Deleting files from a stolen machine

This hint is likely to get turned into a service and a series of application: How to delete your files when your laptop gets stolen - Download Squad.

You need controlled acess to a server (example, Google web page authoring environment). If your laptop is stolen you create a file. Next time the laptop starts up in a connected mode a script finds the file and deletes whatever you want.

Of course things could go wrong, so backups are indicated. This would be a good complement to an encrypted folder. (XP supports encrypted folders, but I've found their implementation to be treacherous. I prefer OS X encrypted images.)

PS. Google uses a similar technique to validate ownership of a web site.

Getting around corporate IT lockdown

The article is short but useful: Geek to Live: Survive IT lockdown - Lifehacker. The comments add value too.

Evading corporate lockdowns is not necessarily a good career move. If the lockdowns interfere with the ability to do work they are a leading indicator of the need for a career change.

Winner of greatest kludge: Microsoft Access Macros

Today I did something using Microsoft Access Macros.

Words fail me.

I thought I knew what a kludge was, but Access continues to astound me. What a rat's nest of hacks, ancestral code, forgotten functionality and undocumented features!

I got it working, but only through ESP. Hell for a programmer must be working on the codebase for Microsoft Access. (Ok, so Word is likely worse and Outlook is perhaps just as bad).

Blog Search - Advanced Options

At long last Google's Blogger has added Google-like advanced search to their blog search. Wow, that took a while.

Aperture 1.1 due in March

Aperture 1.1 is what I've been waiting for. Actually, I want Aperture 1.11, but if reports are good I'll go for 1.1 in May.

XP on MacTel: via Linux and VMware

The initial enthusiasm for booting XP on a MacTel machine has waned. The problem may be intractable without risky hardware hacks.

So attention has moved to an odd alternative: Boot Linux, then run VMWare on Linux, then XP on VMWare: Mac OS X Internals: XP (VMware) on the Intel-based Macintosh.

It sure sounds odd, but it plays to the vast strength of Linux -- the ability to port to new platforms. It's easy to imagine a stripped down distro that would package just enough Linux to support VMWare. So one would reboot a MacTel machine to Linux/VMWare/XP ...

Magical Mac stuff

I'm browsing the collection of images that I use to index our attic. (Hierarchical data structures are most easily represented using the native folder system.)

I open one in the OS X image viewer app. I rename it in the folder while it's open. The application handles it, changing the name on the fly.

Windows doesn't do that.

Sweet.

PS. The OS X 10.4.x TextEdit application is such a reasonable lightweight substitute for Word, that after some reflection the best way to get a decent RTF file format word processor on the G3 iBook is to buy Tiger for the iBook! (My research suggests it runs quite well on a G3 with 640MB DRAM and I get the educational price.)