I couldn’t help but look, and lo and behold, the hard drive had TeachText and NCSA Mosaic, the first publically available web browser, on it. When I started Mosaic, it had the date on the startup screen: 10-29-1993.

So, I wrote a web page in TeachText, welcoming people to the Computer Store and our 50 years celebration, and then viewed it in Mosaic. And then I annotated it using using the Mac’s audio-recording (which worked great, by the way).

I’m not the nostalgiac type, but it was weird. The very first web page I wrote, ever, I wrote with TeachText, and the first web browser I ever used was Mosaic on a Mac. It really took me back.

Writing markup with TeachText and seeing it render in Mosaic are the seeds of my life as a professional web developer. It seems so very long ago.

The article provides an overview of the origination of secure e-mail and how the technologies have changed over the years. It also provides context for digital signatures, e-mail certificates, and PGP versus S/MIME.

Here’s an excerpt from the article:

PGP vs. S/MIME, S/MIME vs. PGP. On the one hand, it really doesn’t matter which of the two technologies you choose. From a user’s perspective, both provide the same set of security services, and neither really has any significant advantage over the other. On the other hand, the fact that there are two choices naturally raises the question of interoperability.

So, today when I received yet more user names and passwords via e-mail, and then needed to pass that information on to a person I work with, I figured it was as good a time as any to look into securing e-mail.

I’ve known about PGP, but have had issues getting it working in former versions of Apple’s Mail application. So, upon Googling for apple mail encryption or some-such phrase, I found a few helpful resources.

• MacDevCenter.com — How to Set Up Encrypted Mail on Mac OS X
• Mac OS X 10.3: Mail – How to Use a Secure Email Signing Certificate (Digital ID)
• Personal E-mail Certificates from Thawte.com

The first link above is a walk-through on getting S/MIME set up with Apple Mail. S/MIME seems to be an alternative to PGP. The short story is that I went ahead and got a certificate from Thawte, installed it into a special keychain on the Mac, sent a signed message to my co-worker while he was doing the same. Now we have each other’s public keys stored in our respective programs and we each have our own private keys, so we can send signed and encrypted e-mail to each other.

So, from here on out, I have a safer way of sending sensitive information to some select people.

And, I need to give credit to Apple’s Mail application. While getting the certificates and keychain access all worked out wasn’t the most straightforward task (it wasn’t hard though), now that it is set up, signing and encrypting messages is very easy.

This is helpful, for instance, if your name is odd, like “Davin.” To stop my name from always appearing when I run a spellcheck, I just clicked the “Add” button in the spelling checker dialogue box to add it to the custom spelling dictionary.

So, adding words is easy. A question from a PowerPoint class today was, “How do I remove words from the spelling dictionary?” In this particular case, someone added a misspelled word and wanted to get it out.

Well, here’s how.

On Windows, go to Start » Search and type in CUSTOM.DIC. Make sure that you are looking for hidden files as well.

When it comes up, open the file in a text editor like Notepad. You’ll see a list of words that are considered okay. To remove one, simply delete that line of the text file and save the file.

That’s it.

On Mac OS 10.x, use Spotlight (the built-in search tool) to look for “Custom Dictionary”. The file will most like be in /Users/yourname/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/

Open that file in a text editing program (BBEdit or TextWrangler are nice. You can probably also use TextEdit.) Again, delete the offending lines and save the file.

I happen to have the “Microsoft Manual of Style for Technical Publications, Third Edition” on my desk, and I found no entry for anything resembling “open source” in it.

Somehow, I wasn’t surprised.

Children in developing nations? More like, everyone in the U.S. For $100, I’ll bet there would be masses of people around the globe lined up to get them.

Granted, it won’t have all the features of what we normally think of as a laptop, but it does look very interesting.

This reminds me of a story about how Ford envisioned manufacturing a car that the average worker could afford–before he even realized how he was going to do it. I like it. Set a price and some basic features and figure out how to do it, even though it may seem ridiculous.

When I tried doing the exact same process on Mac OS 10.4.2, I got a -36 error. Basically, it doesn’t work.

So, there is some sort of conflict with how the OS connects, but it was able to connect when inside the firewall for the server.

I’m not sure what to make of it at this point.

Now, to see if I can do the same with OS 10.4.2.

I have all the right information (server address, share name, user name, password), and I have successfully mounted the network drive on a Windows XP system.

On the Mac, I go to Go->Connect to Server, and I type in the smb://server.address/sharename and click the Connect button. I am then prompted for a domain, user name, and a password. I enter all the information in the appropriate boxes, and proceed to get an error: Error Code -36.

I’d write in the text of the error message, but I think I’ve tried logging in too many times so my account seems frozen.

I tried connecting through a VPN. No luck. I tried using CFIS protocol instead of SMB. No luck.

I just tried the command line smbclient and made some progress, but I’m really out of my element here.

Then when we fire up the machine, we can choose to load either Win or Mac OS. And, maybe the Mac OS will be able to just boot up Win natively. Hm.

Virtual PC will become extinct?

Linux/Apache will own the server space and with the emergence of MySQL and PHP as the hot development tools over Microsoft .NET and J2EE there will be no way to unseat it. In popular parlance this is commonly referred to as LAMP.

It’s an interesting statement because MySQL and PHP are not as full-featured technologies as .NET and J2EE. So, from a large-scale developement perspective, they aren’t as strong options. They’re getting better with recent versions, but they still just don’t have the features.

But, that said, MySQL and PHP are both available at no-cost (though total cost of ownership is another debate) and they are easier to learn, in part because of the fewer features. The barrier to entry is lower. This fact alone may make Dvorak’s prediction come true.

And, there are some pretty impressive and large-scale web sites out there that use MySQL and PHP, so while they don’t have the depth of the more mature technologies, you can’t really scoff at them. They get the job done.

Here are his recommendations:

• Turn off Bluetooth, Discoverable, so that random Bluetooth enabled devices won’t see the laptop.
• Turn on the systems’s Firewall in System Preferences
• Install Norton AntiVirus and keep it updated

Just a note, I’ve been using Macs for years, and the last virus I had on a Mac was in 1995 and it was a Word Macro virus. Highly irritating, but it did very little damage.

That said, I’m sure the day will come when a virus will rip through the Mac world and play havoc with all of the unprotected Macs out there.

I can’t even get an OS to install. Sometimes, it doesn’t even bring up the BIOS.

I figure there is one component or another that is fried, thus messing up the whole system. It isn’t the hard drive. I don’t think it is the RAM. It might be the power supply. It might be the CD-ROM drive. It might be the system board. I do not know. I do not care.

My Mac works, so it isn’t all that urgent.

The problem is, there are files on that drive that I hadn’t yet made copies of on this sytem. Which is to say, those files are now in jeopardy. This is a problem because they represent quite a few hours of work for a client whose project I need to finish before taking on a new job. At least that was the intention.

Oh, drat. Drat. Drat. Why is it always the computers with Microsoft Windows that cause me problems? MS is such a big, easy target. It could very well be a problem with the hard drive itself, having nothing to do with Windows. Really. Now, the trick will be putting in a different hard drive, trying to install Windows on it, and seeing if I can salvage the files from the corrupt drive.

Why am I so dreading installing all the software again? Is it because they will refuse to install because they say they are already installed with that license key? What if I just intall Linux on the other drive and get to the files covertly?

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmm. I have the disk images for Red Hat Linux, v9 just stitting in a directory on my Mac. Now I just need a fresh hard drive.