If you want to open the Sound-Pane in System Preferences then try this key combination:

⌥ – any of the keycaps to modify the volume on your Mac

The same goes for the Monitors-Pane:

⌥ – keycap to increase or decrease monitor backlight

Just a quick tip for the impatient. Works in 10.5.x and 10.6.x.

Get the whole story on Wikipedia or from the BBC.

It seems that it is not that widely known, that you are able to launch Dashboard via AppleScript, as well. If you got an error message like ‘Dashboard got an error: Application isn’t running.’ while using activate, launch does the trick. It is as simple as that:

tell application "Dashboard"
	launch
end tell

Bonus: If you are administering one or more OS X servers, then check your available Widgets in Dashboard, there is one to give you information about the vitals of your server(s).

cron, the one available on OS X, is capable of handling the switch from daylight time to ‘normal’ without problems. Meaning jobs starting between 2 AM and 3AM won’t run twice. I always thought, that this behavior is built into launchd as well. Long story short: Three OS X Servers started the jobs twice last weekend.

Just an FYI in case you need to know.

First things first, though. This is my take on the subject, read gut-feeling and experience. I’m not a doctor or in any other position to tell you what to do.

The Basic Idea behind the ‘Morning Banana Diet’

People on this diet are supposed to eat a banana and drink a glass of water for breakfast. That’s it? Basically, yes. It is said, that you are allowed to eat normally during the rest of the day. Your weight is supposed to go down when adhering to this routine.

Why the ‘Morning Banana Diet’ could work

Honestly, the above section sounds to good to be true, doesn’t it? IMHO, it could work. Let me tell you why. There are a couple of reasons igniting the feeling of being hungry:

1. You haven’t eaten in a while.
2. It is ‘time to eat.’
3. Your blood-sugar is low.

There are more reasons, granted; let’s concentrate at the ones mentioned, though. The first one is a given, your body needs something to burn, period. The second reason is known to give you a feeling of being hungry without the real need to eat something, meaning your body could continue to exist nevertheless; it is just ‘trained’ to be hungry at certain times. Next time your getting hungry around lunch-time, try to figure out if you really need something to eat or if it’s just a habitual thing.

Reason three was my clue to why the Morning Banana Diet could actually work. If your body does not have enough sugar to burn, it tends to get nervous, and rightly so. If your body is lacking sugar, it cannot generate the energy to keep you going. The proof of the pudding , eat something with artificial sweetener, you’ll get hungry again much faster as if you’d eat something containing sugar.

If you eat a banana in the morning, your blood-sugar should be fine until at least noon; the craving for sugar during a morning-break should lessen considerably. Especially if your body gets used to the intake of sugar and vitamins contained in a banana. So the Morning Banana Diet uses reason two and fights reason three. So in theory, at least, it could work.

What’s your take on the subject?

• Don’t panic!
• There might be a way out of this.

What happened?

The passwords for the administrative account on OS X Server, I’m talking about the one created during installation, and the diradmin-account are the same, right? Are you sure? They probably are, if you didn’t change one of them. These two passwords are the same after the installation, because they have been synchronized during the installation. If you should change one of them later, then they won’t be synced again. Shouldn’t be a problem, though, everyone keeps records of vital data like this, most of the time.

On the other hand, if one of us sets up a machine, then said machine should get a healthy workout before deployment, to make sure the hardware is OK. This usually includes the installation and configuration of all needed hard- and software. So, in theory, the machine would be ready for deployment. But, during these tests, nobody cares about passwords; the system runs in a controlled environment and access from outside of this environment is either impossible or severely restricted. This could mean—if the Open Directory-user-accounts have been created during this phase—that nobody tried to connect to the directory-tree as diradmin after the change to the “real” administrative password. Same goes for periodic changes to the administrative password, depending on your policy.

It happened, I cannot login as diradmin any more…

Regardless how it happened, don’t do anything in a rush now; breathe. Spare yourself the trouble to try passwd diradmin as super-user, it won’t work; you need the old password to make changes. If you have access to the system, either physically or via ssh, ARD or screen-sharing, then the situation can be rectified.

If possible, make a backup of the system, seriously! Then retrace the steps in How to reset the Open Directory administrator password and you should be OK.

In a nutshell: The documents describes how to use Workgroup Manager to gather information about the password and uses mkpassdb to dump the password-database and overwrite the old password with a new one. It seems, that on 10.5 all you need to do is to use

sudo mkpassdb -dump

to get the slot-ID and

mkpassdb -setpassword [slot-ID]

executed as super-user, a.k.a. root (one way to get there is sudo su), to create a new password for diradmin.

The latter is my experience, your mileage my vary.

Disclaimer: The fact that it worked for me, does not necessarily mean it will work for you. You have to do it on your own risk, I’m not responsible if something goes wrong.

It seems, the person getting this very IP-address by the ISP before the poor soul in question used it to send spam and was blocked for doing so by the RBL. Is it that hard to check for the own address-range when getting the data-stream of an RBL (I’m 99% sure, that the ISP in question is using this very RBL to protect its own servers)? Obviously so. Hint: grep [my_ip_range] does the trick.

Again, just a quick reminder.

[No, I won't name names.]

I found one deprecated call (in two incarnations): listcats expands to list_cats, but the beauty in using the Bundle is, I just exchanged it to expand to wp_list_categories and I was done. I don’t have to remember which calls are deprecated, I’ll just have to make sure to check the Bundle as soon as new lists with deprecated calls show up and exchange them. The only “clear and present danger” I see in this approach is: What do i do, while not using TextMate? But that holds true for almost anything handled by a Bundle in TextMate. (I just found out, that the editor in WordPress does not close HTML-Tags when ⌘ – ⌥ – . is pressed. )

Kudos to Joost for picking up the task. Thanks, really.

I’m going to test it later today.

sudo tcpdump host [ip-address]

It lists the packets as they go by, regardless if [ip-address] is the source or the destination. The use of sudo is a necessity on OS X, you’ll end up with a tcpdump: no suitable device found-message otherwise and rightly so, “normal” users have no rights to snoop tpcdump packets.