Doomshammer's Weblog

Seine Hoheit @moellus hat hoechstpersoenlich den heutigen Tag zum coconutBattery-Tag ausgerufen. Ich folge natuerlich aufs Wort!

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Ich arbeite ca. 60-70% des Tages im VPN meiner Firma. Das klappt auch alles ganz gut, bis auf ein kleines Problem das ich die letzten Tage habe. Die Kollegen in den Staaten haben die DNS Forwarder im Active Directory geaendert und die sind (zumindest fuer mich) unendlich langsam. Ein DNS Request dauert in der Regel ca. 4-6 Sek. Wenn man mal ueberlegt wie oft und wofuer ueberall ein DNS Request benoetigt wird, koennt ihr euch vorstellen wie lahm mein komplettes System wird, sobald ich die DNS Server gesetzt bekomme.

Da es mit einfachem /etc/resolv.conf anpassen leider nicht getan ist, hab' ich mich mal durch die Dokumentation von Mac OS X gewurschtelt und geschaut was da Abhilfe schaffen kann. Gefunden habe ich "scutil" (System Configuration Manager). Damit kann ich die DNS Einstellungen den Cisco VPN Client ueberschreiben und so mein System wieder schnell machen. Das ganze funktioniert recht einfach...

"scutil" als root starten und erstmal den aktuellen Status anschauen:


Ok, die DNS Server sind definitiv die beiden lahmen Teile... also aendern:


Hat geklappt- jetzt noch schnell ueberpruefen ob die Einstellungen auch uebernommen wurden:


Sieht gut aus- und *zack* ist das System wieder schnell

Update
Folgendes kleines Script macht das ganze noch etwas einfacher:

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As I have to do lots of phone calls with foreign countries (United Staates, United Kingdom, Danmark, Ireland, Netherlands...) I am excessively using my VoIP account at Sipgate, as it is much cheaper and as I love doing longer calls with my USB headset instead of having a "hardware phone" in the hand all time.

So I searched for a good VoIP softphone for Mac OS X as I am doing my work on the Mac mostly. I found X-Lite which I am already using on Windows and which is working fine (on Windows at least). Unfortunately the latest X-Lite version doesn't support Leopard yet, so I had to search s. th. different. I found SJphone which is Java based (at least I think it is). It works with Sipgate but it is very uncomfortable and doesn't support different audio outputs/inputs - so this doesn't work for me as well.

I finally found Xmeeting. Xmeeting works with Leopard and Sipgate w/o issues. The user interface is really clean and comfortable. It also supports video conferencing and has direct access on you local address book (if you allow it). It is highly configureable and works like a charm - much better than X-Lite on Windows. And the best... it's OSS so it is free

Here a quick screenshot of the clean and small UI:

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Everybody who has to deal with different (operating) systems probably know this problem. You'd like to keep your calendar entries in sync between all systems, so that you have an accurate schedule independent of which system you are currently working with.

As I had this problem lately, I searched for an easy but OS-independent solution to resolve this problem- and I found one: Google Calendar. Google's calendar application is really powerful (while being - as most google services - free of charge). The calendar makes it easy for me, to have an accurate multi-category schedule, which I can access from everywhere (well, at least where I can access the internet).

Now with Google Calendar as base, I can sync it with my company laptop (running Windows Vista/Outlook), my private laptop (running Mac OS X/iCal) and my Blackberry wireless device. I can do two-way syncs from all devices w/o any issues and I can select which of my categories I want to sync with which system (e. g. on my company laptop, I only sync the "work" category with the Google Calendar, but on the MacBook or my Blackberry I sync all categories).

Thanks Google for this great and free service- it really eases my daily calendar-work.

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Today the memory upgrade for my MB arrived Now I have 4GiB of RAM in it and it's really a big difference in terms of speed. I really begin to love this little piece of hardware \o/

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Ok. It's about 12h since I am working with Mac OS X and I am more or less getting used to it. There are some things that are not (yet) working as I like them to work, but I think I will get this figured out as well.

I've tried out a bunch of software, but I think that I finally found the configuration that works best for me:

- Browser: Safari (with some plugins from www.pimpmysafari.org)
- Mail: Apple's Mail.app (with GPGMail)
- Calendar Application: Apple's iCal.app (with SpanningSync to sync my Google Calendar)
- IRC/IM: Colloquy, Skype, PSI
- Audio-Player: Cog
- Terminal: iTerm with zsh/screen
- Mobile sync: PocketMac
- Office stuff: iWork '08
- Programming: vim
- Photography stuff: Lightroom, Photoshop

That's all I need for efficient working and I have to admit, that on Mac OS X you can work very efficient. All in all I am very pleased with my new toy (especially the battery duration is awesome: >5 hours while working as usual).

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(via Chris)

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I'm not a too big Mac fan- but these video series on youtube is great!
(read on...)

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• Continue reading "Mac Spoof"