Tag: computing

  • I’m geeked

    My department at MSU had a day celebrating 50 years of computing at MSU. So, in the MSU Computer Store, there was a Mac II plugged in and running, tiny monochromatic monitor and all. I couldn’t help but look, and lo and behold, the hard drive had TeachText and NCSA Mosaic, the first publically available…

  • Overview of PGP, S/MIME and the evolving versions of secure e-mail

    I just read an article by Jim Galvin, published March of 2000 in Information Security Magazine, (IN)SECURITY FROM END TO END. 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…

  • Securing e-mail

    Every once in a while, I get e-mails from server admins with host connection information. This tends to get under my skin, though I admit to sending similar information from time to time. The thing is, e-mail is so darned good at delivering this kind of information. The problem, of course, is that e-mail is…

  • Removing words from the Microsoft Office Custom Dictionary

    In Microsoft Word, Excel, Outlook, Entourage, or PowerPoint, when you do a spell check, you have the option to add a word to the custom dictionary. 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”…

  • MS Manual of Style has no “open source” entry

    I was just drafting an email and wanted to know if there is a standard way of writing out “open source,” like, is it capitalized. 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,…

  • $100 laptop from MIT Media Labs

    A $100 windup-powered laptop targeted at children in developing nations? 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…

  • OS 10.4.2 does not connect to Win 2000 server

    As noted in the prior post, I had no problem connecting to a Windows 2000 Server shared volume with Active Directory authentication using Mac OS 10.2.8. 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…

  • Was able to connect with OS 10.2.8 to Win 2000 server using Active Directory authentication (Troubleshooting, continued)

    I tried on my old standby Mac at home (an old G3 Blue and White running OS 10.2.8). I had to first connect to the MSU Virtual Private Network, but once I logged on to the VPN, I was able to Connect to Server and mount the volume I’ve been after. Now, to see if…

  • Troubleshooting OS 10.4 connection to Windows share using Active Directory authentication

    I’m trying to mount a shared volume on the Mac OS 10.4 laptop I use at MSU. The shared volume is on a Windows server and it uses Active Directory to authenticate user names and passwords in the domain. I have all the right information (server address, share name, user name, password), and I have…

  • Coming soon? Dual-boot, Mac & Win

    So all this talk about Apple moving its OS to x86 processors makes me think that at some point down the road, we’ll be able to buy a system from Apple (because they won’t officially permit the OS to run on just any computer – not that hacks aren’t already running) that has OS 10.5…