While browsing the Mac OS X Forums (currently down for a server swap), I found a reference to a very detailed paper on how you can use BSD (the UNIX system underlying OS X) to stop spam and trojan horse programs from reaching your machine.
The author is Brett Glass, and he's posted the article on his website. It's very interesting reading. Highly recommended if you're remotely curious about this type of stuff; required if you're using the OS X version of sendmail as your mail server!
Under OS9, an often suggested fix for misbehaving applications was to "trash the preferences." While I haven't heard many reports of misbehaving apps under OSX PB, you can still try a similar trick if you are having troubles.
Each user's preferences are stored in the directory /Users/username/Library/Preferences/. Navigate there, and you'll see a bunch of different preference files, all ending in ".plist". If you want to get rid of one, I would recommend taking a "better safe than sorry" approach, since this is beta software. Instead of just deleting the pref file for the application in question, rename it to something like "appname.bad". That way, if for some reason your fix causes more problems than you had previously, you can go backwards.
When you now launch the troublesome application, it will create a new ".plist" file, since it can't find the old one. If everything works as expected, you can now go back and delete the ".bad" file.
As a side note, you can also view the contents of the preference files, since they're stored as plain text.
The Apache web server includes the ability to process CGI (Common Gateway Interface) scripts. By default, this functionality is disabled and needs to be manually enabled in order to function. Read the rest of this article for step-by-step instructions on how to enable CGI's (enabling SSI (Server Side Includes) is also covered. SSI is a way of using environment variables to return some variable information on a web page.
Most CGI's are written in Perl, but you can also find a few in C, C++, and some of the UNIX shells (sh, ksh, csh, etc.). The CGI Resource Index (see below) also lists six CGI's written in Applescript!
Once you've enabled Apache, you'll probably want some scripts to run. Here are a few of my favorite sources:
Browsing a few of the other boards and forums over the last few days, I noticed a few people have figured out how to make their Harmon Kardon Soundsticks function under OS X.
Navigate to /System/Library/Extensions/ and either rename (probably safer!) or remove the file AppleScreamerAudio.kext. You will probably have to be root to have permission to change this file. Here's how I'd do it via a terminal session. Comments are in [brackets], so don't type them!
> su [become root; you'll need to enter root password]
> cd /System/Library/Extensions/ [change to the directory]
> mv AppleScreamerAudio.kext AppleScreamerAudio.bak [rename the file]
> exit [ends root session]
> exit [ends terminal session]
Restart OS X and your Soundsticks should be working! Since you're disabling a portion of the system software, no guarantees on what else might break. However, others have reported success with no side effects.
If you regularly switch back and forth between OS X and Classic, and would like to keep all your bookmark and history information current, it's actually quite simple. This thread on the MacFixit Forums discusses a number of ways to do it, but "Toyin" has the best solution.
Start by making aliases of your Favorites.html and History.html files in OS 9. These are stored in System Folder:Preferences:Explorer. Take the aliases, and move them into /users/username/library/preferences/Explorer/. Replace the existing files (make a backup first if you wish), and (obviously, I hope!) replace username with your OS X user name.
Now whether you surf under OS 9 or OS X, your history and bookmarks will be common between both environments. You could probably reverse the process as well, and make aliases of the OS X files and place them in the OS 9 prefs folder (but I haven't tried that yet to be sure).
There's an interesting thread in the MacFixIt Forums about bringing Eudora mailboxes into the OS X mail application. It turns out it's possible, but requires a bit of file editing and directory structure creation.
Basically, you need to convert the Mac line-endings in each mailbox file to UNIX style line-endings, and then create a directory structure that matches what mail.app expects to see.
My friend is running DHCP at his house. I noticed that it also assigns an Host name to OS X. How do I override this host name? While DHCP is enabled, the Host name field is grayed out.
If you hold down the option key while resizing a "new-style" open panel that uses column view, the panel will switch to a single column mode that somewhat emulates Classic open panels (except that you navigate up the filesystem by using a horizontal scroller instead of the pop-up menu at the top of the window).
I think this just works for Cocoa apps, but I haven't checked any Carbon apps to be sure. I also can't figure out if this is a bug or a feature...
Rather than launching the System Preferences application and then clicking the desired icons it is possible to double-click the individual panes as items.
These are contained within:
/System/Library/Preferences
These individual panes can also be dropped into the dock giving even quicker access to the pane - for example - sound, monitor, etc.
Frequently, the classic environment monopolizes the system. This makes the whole OS feel sluggish, because the the Window manager is trying to tear through all its code while sharing a huge number of resources with Classic. This happens on a lot of Unix platforms, and Windows as well. Unlike Windows, Unix and OS X provide a fine-grained way of alleviating this problem. It is called "renice". This command line tool wll allow you to finely control the priority of every program running on your system, including Classic. Typing "man renice" at the command line can give you detail descriptions of this tool, but I'll walk you through the basics (read the rest for the details...)
