Jimmy's weblog

Well, the rumours were true after all. During his WWDC keynote address, Steve Jobs announced that Apple will begin switching from IBM PowerPC to Intel chips during 2006 with the transition to be completed by the end of 2007.
Developers using XCode 2.1 can today begin compiling “universial binaries” for both PPC and Intel and [...]

One of the more useful utilities that Apple includes with its Xserve products is the Server monitor. This tool provides detailed remote hardware monitoring including:

Info - Hostname, IP address, operating system, processor type and configuration as well as total system memory
Memory - Name, size, speed and type of memory installed in each slot
Drives - [...]

After a few days using Apple’s new operating system, I’ve found myself becoming surprisingly addicted to Dashboard widgets, in particular the Address book and iTunes controller.
I’d also been keen to use the Weather widget but entering the name of my home town of Melbourne (Australia) gave me the weather for Melbourne, Florida instead. Not [...]

Wondering just how many failed authentication attempts your OSX machine has been getting? Try…
sudo grep “failed to auth” /var/log/secure.log | sed “s/^.*user \(.*\) for.*$/\1/” | sort | uniq -c
…and you’ll see something like…
14 abpusr01-u
1 ben
1 ben-u
2 billy
3 black
2 blow
2 bogdan
3 cosmin
19 cyrus
12 daemon
…
30 mysql
30 nobody
7 patrick
6 postfix
1530 root
…
24 www

By default OSX server sends root’s mail straight to /dev/null - the electronic equivalent of a black hole - thus breaking the first commandment of system administration (Thou shall monitor thy logs and mail).
A far more sensible configuration is to forward mail for root@[your server] to an address you read regularly. This can be [...]

FreePOPs is a POP3 daemon which allows you to use your normal email client to check web-based email services including Gmail, Hotmail, AOL, Yahoo or any Squirrelmail-based site.
Free and open source, FreePOPs works with any email client which supports POP3 including Mail, Entourage, Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora and many more. It is cross platform, [...]

Browsing through Apple’s Developer Connection site, I stumbled across a very comprehensive guide to OS X shortcuts.
From Command-Space Bar through to Control–Right Arrow, they’re all listed here.

NAME
watchdog - Mac OS X Server service monitoring daemon

SYNOPSIS
watchdog [-d | -n | -x] [-r] [-f file]
watchdog [-h | -v]

DESCRIPTION
watchdog is an (AT&T) init-like process that launches,
monitors, and relaunches critical services when they
terminate. watchdog improves reliability of the system
by [...]

As someone who hasn’t used a Windows desktop computer for several years, there are some nice features that I’ve forgotten even existed. One of them is viewing PDFs within a browser window.
My main work and home computers are OS X machines, so I spend most of my web browsing time using Safari. When [...]

Postfix Enabler is a simple application that allows Mac OS X.3 users to easily and quickly set up a mail server on their computer. It provides a graphical interface to configure SMTP, POP3 and IMAP services, all of which can be offered in clear text or encrypted using SSL. It can also enable [...]