Local IT Solutions

  • Apple Mail 4.0 and IMAP

    Check out this reference page on the Google Apps help site: http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=78892

  • WordPress 3.0 is out

    WordPress 3.0 is out and available for download. You can check it out here. I have installed it from scratch for one project and I have installed the upgrade using the built-in upgrade tools. Both have been very successful. The new interface improvements are great and it seems very stable. All of my existing templates…

  • Amazon CloudFront and media distribution

    So I have finally gotten around to setting up an Amazon CloudFront solution for a hosting customer. Set up an Amazon S3 bucket, upload some content to it (in this case, some .flv files for a film promotion site) and then sign into the AWS console and set up a CloudFront distribution point, selecting the…

  • iPhone and iPad with Google Calendars

    After having spent an hour or two trying to find the right answer, I found the easiest and most beautiful solution as the following : 1. Follow Google’s instructions to setup your main account using Exchange protocol. 2. On your iPhone or iPad, launch Safari and go to m.google.com/sync – don’t forget to choose English…

  • The first few hours with iPad

    Well… I couldn’t resist and was pleasantly surprised to find that our local Apple reseller had more than enough stock for everyone to go around (before 9:00am at least!) It is very good. All the built-in apps are very fast on both WiFi and using Telstra’s iPad 3G coverage. Watching movies is easy and I…

  • Using Preview to merge and create multi-page PDFs

    The Preview.app in 10.5 and newer has many new features. One that appears to be undocumented, however, is the creation (merging) of multi-page PDF documents. It’s simple: Use Preview to open up the two PDFs you would like to merge. Choose View » Show Sidebar (or click the Sidebar button). Make sure both PDFs are…

  • WordPress and SlideDeck

    When using SlideDeck with WordPress, you might find that you can’t get the SlideDeck to correctly insert as per the instructions. The hint: make sure you are using the Visual Editor in WordPress, not the static HTML editor. One of my hosting customers spent half the weekend with various browsers, version and test SlideDecks in…

  • Importing Movable Type to WordPress

    When importing into WordPress, the importer doesn’t seem to like accents and umlauts. One of my hosting customers is now going through the entries now and finding that where there is a word with an accent or umlaut in it (e.g. the first “a” in Trollhättan), the importer will stop at that letter and does…

  • Issues with WP eDegrees° theme and FCG

    If you are using the latest release of the eDegree° WordPress theme and you can’t get the Featured Content Gallery to work on the front page, welcome to my world! After a lot of searching, I finally found the solution here. The secret is to comment-out the second line of the wp-content/themes/edegree/js/functions.js.

  • Printer Control in a Managed Network Environment

    One of my customers recently complained of having to go out to the receptionist’s computer and type in an administrator password everytime her local USB printer ran out of paper or got a paper jam. I think I have a fix: Create a new group in Workgroup Manager on the server. Add the user to…

  • Interrupted Yum Install Processs

    I was patching a RedHat server that managed to get itself all confused when it was installing patches. I was able to stop the “yum update” process and restart it from where it virtually left off with following: “yum clean all” “yum update” When you run the “yum update” command, you will likely get some…

  • Campaign Monitor + Rails = Awesomeness

    Once you have Rails up and going on Mac OS X Server, you can add useful plugins to extend the functionality and perform some useful tasks. One such solution would be to integrate with Campaign Monitor so you can subscribe new users/members/shoppers to lists within Campaign Monitor for later mail-outs. Start by adding some extra…

  • Ruby and MySQL on Snow Leopard Server

    http://www.icoretech.org/2009/11/installing-mysql-ruby-gem-in-snow-leopard-server/

  • Software Update AppleScript [Updated]

    Check out this site for a handy AppleScript to manage changing between Apple’s Software Update Servers and a local Software Update server running on a Mac OS X on your own network.

  • Insanely Annoying SQL Server Web Database Problem

    Well… I have been working with a customer all afternoon trying to get a MSSQL Database uploaded from their office server to a web hosting environment. Check this out: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/01/11/tip-trick-how-to-upload-a-sql-file-to-a-hoster-and-execute-it-to-deploy-a-sql-database.aspx