) X X
file edit (vim foo) X X
file edit (emacs foo) X X X
file edit (nvi/nano foo)
How common commands change MACtimes for a file (f1):
Action atime ctime mtime
creation (touch foo) X X X
creation (dd if=/dev/zero of=foo count=1) X X X
rename (mv foo bar)
permissions change (chmod <some_perm> foo) X
copy (cp foo bar) X
copy overwrite (cp bar foo) X X
append (cat >> foo) X X
overwrite (cat > foo) X X
truncate (cp /dev/null foo) X X
list file (ls foo)
edit (vim/emacs/xemacs/joe/jed foo) X X X
edit (ed/nvi/vi (sun)/vi (obsd)/nano/pico foo) X1 X1 X1
1 – all times changed, but atime is slightly older than mtime and ctime

The ls command can be used to show the modify, access or change times of files. The following table shows various ls commands that sort in reverse order by mtime, atime, or ctime. This causes ls to list the most recent times last.

displaying MACtimes using ls:
Linux (ls from GNU fileutils) OpenBSD Solaris
mtime ls -latr –full-time ls -latTr ls -latr
atime ls -laur –full-time ls -lauTr ls -laur
ctime ls -lacr –full-time ls -lacTr ls -lacr

How to delete stuck files on Amazon’s S3

security, tech help, technology / By / 26 July 2010

I use Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage Service) to back up files, and I also use OmniGraffle, a diagramming program, on my Mac. This is a letter I sent to OmniGraffle recently that explains a problem with the interaction of OmniGraffle and S3.

Start letter:

OmniGraffle (OG) is a great app, but it has a serious, showstopping incompatability with Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage Service).

S3 is an online backup service run by Amazon. Lots & lots of people use it, with more moving to it all the time. You can find out more about S3 here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_S3

I created some documents in OmniGraffle and uploaded them to S3. When I tried to perform another backup, the command-line S3 app I was using crashed. I tried another. Crashed. I tried Interarchy, a GUI app, but while it appeared to work, in reality it simply silently failed. After much trial and error, I finally determined that it was a particular file generated by OG that was causing the problems. But I had no idea how to fix things.

After searching on the Amazon S3 forums, it turns out others are experiencing the exact same problem. I found two entries discussing how an invisible character in the name of the Icon file located in a .graffle folder was causing the crash. Here are those two entries:

http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/thread.jspa?messageID=63273

http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/thread.jspa?messageID=45488

Eventually, after over an hour of trying various combinations with the help of a friend, I was able to delete the offending file using this command.

./s3cmd.rb -v delete “granneclientele:clientele/images/omnigraffle/audacity-toolbar-tools.graffle/Icon”$’\r’

I show that command to you not because I expect you’ll understand it, but because it demonstrates that this is a bear of a problem that many of your customers will be unable to solve on their own. As more of your customers use S3, they’re going to run into this issue.

I understand this all may sound confusing, so please do not hesitate to call or email me for further details.

/End letter

An OmniGraffle support person wrote me back, saying that this issue had been fixed in version 4.2 of the software.