Thanks for checking out my blog. There's a good chance you're here because you had a class with me or met me at a tradeshow. I'm an Apple- and Adobe-certified instructor from Boston, and a full-time trainer for Future Media Concepts.

Feel free to take off your shoes, get comfortable, and have a look around. All of my previous posts can be searched by the keywords along the left side of the page, my resume can be found on the right, and if you care to write me with a question, my address there, too. Please, don't hesitate- your questions give me material to write about (and improve my classes).

And YES, I am available for consulting!

Mac users can work quite happily in an AD environment, with one small caveat: Mac users aren't notified when their account password expires.
I promised I'd post about this when I found it and I finally found it. Behold…


http://www.thomsontown.com/pwdmon.htm

Now that Snow Leopard is out and about, I thought I'd repost a tip from a long time ago. Installing Snow Leopard has gotten faster, but its still pretty slow off of the DVD; DVDs are slower than hard drives, there's no way around it. I'm a huge fan of making disk images, but since the Snow Leopard installer requires being booted off the disk, you can't install off of a disk image. And even if youre installing off of the DVD, you may not want to reboot- for example if youre setting up a second drive or an external drive but you want to keep on getting other work done while it installs.

Try this:

Pop in the Snow Leopard disk, or mount the imange, but instead of double-clicking the installer, click the Go menu and go to System/Installation/Packages  (note: there's no leading slash. You're not navigating to the System on the root drive, you're navigating to the System on the installer). Find OSInstall.mpkg and double-click. "mpkg" is a meta-package, or a package full of other packages. This is the installer that launches when you boot off the disk.

Now you can install Snow Leopard on a drive without rebooting!

Quick note- if you've upgraded to Snow Leopard, don't forget to upgrade Adobe Flash: 10.6 downgrades it to a, lets say, less secure version.

www.adobe.com

Update- 10.6.1 fixes this. Thanks, Apple!

Been getting a few questions about this, and lo and behold, here's a blog post from Adobe…

If you're a Web designer, expect your CSS colors & your untagged/unmanaged images to look darker on Snow Leopard than on previous versions of the Mac OS. You'll also see less of a visible color shift when going from Photoshop to Flash or other unmanaged environments (e.g. Internet Explorer).

Why is that? Apple has switched to a default gamma of 2.2, which is what Windows has used for years. Colors that aren't color-managed are going to look darker on the whole. Your whole display will now be closer to what Windows users see.

More from John Nack

Here's a little keynote presentation I threw together that reviews some of the many command-line tools for working with Directory Services. Many of the ds8, slap*, ldap*, and k* commands are detailed, as well as procedures for importing & exporting keytabs, and binding to an OD master with the command line.

It is by no means thorough or all-inclusive but it's a good start.

files.me.com/overstim/j8ettg.key.zip

If you don't ave Keynote, you can still view these slides in Leopard with QuickLook, or import them into PowerPoint.