RANTS: Time Warner DNS Woes

I was talking with someone last week about how he was having problems with internet connectivity. His TW cable modem was working, the router was working and the computers all were working fine. Only thing was that the browsers were not serving up web pages. He was telling me how he figured out that TWs DNS servers were not working properly. I told him that I wasn't experiencing any of the those problems.

I spoke too soon. Starting yesterday, I had the exact same symptoms. The fix is to change your router's (or computer's) DNS servers. Open DNS seems to be the easiest solution. Here are the instructions:

https://www.opendns.com/start

A quick search shows that Time Warner has had this problem for some time now and many people are plagued by it. When will they realize it and deal with it?

TIPS & TRICKS: Leopard Quick Look

In OS X (10.5), there's a feature called Quick Look:

http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/quicklook.html

I knew it was there, but never really bothered to integrate it into my everyday usage. But, I saw yet another tip for it today and decided to see if it will help productivity. The basics:

1. Highlight a file (or folder)
2. Hit the space bar or command y

I love keyboard shortcuts so this will likely stay in my bag of tools, mostly because, in addition to being able to preview contents of a file without waiting for the application to launch (we all know how long it takes for Word or Excel to launch), I can hit the esc key to close it out. Yet another way to avoid needing to reach for the mouse.

TIPS & TRICKS: Do Not Run As Admin

Continuing evidence of why no one should run as administrator or with administrative privileges on their user account:

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewarticlebasic&articleid=9127318&source=rss_news

Yes, when you first purchase a new computer, you'll need admin privileges to install your software. But, after all the software is installed, there will be few instances where admin rights are need to execute anything. This holds true for all operating systems and all devices, especially internet devices, including mobile devices.

The main point from the article above:

Nine of out 10 critical bugs reported by Microsoft Corp. last year could have been made moot, or at least made less dangerous, if people ran Windows without administrative rights, a developer of enterprise rights management software claimed today.

RANT/RAVE: OS X Network Locations

Earlier this evening I worked on a client's Apple MacBook Pro. The machine had many configurations setup by someone else, other than the user. One of these configuration steps included configuring the network locations. First, within a network location (Apple > System Preferences > Network > Location), there can be multiple active network ports. By default Apple includes 4 ports: Airport, Bluetooth, Ethernet, and FireWire. Each of these can be set to inactive simply by selecting the port and clicking the button with the picture of a gear below the list and choosing Make Service Inactive.

This was important because I found that there was 2 network locations set: Airport and Ethernet. The Airport network location had everything else disabled, including Ethernet, FireWire, and Bluetooth. The Ethernet network location had everything else disabled, including Airport, FireWire, and Bluetooth. Initially, I wondered why this was configured this way. It could be inconvenient to have to manually switch network locations just to switch between Ethernet and Airport.

Then I understood why a network port having a dedicated Network Location might be important. Unexpected behavior may result if a Network Location has multiple active network ports. Fortunately, my personal experience has resulted in very few issues, if at all. In fact, Apple OS X's default configuration is for a single location to have all the network ports active simultaneously.

Nevertheless, to avoid problems it might be good practice in specific situations. At the end of the day, there should be a good balance between usability and preventing problems. I would say that this practice of separating the network ports is only good practice is a few situations. For the general user, it's more useful to just keep one network location with all the network ports active, as Apple has done by default.