Ramble On

Ok lets make this clear before anyone jumps on me. I am a Mac user. (2008 Mac Pro, MacBook Pro, and a 12″ Powerbook – and a Mini at work).

As a Domino developer I have to use Windows at work and I have various XP VMs on my Macs. I would never dream of running XP without a virus checker and it’s always the first piece of software I install when I get a new box. But now Apple are recommending all users install a virus checker.

A few weeks ago I had my first case of a user with a ‘Mac’ virus – actually a Windows Word macro virus that works on Office on OSX. So although it didn’t have a payload that damaged Macs it’s still a virus. The user has continued to post documents containing the virus despite being told to install a virus checker. So it’s clear that some people have bought into Apple’s marketing hype and believe that they will never catch a virus and it’s this category of Mac user who will be the targets of the first virulent Mac virus. So it’s good that Apple are being pragmatic.

If you’re interested in installing a virus checker but aren’t yet ready to let anything Norton produce sully your Macs, then you could try ClamAV, a free virus checker. At least it will ensure you don’t pass around Office macro virus.

Posted in Apple

I’m setting up this new domain and I’m having to setup my own domains and since Media Temple don’t handle .co.uk’s, I couldn’t set them up when I purchased the server space. So while I was waiting for a dns change to be propagated from a UK registration service. I wanted to test that I had configured the server correctly for the new urls and discovered a remarkably useful ‘hosts’ file in both Windows and OSX that allows you to override your dns server and redirect urls to ip addresses. Remarkably useful and I don’t know why I wasn’t aware of them.

On Windows there’s a file called ‘hosts’ in 

c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

You can edit the file using a text editor and add in your testing servers url and the ip address to direct the browser to. e.g.

127.0.0.1       mywebsite.com

OSX also has a ‘hosts’ file in /etc/hosts

Again you can edit the host file by using 

sudo vi /etc/hosts

and then add the required host definitions.

Posted in General, Web Design

A interesting idea, an advent calendar of useful web development tips. It seems to have been running for a few years but it’s the first time I’ve seen it. The first article is a web developer’s checklist for a web designer. Personally I’m not too keen on their design, but they appeared to have covered a wide range of topics in previous years.

‘24 way to impress your friends‘

Posted in Web Design