Firefox Slow? Try this.

// February 6th, 2010 // Comments Off // Technical

By Default, Firefox sets the history to 90 days. A bit excessive if you ask me. By setting the number to something a little more reasonable (like 20-30 days), you’ll notice a dramatic speed increase, especially upon start up.

Facebook, Twitter? Be Aware

// July 1st, 2009 // 1 Comment » // Technical

As computer software gets more secure, the bad guys depend more and more on our active co-operation to compromise our systems. “Social Engineering” is the term for this strategy. We all know about the dangers of requests to “run this program” or “click this link” in e-mails or on Web sites. And we wouldn’t do that, right?

And then we go to a social networking site, like LinkedIn, FaceBook, or Twitter, and happily run an application within that site to support a cause or define a relationship or send a “gift” because a friend or acquaintance invited us to. And of course, since we don’t really know anything about the application, we take the chance of having our system compromised. Viruses and malware are spreading like wildfire through social networking sites through harmless-looking malicious applications, and the communities are surprised when it happens. There’s an outraged sense of “how could this happen HERE?” when really, they did it to themselves by running software on their system that they didn’t know they could trust. Yes, FaceBook or Twitter might seem like good neighborhoods, but you can still run into creeps in the parking lot.

Excerpt from our company newsletter

Apple’s Migration Assistant

// June 25th, 2009 // No Comments » // Technical

Recently, I spent a great amount of time attempting to sync my new MacBook Pro running OS 10.5.7 with my old MacBook Pro running 10.4.11. Not having a firewire cable handy, I decided to use an ethernet cable. Supposedly, this is now possible, according to Apple. Well, not so… at least not for me.

I even spent 45 minutes on the phone with Apple’s tech support. The woman who helped me (she was very cool), ran me through the gamut. We tried everything from powering down both MacBooks, took the battery out of the old one, pressed the power button for 10 seconds, placed the battery back in, zapped the pram on both laptops, installed cd and dvd sharing from the new MacBook’s DVD, [take a breath...]

None of which worked… In the end, she and I agreed that it would be far less painful if I just got my hands on a firewire cable. So, I did just that, and everything worked out perfectly.

So, a word to the wise:

Save yourself some headaches, and use a firewire cable when migrating data from one Mac to another.

Nevermind, New Repo Found

// May 6th, 2009 // 1 Comment » // Technical

OK… I just stumbled upon AtomicRocketTurtle.com which is run by Scott Shinn (resume – pdf), the Director and Chief Scientist of the ART laboratory, a founder of Plesk, Inc. Scott maintains a wonderful RPM repository, specializing in packages like PHP, MySQL, ClamAV, and Spamassassin.

I was able to set up the repository and seamlessly upgraded PHP to 5.2.9 and MySQL to 5.0.79. Cheers to Scott!

Where Has My Repository Gone?

// May 6th, 2009 // No Comments » // Technical

Once upon a time, we could hop on over to Jason Litka’s  ”Utter Ramblings“, a wonderful service where Jason offered bleeding-edge Red Hat Enterprise RPMs of the latest Apache, MySQL, and PHP builds. I was saddened today to find out that he has stopped all work since a far back as May 7, 2008. Apparently, he got engaged and that was the beginning of the end for his tasty roll-outs of up-to-date RPMs. Jason, all I can say is, we will miss you.

So, that left me wondering. Where is everyone flocking to now? Well, it looks like there is someone of French origin carrying the torch: Remi’s RPM Repository.

I tried using the repository. However, I ran into a plethora of dependancy issues when I tried to update the installations on one of my servers. It looks as if I’ll need to wipe all of Jason’s installations and reinstall everything from the Remi repository. Bummer.

If anyone has made the jump from Utterramblings to Remi, please let me know. If at all possible, I’m curious as to what steps need to be taken before I decide to take the plunge on my own.