Weblog Topics
A Chaotic Dance
The web is a chaotic dance of ever developing and evolving tools. I would like to offer my help to your executive management team in tracking and anticipating the trends ahead. Voice recognition, web-enabled mobile phones, high-quality online typography, collaborative workflow systems, interactive multi-user web projects, web radio, web video, database visualization, and many other tools are available. These tools can assist managers to better understand the knowledge which resides in the networks of people that work with them.
This knowledge is useful to the degree that the manager can visualize the relationships between the nodes. The tools also help to communicate the cooperative vision from the center outward, allowing hierarchy to evolve into overlapping fields of influence, rather than autocratic pyramids.
Better tools should lead to better communication and better decisions. Design Management is the process of identifying critical junctures or inflection points — “tipping points” — and through intelligent analysis and strategic planning, creating a fertile culture for new ideas to take root and flourish.
Securing OS X 10.5 sshd
There are a number of excellent how-to's addressing this such as
http://www.macgeekery.com/tips/security/basic_mac_os_x_security
One important point:
if the host is behind a wireless router, be sure to open the new port on the router as well, or you will cut yourself off!
Fix for ypbind errors in OS X
OS X 10.5 Leopard is showing these errors every ten seconds:
] com.apple.nis.ypbind[]: Domainname not set. Aborting.
] com.apple.launchd[1] (com.apple.nis.ypbind[]): Exited with exit code: 1
] rasalas-pro com.apple.launchd[] (com.apple.nis.ypbind): Throttling respawn: Will start in 10 seconds
I fixed it as follows:
Since ypbind is not used by OS X in 99.9% of installations, just turn it off.
Edit the ypbind start-up definition
sudo vi /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.nis.ypbind.plist
and change
<true/>
to
<false/>
Then shutdown the service
sudo service com.apple.nis.ypbind stop
I'm expecting that the "false" will keep it from restarting on reboot, but not quite sure about that.
Also, for future reference
sudo service --list
will show all the 'services'...
OS X Help Viewer Freezes
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=137902
:
... - before doing the above, check out ~/Library/Documentation/Help and /Library/Documentation/Help and scan the list clicking on each item to see if you have any orphaned aliases there (from apps you've trashed).
I went through the above steps with a malfunctioning Help Viewer and found they fixed the problem exactly once - until the Help Viewer was reinvoked.
Trashing aliases before doing the above made the Help Viewer stable again on my system.
:
Go to Users/Your_Name/Library/Preferences and delete the following files:
com.apple.help.plist
com.apple.helpui.plist (not in 10.5)
com.apple.helpviewer.plist
Ban Clear Form Buttons
Thanks for visiting!
Join the movement to ban "Clear Form" buttons from the web! These throwbacks to computer science sophomores are a bane to civilized discourse. The only reason they exist is to accidentally erase the form you've just spent ten minutes filling out, because they are inevitably placed a hair's breadth away from the "Submit" button!
The only appropriate place for a "clear" button is at the TOP of the form where one may, in fact, want to clear the form. However, even then, one can easily erase any existing data on a per field basis, as required. Please feel pass this on to webmasters who are still stuck on the meaningless tradition!
Peter Fraterdeus is a UI designer and communications consultant. For more discussion of online user interface design, visit the dezineCafé.Return to the dezineCafé, already in progress...
Neo Office for OSX
http://www.neooffice.org/
Open Office (OO) is a free and open source "productivity" suite which mirrors the capabilities of Microsoft Office. NeoOffice reads and writes MS Word, Excel, and dozens (hundreds?) of other (obscure?) file types. (I thought I'd run into a problem, as this menu took quite a few secs to populate, and the program was unresponsive in the interim. However, it's a hell of a list!)
The most recent versions will inter-operate with Microsoft's new "open standard" Office XML formats, providing even better compatibility into the future.
I've been using NeoOffice for the past year and recently switched over to NeoOffice Writer for all of my word processing.
It's highly sophisticated, offering at least 80-90% of the features that MS Word does, and easily 100% of the features that any normal Word user would need day-to-day. For users of OS X on Intel Macs, the speed improvements over Word (which is still not Intel native) are remarkable.
Here's the "Excel" application, NeoOffice Calc
NeoOffice gets ***** five stars for being an excellent alternative to the overpriced Microsoft Office Suite.
While I give the Microsoft Mac products division credit for vastly improving the Mac version of Office over the past couple of years, it's very likely that Microsoft will phase out Word for the Mac in the future.
NeoOffice provides an excellent migration path for Mac users with lots of Word or Excel documents, or with a need to share these with Windows Office users.
http://www.planamesa.com/neojava/en/download.php
"""
NeoOffice 2.0 Aqua Beta 3 is a test release and may have some undiscovered bugs that may cause NeoOffice to crash. If you feel that you need software that has been heavily tested, we recommend that you use a commercially-supported product like Microsoft Office.
Since NeoOffice is developed by volunteers and tested by users, we expect that users will find crashing or other serious bugs. We strongly recommend that you save your work frequently so that if you encounter a crashing bug, you will not lose much data.
"""
Ha. Like Microsoft doesn't crash ;-)
I've found the latest release to be incredibly stable. (although if you select that "open as" menu shown above, it may take a minute to show up...)
have fun!
PF
