Sam’s random musings

MacDevCenter.com: Exploring the Mac OS X Firewall All Unix systems have a firewall. But on the Mac, it’s installed by default and you can’t turn it off. To keep things simple, and keep users from having to build their own firewall rules, OS X packages the firewall as a sub-menu of Sharing within System Preferences. The benefit of this approach is that the firewall can be tied to services. Turn on Personal Web Sharing, for example, and a new rule appears in the firewall to control access to the service.

All The Quickies:

Borkware’s All The Quickies page has a ton of great tips for command line users and programmers. (I’m also a big fan of Mark’s Core Mac OS X and Unix Programming book.)

This actually has a lot of good quick oneliners of the kind that are often slipping my mind just when I need them the most…

(Via inessential.com.)

HOW-TO: Make your own annotated multimedia Google map:

One of the great things about Google maps is it has its roots in XML. To translate for the non-web developers out there, it basically means Google maps are user hackable. This how-to will show you how to make your own annotated Google map from your own GPS data. Plus, you’ll be able to tie in images and video to create an interactive multimedia map. We’ll walk you through the steps we took to generate an annotated map of a walk we took recently through our hometown, now that it’s actually starting to get warm enough to want to walk about!

This is really really cool, it goes to show that google is building a broad infrastructure not just tossing in features, there is a richness to what they are doing that is just lacking in their competitors

(Via Engadget.)

The Neighborhood Project:

Jonathan Moore sent us a link to The Neighborhood Project:

The Neighborhood Project is creating a map of city neighborhoods based on the collective opinions of internet users. Addresses and neighborhood data are translated into latitude and longitude values, and then drawn on the map…. This is an experiment in collective knowledge. The more people who add their opinion to the database, the more accurate the neighborhood boundaries become.

They’ve started with San Francisco, and are using our free geocoder at geocoder.us to do the address lookups. They’ve done a cute “magnifying” DHTML hack for viewing whole map at once. If you’re interested, they’ve published source under the GPL. I want one for London!

This is a cool mapping application, self defining neighborhoods

(Via Mapping Hacks.)

Coggeshall.org: Phishing & Why PHP Makes it Easy:

On John Coggeshall’s weblog today, there’s a new posting that brings light to a “dark side” of one of the online uses for PHP - its use for phishing and why it makes such a good tool for the job.

Interesting read for PHP people

(Via PHPDeveloper.org.)

DevShed: Reconsidering PHP Variables:

PHP helps you to quickly build big applications and many times, its easy to neglect the security matter. Its easy to believe that security breaches could not happen to your software. But what if it does happen? For this reason, security in your applications should be kept in consideration from the beginning.

(Via PHPDeveloper.org.)

An Introduction to diskspacemonitor on OS X Server:

Running out of space on OS X is bad, like real bad.Read on to find out more about the built-in facilities that will prevent you from running out of space.

Going to need this, don’t want to loose.

(Via AFP548 Full Feed.)

Mac OS X Server High Availability:

Part 1: MySql ReplicationStarting with 10.2, Mac OS X Server has started to offer some services that allow you to build high availability systems. Apple provides IP Failover as a means to automate the transfer of an IP address and services to another server and with 10.4 these services are going to be greatly expanded upon. Part 1 of this series is not going to cover IP Failover, but rather look at another bundled service, MySQL, and it’s built-in replication facilities.Read on for more…

Oooo going to need to refer back to this SOON

(Via AFP548 Full Feed.)