During the clean-up of my personal data on my Mac's, I found several PGP encrypted containers, and encrypted files. To see what was stored in them, I needed to install PGP (again).
After installing the software I dug up my keyrings and everything worked fine, until I tried to encrypt an e-mail. In the old days you had a button for encrypting the body of an e-mail message, but today things have changed. PGP is using some sort of (local) proxy to encrypt, decrypt, sign and verify e-mail messages. BUT there's also the possibility to do this with text on the clipboard, or text you selected with your mouse/keyboard.
This is where I ran into some missing functionality; Normally the PGP actions are visible under the 'right-mouse' click -> Services, but no PGP actions available. Further investigation showed that no PGP actions were available on (plain) text in editors. PGP actions on entire files were no problem.
Today we ran into a feature of the Machine Authentication Restrictions (MAR) option in the Cisco Secure ACS Radius server. It seems that when you're using the ACS for 802.1x authentication, you have the option of demanding that the authenticating users can only be authenticated when the computer is already authenticated. This way, you make sure that no user can access the network without a legitimate PC.
PhotoLinkerI tend to geotag most of my photos. This way I have location information with the photo for future reference. It's also a neat feature that you might exploit when creating photo albums with e.g. iPhoto. The GPS coordinates in the images creates the option to create maps in iPhoto albums.
I use geotagging in two different ways. I use the jf Geocoding plugin in Lightroom and the PhotoLinker application. Both have their (dis)advantages. Something I won't go into in this post.
One can not have enough screen "real-estate" when working with photos, or while exploring your web-development skillz. So, a single display is simply not an option in my case......
Next to my 27" iMac stands a Dell 24" TFT Display. This Dell display is being abused for two things;
- extended display for my iMac, and
- as a main monitor for my (Windows) work laptop
using the input selector on the TFT display.
Since I'm a guy and I rock at multitasking (*cough*), I have both my Windows (work) laptop and my iMac powered on. In this scenario I have only one active display on my iMac. The second display should therefor not be used, and this is where Apple fails miserably.
Going on holiday is fun, but it's also a time of concessions on several levels. Especially if you can't bring every lens you own or (in theory) might need. Since the awesome Nikon 5-500mm f/1.8G VR ED N (small, <€1000, <1kg) isn't widely available. This means deciding what to bring in your camera bag.
In my case, I wanted to experiment with primes during my holiday. this also means that you have to use the foot-zoom, and on several occasions that won't work because of certain limitation (walls, buildings, ravines, etc.). In those cases you have 3 options;
- Don't make the photo
- Make a photo, but know immediately that it will end in /dev/null when you get home (a just-for-the-record photo).
- Improvise
So as you might have guessed, I ran into such a situation in Toledo, Spain. They have this great cathedral in the middle of an old town with narrow streets. You need a ultra-wide angle lens for almost anything there.
My area of expertise in the professional world is Network Security. This includes protecting network from intrusions, but also delivering reports about the network status. For the latter we use SIEM(like) environments like the Cisco CS-MARS and the Juniper STRM.
The 'problem' with these devices is that they are great in reporting incidents and creating awesome reports about everything, but they lack the functionality to do some serious investigating.
I have several customers with a SIEM, and most of them still use (Linux) commandline tools like awk, grep, etc. these tools work, but you need to scrape everything together yourself, and building queries can be quite challenging. This is where Splunk> comes in.
After Apple updated the Mac mini to it's current form (mid 2010), I decided that it was time to start replacing my 'faithful' Windows 2003 server with something a bit less power consuming. The original Mac Mini was basically a consumer device, but a while back, Apple released a server version of the device. The main differences are:
- Only 1 CPU model available (2.66GHz at this moment)
- No DVD drive
- 2 * 500GB internal disks
- OSX 10.6.4 Server edition (unlimited clients)
Basically everything you could ever need for a server with a very small footprint.
The installation of Coldfusion is not straight forward. Not that I expected it to be [1], [2], [3], but one keeps hoping on an installer that actually installs the complete package, and where you don't have to edit files yourself to get it to work. It's not that it's the very first version of the scripting engine......
Anyway, the installer guides you through everything needed to INSTALL the software. Getting it to work comes next....
