Yesterday, I received an interesting Mac OS X tech support call from a friend. They couldn’t click on anything. I figured some sort of dialog on the screen must be hogging focus. To keep this brief, it ended up being the wireless, bluetooth mouse that Apple sells. A quick reboot of the mouse by removal and replacement of the batteries and my friend was back in business. The odd part was that the mouse pointer still moved on the screen; the buttons just failed to work.
Two things to take from this:
- Everything with batteries these days has a processor and can be rebooted.
- Always have a cheap $10 usb mouse on-hand for emergencies.
debugging
Sometimes companies can have some over zealous content filtering web-proxies/firewalls. To combat this, I’ve used this little SOCKS proxy called nylon in the past. Run it on your own Linux machine like so:
nylon -f -a company_ip
I like to run it in the foreground so I don’t forget to turn it off. Another note is that for some reason I wasn’t able to get nylon to work with Firefox unless I told Firefox to use the older SOCKS v4 protocol. Nylon hasn’t been updated in a couple of years, perhaps it has a v5 bug?
Another option that I haven’t tried, but appears to work with windows as well is 3proxy (with the world’s worst website).
Finally, the two solutions above can give you full internet access and not just web pages. However, viewing web pages through a proxy in this manner can be quite sluggish, so it might be worth your time to use squid as your web proxy since it caches content.
Here’s to freedom.
Uncategorized
Had an issue today with an IRC-blocking firewall appliance. The following site allows you to use an IRC client in a web browser.
Mibbit.com – Easy and fast Webchat.
reminder
It is sometimes frustrating as a Mac user setting up Entourage at a new company. If the IT department gives you the ok, you’re usually left to yourself to set it up. Furthermore, most companies do not have their exchange server setup properly and they don’t know it because Outlook seems to have some sort of backdoor ways of getting everything it needs. I wish the Outlook team would share these tricks with the MacBU team. The biggest omission is usually the lack of LDAP access. However, we’re in partial luck since someone has written an applescript which alleviates some of the pain.
Accessing the Global Address List from Home.
reminder