I’ve stated before that I don’t love rumors nor do I really want to know what’s going to be announced before it comes out of Apple’s mouth. With that said, if there is a Tablet this is what I want to see.

Hardware: 10″ screen and it is as thin as the MacBook Air. SSD- 64GB’s would be swell. Wifi, built in 3G which activation is an option and not a mandatory contract with purchase. A decent processor. Microphone, Bluetooth and speakers- not sure if I need a webcam or not..

Software: Either full blown Snow Leopard or something a little more full featured than the iPhone OS. Being able to run apps from the app store would be a must. Maybe at first it is able to emulate them so they don’t look too horrible at the larger resolution. I really want my apps on the tablet, did I mention that? I also want real applications or maybe an option for more full featured apps- developer friends, how much would you love that?

How it would fit into my life: When at home I would be able to use it as a fuller featured remote for my Apple TV. Bigger gestures with momentum to browse quickly through everything. Maybe I just heard a song on a movie and I “Shazam” it and instantly purchase it in my REAL iTunes, none of this wanky three apps to do one thing that I have on my iPhone. I can use home sharing to have access to all the media in my house. I can set up crazy genius playlists and push it out to play off of all my designated speakers. Instead of having my computer and iPhone in arms reach I only need the tablet. As someone with clients that rely on me to be reachable I want my tablet to have VPN with Apple’s Remote Desktop app- maybe even just a dumbed down version of it. I want to be able to help my clients when I’m playing hooky on a Friday and taking my kid to Disneyland.

Are you ready for this last request? It’s a big one…

I want it in my car. Yep, I want it to replace my hands free navigation. I own a new car with a decent hands free system, it sucks compared to things my iPhone can do though. I would throw a suction cup mount on my nav screen so fast if I had the Maps app, I don’t even know if I need turn by turn. The fact that I can look up a place, see options on a map with links to addresses, websites and phone numbers in seconds is crazy. My Nav does it quick but it just gives me a list of names with how many miles they are away from me. What if I want a Target store on my way home from work? That list on my car nav doesn’t tell me much. It tells me that I have Targets 1.3, 2.7 and 5 miles away from me- which one is on my way home? I want to hold down a button for a few moments and give it a command to call my husband like I do with my iPhone. In my car I have to click and do no less than 4 commands to get it to dial a number. How’s that not distracting? I already play my music and podcasts off my iPhone in my car, why not off my tablet which is also my Nav and hands free? It’s an Apple and will sync with everything in my life- am I that far fetched? I really don’t think I am. If this Tablet can’t do all of that then I think Apple needs me to be doing more for them than just hawking their wares. I’m just sayin’.

Marilyn

Have I mentioned before that competition is good thing and makes me happy? I want manufacturers to try and kill the iPhone. I want companies other than Apple to try and take it to the next level. Why? Because you and I- the consumers, benefit from this. Competition breeds innovation. I was reading a Mashable article (You should open that link to see the points I’m covering below and their finding amongst the 4 phones) that covered the new Nexus one vs Droid vs iPhone with a great comparison chart. Continue reading »

In our mail server migrations from 10.5 to 10.6 we’ve been running the migrate_mail_data.pl Perl script to move our mail data from Cyrus to Dovecot. Seemingly at random email rules will work for users but vacation messages will not. I’ve spent the better part of Christmas Morning (Merry Christmas btw trying to sort this out. As is typical for Apple when simplifying the GUI side (abstracting things Apple from the Open Source goodies) they kind of complicate what’s happening behind the scenes. In trying to resolve this problem, here are the notes I’ve taken thus far.

What I know to this point 200912251448PST…

The wiki writes sieve scripts to /Library/EmailRules/sievescripts/ . Each script is the users GUID ending in .sieve. They are owned by _teamsserver user and group and perms are 770. Also in /Library/EmailRules is vacationIndex.db . Still sorting out what that does.

There is a LaunchDaemon, /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.wiki_sieve_manager.plist that watches /Library/EmailRules/mailsieve and executes /usr/bin/wiki_sieve_manager on changes to that directory . I don’t know what’s put into mailsieve at this point.

By some mechanism scripts are moved into /var/spool/imap/dovecot/sieve-scripts/GUID/ . Unlike the .sieve files in /Library/EmailRules these are owned by the user. The group is mail and perms are 700. Inside the GUID directories should be four files

.dovecot.lda_dupes which tracks to whom auto replies have been sent.

wiki_server_rules.sieve which should have the sieve file from /Library/EmailRules/ if I’m at all understanding what’s going on here.

dovecot.sieve which is a symlink to wiki_server_rules.sieve and the file the server looks for as the current sieve as defined in /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf .

dovecot.sievec which is may be the binary of the script. Trying to think back to hand editing sieve scripts a few years ago. Not sure though.

I posed the question on Twitter this week “What’s your favorite iPhone app?” I received tons of responses and have compiled this list of 61 apps that you people love! Here’s the list complete with links to the iTunes apps store::

Social Networking:
Bump
AudioBoo
FourSquare
FaceBook
Focus for Facebook

Twitter:
Twitterific Premium
Tweetie 2
Twittelator Pro
SimplyTweet
TweetDeck
Echofon Pro

Twitter Helpers:
BirdBrain
Boxcar

Productivity:
Things
Evernote
VehiCal Car Expenses Manager
Handbase Database Manager
1Password
reQall
Dropbox
Jaadu VNC
Awesome Notes

Books:
Stanza
Kindle

Music:
Shazam
Pandora

Photography:
CameraBag
ShakeItPhoto
AutoStitch
Best Camera

Purchasing:
Starbucks Card Mobile
B&N Bookstore

Messengers:
WhatsApp Messenger

Games:
imobsters
Monopoly
Traffic Rush

Kids:
Monkey Preschool Lunchbox

News/RSS Readers:
Newsstand
iReddit
Google Reader

Entertainment:
VLC Remote
Koi Pond
SlingPlayer
Apple Remote
MyDVR
Sky+ Remote Record Only available in the UK

Utilities:
Lithium
Convertbot
RedLaser

Business:
EasyVoice Mobile
UPS

Reference:
Mactracker

Sports:
NBA League Pass Mobile

Navigation:
Navagon
Peaks
MotionX

Travel:
Tripit- Travel Organizer

Weather:
The Snow Report

Health & Fitness:
C25K

Finance:
Chase Mobile
USAA

mac-fusion has a new Mac mini with Snow Leopard Server. It ships with (2) 500GB hard drives but it’s not configured as any kind of RAID. We wanted to know how the redundancy and reduced capacity of a RAID 1 compared to the speed and size benefits of running a RAID 0. We also wanted to find the baseline speed of a non RAID setup. So we pitted the mini against itself and several other Macs for good measure.

Methodology

We used Quickbench 4.0.4. It says it’s Leopard compatible but there’s no mention of Snow Leopard. That would really be a drag if all this data was not valid. But unfortunately the developer’s support forums have been offline all week so we’ll go with it for now. We ran the Standard test using transfer sizes ranging from 4KB to 1MB and taking the average. We did 5 passes to try and even out any big anomalies. All machines were tested after being rebooted, and, except for the Xserve with SSD, all servers were running a minimum set of services. We threw the Xserve SSD in just to see if the MacBook Air SSD performance was hobbled at all. Results are in MB per second.

Sequential Read

Sequential Write

Random Read

Random Write

Thoughts

It’s no surprise that you get what you pay for and the Xserve with RAID 5 Donkey Kongs the others in all but Random Read, although not by a huge margin. But if you’re supporting a workgroup of more than a handful of people and providing a broad range of services, it’s the way to go. The MacBook Air w/ the SSD drive puts up some pretty solid numbers in the Random Read area. That’s the nature of SSD. And that’s what makes it feel pretty sporty compared to a regular HD. But it’s still slower than a production Xserve box with an SSD. I don’t know if that’s the drive or the bus or something else but would love some comments on that.  Even though the old mini didn’t come anywhere near saturating it’s limited 1.5Gbps SATA bus, I don’t think it helped anything. That thing is S L O W. The Mac min Server however is much faster even with a single drive. But, to address what we set out to find, if you’ve got a good backup plan in place, the size and speed benefits of a RAID 0 seem to be justified offering nearly 2x the performance in both sequential tests, a small boost in Random Read and nearly a 50% gain in Random Write.

Specs

Mac mini – Mac mini (Late 2006) 1.66GHz Intel Core Duo, 2GB RAM, 60GB, Mac OS X Server 10.6.2

Mac mini Server – Mac mini (Mac OS X Server, Late 2009) 2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM, 2×500GB, Mac OS X Server 10.6.2

MacBook Air SSD – MacBook Air (Mid 2009) 2.13GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2GB RAM, 128GB SSD, Mac OS X 10.6.2

MacBook Pro – MacBook Pro (15-inch, Mid 2009) 3.06GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM, 500GB Seagate Momentus 7200RPM, Mac OS X 10.6.2

Mac Pro – Mac Pro Two 2.66GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon “Woodcrest” processors, 8GB RAM, 1TB Hitachi Deskstar, Mac OS X 10.5.8

Xserve SSD – Xserve (Early 2009) Two 2.66GHz Quad-Core  Intel Xeon “Nehalem” processors, 12GB RAM, 128GB SSD, Mac OS X Server 10.6.2

Xserve RAID 5 – Xserve (Early 2009) One 2.26GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon ”Nehalem” processor, 6GB RAM, 3×1TB Apple Drive Modules, Xserve RAID Card, Mac OS X Server 10.6.2

The Domain Name System, DNS, makes the Interweb go around. It’s the White Pages of the internet, translating names to numbers, a forward lookup, and numbers to names, a reverse lookup. Having a handle on DNS can help you with basic troubleshooting as a user and is essential for managing and maintaining servers as a Systems Engineer. Without getting any more preachy, let’s move on. There are three primary record types in forward looks ups. An “A” record maps a name directly to an IP. “CNAME” is an alias record. It maps one name to another. “MX” defines mail exchangers responsible for a domain and the associated priority. The lower the number, the higher the priority, i.e. closer to final mail delivery. On the reverse DNS side of the coin, there’s the “PTR” record that maps an IP to a name. Generally speaking, unless you’re doing DNS admin, you don’t need to sweat other records like SOA and NS. Now let’s take a look at the services that actually makes up the Domain Name System. First there’s something called a resolver that lives on your computer. It, well, resolves the query, “What is the IP address of a specific host?” The resolver issues a recursive query to the DNS Servers in the Network System Preferences that you’ve probably pulled down via Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol, DHCP. If one of those Name Servers has previously looked up the IP address of the host in question, it hands it over. If it doesn’t have that information cached then it needs to go to the Root Name Servers. These guys are the top of the food chain in DNS land and are responsible for the Top Level Domains, TLDs, both the generic (com, net, edu, etc.) and country codes (us, au, ca, etc.). Think of them as the phone company. They have a critical piece of information for resolution to take place. That being which Name Servers are authoritative for a particular domain, or which phone book contains the information we seek. Once the Name Servers (phone book user) that our resolver is querying has retrieved those authoritative Name Servers (phone book) from the Root Name Servers (phone company), they query those Name Servers (phone book), directly for the IP of the host in question and return that to our resolver which hands it off to the requesting application. Whew.

OK so we’ve identified the critical players, let’s put it into action. You fire up Safari and type in www.mac-fusion.com, because that site is rad. Moments later you’re there. We take it for granted but how do it know? Think about it. How did Safari know where all the HTML files were stored for rending the web page you’re checking out? The entire process is pretty fascinating. For now we’ll leave out a whole lot and focus on the big picture. So when you type in the address and hit Enter in Safari, all kinds of stuff happens behind the scenes. And here’s the high altitude, conversational, view of it all:

So if DNS really is the White Pages of the Internet let’s see how hard we can flog this phone book analogy. After hitting Enter, Safari says, “Hey, can you put me in touch with www.mac-fusion.com?” The Network System Preference checks the DNS servers it has, and sends the resolver off on it’s mission. The resolver then asks the DNS servers from Network System Preferences, “I’m looking for www.mac-fusion.com. Do you know which phone book they’re in?” To which, they reply, “I don’t have that cached, let me check with the phone company.” After being asked, the phone company replies, “Ok, mac-fusion.com, you’ll want to check in the following phone books.” And the Root Name Servers pass along the Name Servers authoritative for the domain, in our case, ns2.mac-fusion.com, ns2.mydyndns.org and ns3.mydyndns.org. Network System Preferences says, “Sweet!” and cracks open the phone book, querying those Name Servers. At this point the DNS server from Network System Preferences has looked up the .com and .mac-fusion parts (name resolution takes place from right to left) of the fully qualified domain name, FQDN, now it needs the specific host, www. But a hah! When asking the phone book for www, the DNS server finds www is an alias, a CNAME, for the actual server, hemi.mac-fusion.com. “So where’s hemi at?” demands the DNS server. “hemi’s at 72.26.106.202.”, replies the phone book. The DNS server replies to resolver which turns to Safari and says, “Blow up www.mac-fusion.com at 72.26.106.202.” And Safari does. And you’ve got a kick ass website in front of you.

The End.

Except for the Open Directory and the http and the arp and a million other crazy things that go on behind the scenes. I feel a sequel coming.

How to add clickable social media icons to your Apple Mail.app signature! Where to find a great set of social media icons. Be sure to catch my major goof in the middle and stick around for the disclaimers at the end.

Here’s a list of links used in the video:

http://www.komodomedia.com/

http://www.youtube.com/user/macfusionTV

http://www.yelp.com/biz/mac-fusion-signal-hill

http://www.mac-fusion.com/

http://twitter.com/macfusiongirl

http://www.facebook.com/pages/mac-fusion/56394763086