Like most schools, we have a content filter. Ours happens to be [redacted], but these filters all work the same way, by blocking content from known-bad lists of domains. Some use fuzzy logic as well, but most are fairly straight-foward category-based content filters. Before we go further, try this as a experiment:

1) Go to Bing.com

2) Search for “Jenna Jameson” or any porn star name

3) Click on Videos at the top.

4) Turn off “safe search” if you haven’t done so already.

5) Now scrub your mouse over each of the videos in the search fields.

6) Voila! Instant porn, available to anyone, regardless of a content filter.

Right, okay, so what to do? As an IT administrator in a K-12 school, I can’t very well allow this content on my network. I’ve contacted my content filter provider and they said this:

After doing some research, it looks like Microsoft has developed Bing is such a way that will make it very, very difficult to block the inappropriate and/or dangerous content on the video links.

Most sites like this will have a page for turning on adult content, will allow a parameter to be passed that enforces safe searches, or other things. Microsoft appears to have done everything in the most difficult possible way. Everything is parameter based and mostly driven by javascript and random id numbers with zero clue as to content. Whereas Google and others embed the URL of the site where the content came from, which allows a partner to filter individual pieces out of results, bing does none of this. As there is no current way to block individual portions of a page and/or tools to enable something similar to “safe search”, at this time our recommendation is to simply block bing.com in your policies if you are concerned about users accessing inappropriate content.

So that’s my solution. Microsoft has left me with no option except to block their entire search engine. Good job, Microsoft. You’ll never win the search engine game with solutions as clueless as this.

6-17-2009: A day or so ago, Microsoft changed how their search results are delivered. Virtually all porn content is now pulled from “explicit.bing.com” instead of from the main domain itself. Very simply, they’ve listed to the complaints (including mine) and have made it much easier for me to use my existing content filter to block explicit content without having to resort to blocking the entire domain. Today I’ve unblocked “bing.com” and blocked “explicit.bing.com”. In all my testing so far, our content filter is working exactly as it’s supposed to and Bing.com can now be a resource our students can utilize.

More: TechCrunch. FoxNews. Loic Le Meur

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THE HARDWARE
First, you’ll need to get an external, bus-powered hard drive. I really like these cases from OWC, but have used the WD Passports (see my note at the end of this article) and the SmartDisks also with good success. Know that PPC Macs can only boot from Firewire and Intel Macs can boot from either Firewire or from USB 2.0 (some Intel Macs like the latest MacBooks and the MacBook Air do not have Firewire). I like the OWC cases because most of them have both Firewire 800 and USB 2.0, allowing me to boot virtually any Mac from my Utilities HD. My bag also contains a plethora of cables: Firewire 800 to 400, 6-pin to 4-pin, and so forth.

PARTITIONING
For many years PPC Macs used a partition mapping called Apple Partition Map (APM). An APM-formatted drive can boot both PPC and Intel Macs. The newer Intel Macs have a default partition mapping as GUID. A GUID-formatted HD can boot only Intel Macs. For this reason, I recommend you format your Utilities drive as APM and not GUID, so to be compatible with the largest number of Macs possible. To switch formats, you simply need to select the “Options” button at the bottom of your partitioning window in Disk Utility to be presented with the following.

I generally partition my Utilities HD into three partitions:

1. a 9GB partition for a dupe of the Leopard Retail installer (now at 10.5.6).
2. a 20GB partition for a Leopard install with all my software tools installed.
3. the remainder of the HD as a data store for .dmg’s of my software installers.

You can adjust these partitions to your liking. You may choose to have a larger “Tools” partition if you know you’ll be installing the Developer Tools or other space-intensive tools. I’ve found that 20GB, for me, is sufficient.

MAKING THE LEOPARD INSTALLER DUPE
This is very easy to do. You’ll want to make sure that you’re using a retail copy of Leopard. If you attempt to use a DVD that came with a Mac, you’ll find that it won’t boot any Macs other than the model it came from. Sometimes, models are close enough that you can switch installers around between them, but more often than not, the Installer DVDs that came with a Mac are tied to only that model. The most recent retail version of Leopard is 10.5.6 and it should boot just about any Mac out there, including the newest MacBooks and MacBook Pros. Once you have your retail Leopard disk, use Disk Utility to make a .dmg of the installer, as if you were going to dupe it to another DVD. But instead of burning back to DVD, simply use the “Restore” option in Disk Utility to restore your just-created Retail Leopard DVD .dmg to your “Leopard Installer” partition. When done, you’ll have a partition on your Utilities HD that can boot virtually any Mac and install the retail copy of Leopard many times faster than installing from DVD media. An additional bonus is that a HD partition can never get scratched in your bag.

REGARDING A TIGER INSTALLER PARTITION
If, for some reason, you need to make a Tiger installer, you’ll need to know that the only universal (Both PPC and Intel) versions of 10.4.x are the ones for Mac OS X Server, namely Mac OS X Server 10.4.7. Because of this, you’ll need to make separate boot HDs for your PPC and Intel Macs. There are some hacks out there to make a universal 10.4.11 bootable drive but since Leopard is already universal, it’s just simpler to use the new OS. Creating a universal 10.4.x installer or boot HD is outside of the scope of this document; but it can be done. I remember finding instructions for doing so in the Bombich forums.

THE SOFTWARE TOOLS I USE:
There are many software tools on the market. Some are excellent, some are not. Below is a list of the best tools that I’ve found for maintaining, managing, and fixing Macs:

• Alsoft’s DiskWarrior – the king of Mac disk utilities. It really just does one important task, but it does it better than any other tool on the market. DiskWarrior repairs and rebuilds a volume’s disk directory. Think of a disk directory as a giant, cross-referenced table of contents for the data on your drive. If that index becomes damaged or corrupted, the OS can have a hard time even operating. Files can become lost, overwritten, or damaged due to a damaged disk directory, resulting in a non-bootable system or data loss. DiskWarrior fixes this for you by scanning your volume and building a new directory to replace the old, possibly damaged one. DiskWarrior also lets you “preview” a read-only copy of your HD. On many occasions, I’ve used this feature to pull data from a very damaged hard drive, as it allows me to mount the volume that would otherwise be unmountable and unreadable by other utilities.
• Disk Utility. Apple’s built-in utility, great for executing fsck or repairing permissions, or partitioning / formatting a drive.
• ProSoft’s Drive Genius 2. A bit flashy for my tastes, but it does what it does fairly well. Drive Genius can do a lot, including initializing and partitioning drives, but I mostly use it for it’s optimization (or defragmentation) feature. While it’s true that there is disk defragmentation built into Mac OS X (10.3 and higher), there are a few occasions where I’ve found defragging a drive to be useful. For instance, I spent a great deal of time building a customized PPC 10.4.11 image for some ancient eMacs and iMacs and needed the system to be as lean and fast as possible, and so after stripping out all the language files, unnecessary fonts, and Intel code (using Xslimmer), I defragged the master eMac’s HD before making an ASR image. This helped with the speed and responsivemess on these older Macs quite a bit.
• ProSoft’s Data Rescue II – another fairly essential tool. I use this for recovering accidentially deleted files, or for scavenging files from a failing HD.
• Stellar Phoenixs Data Recovery – a newcomer in the Mac market, their Data Recovery product has found a place on my Utilities HD after recovering data that Data Rescue could not. Otherwise, it’s a very similar product.
• Micromat TechTool Pro – this tool has been around forever (anyone remember it’s predecessor, MacEKG? Eventually I’ll get around to installing that ancient software on an ancient Mac and get the sounds and record the functionality for the nostalgia of all of us ancient Mac techs.). I keep this one installed mostly because I find it’s hardware diagnostics useful.
• Apple Developer Tools – Far too many to list, but I find most useful File Merge and Property List Editor.
• Carbon Copy Cloner – the original and still the best disk cloning app around. Still free.
• NetRestore & NetRestoreHelper – now discontinued, but I keep them around, particuarly because of the latter’s ease in generating ASR images.
• Coriolis System iDefrag & iPartition. I once used the latter to dynamically expand a cloned AppleTV system, that was cloned to a larger HD for greater capacity.
• memtest – use this to test RAM. Does a great job of detecting “bad” RAM.
• SubRosaSoft’s OfficeSalvage & FileSalvage – haven’t really used yet, as the other data recovery softwares have always proven successful (or completely unsuccessful because of a hardware failure of the drive).

This list is not complete. There are many other freeware and shareware tools I’ve installed, such as: Eavesdrop, KisMac, iStumbler, X-Ray, Super Get Info, TextWrangler, Batchmod, and Apache Studio.

INSTALLERS
The third and final partition of my Utilities drive is reserved as a data store for Installers and updaters. The Mac OS X 10.5.6 combo installer weighs in at around 600MB and a Final Cut Pro Studio 2.0 set of DVD images is about 50GB. Installing from a HD, instead of from optical media, is many times faster and you don’t have to worry about scratched media or losing serial numbers. When I was consulting regularly, I’d convinced many of my larger clients to allow me to build an Emergency HD in this manner that had on it CD and DVD backups of all of their installers with their serial numbers in txt files. This allowed them an excellent tool for rolling out a new workstation and also helped in cases of disaster recovery–for instance, when one client had to relocate from offices near the WTC to mid-town, in the weeks following 9/11.

I love that I’m able to build such a verstatile and powerful set of tools all self-contained inside a 2.5″ bus-powered HD. Ten years ago, I was building bootable CDs in a similar manner, with Mac OS 8 or Mac OS 9 and a suite of tools and I’d have to restamp a new CD every month or so. Now, I simply update my drive(s), as necessary.

I hope that you’ve found this article useful and welcome any feedback. Perhaps you have a favorite utility that I’ve not included. Happy troubleshooting!

POSTSCRIPT: I’ve recently discovered that the WD My Passport Studio edition hard drives, which have both a FW800 and USB port, will not boot from the Firewire side of the drive, which makes it farily useless as a boot drive for PPC Macs. Don’t buy this model HD if you want to boot PPC Macs with it. Stick with the OWC cases or the Lacie Rugged Disks. If you know you’ll only be booting Intel Macs (which can boot from USB), then the WD My Passport Studio drive will work for you.

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Note: I’m using a VLA copy of Adobe CS3 at my campus. For those you using single-installs, most of these tips may apply, but you may be having issues with product activation, which I don’t talk about at all in this post.

1. First, you need to make sure that you’re using the most recent version of Adobe Updater available. Sounds simple, right? One would think that if you navigate to /Applications/Utilities and launch Adobe Updater, that it would check against Adobe’s servers and see a newer version and tell you so. Outside from downloading the newerest Adobe Updater (5.1..1.1113) from Adobe’s site, the only way to get Adobe Updater to see the newer version is to first launch Acrobat Pro 8.x and run “Check for Updates” from the Help menu. Doing the same from any other application in the suite will not get the newest version. And without the newest version, Adobe Updater will lie to you, telling you that everything’s up to date when it’s not; specifically Acrobat, which would otherwise remain stuck at 8.0.0.
2. Adobe Updater will often fail when trying to update an installed copy of Adobe Reader 8.x. It will download an update, attempt to run it, and then just quit out, without providing any feedback to the user whatsoever. Since part of this updating process was updating Adobe Reader to v9.1 on my MacBooks, I simply deleted Adobe Reader 8.x to work around this problem. Adobe Reader 9.x uses the AdobeUpdater6 program, not the AdobeUpdater5 program.
3. If the updates to Adobe Acrobat Pro fail, you sometimes have to manually run the updates outside of the Adobe Updater program. If Adobe Updater has already downloaded the updates, you can find them in ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Updater5/Install/Acrobat.  This is where Adobe Updater5 installs all of its updates, so if you wanted to capture the updates to the CS3 suite for the purpose of running them individually, or for repackaging into an installer (yay for Casper Composer!), this is where you’d look to get the various updates that Adobe Updater5 runs.
4. Sometimes you have to clear out stale or corrupted updaters. I’ve seen a few occasions where Adobe Updater just borks itself trying to apply an invalid or corrupted update. You can simply delete the entire “Updater5″ folder from the above location and then re-run it and it’ll regenerate all the necessary files and folders and, most importantly, redownload clean copies of the updater(s) that is failing.
5. On a few occasions I had to manually apply the Acrobat 8.1.0 update to Acrobat 8.0.0 in order to get the 8.1.3 update to take. I don’t know why.
6. If the Acrobat Pro Updater continues to say that there are other Adobe applications running and asks you to shut them down before continuing, you’ll have to quit out of the updater, run Acrobat Pro and agree to the nonsense self-healing crap that it throws up. If Acrobat Pro is in the state where it needs to repair itself, then the updates can’t happen. Long story short: make sure that Acrobat Pro can launch without throwing up any of the self-healing dialogue boxes for Word PDF plugins or the AdobePDF printer, and then the Updater will be able to run properly.
7. The Adobe Flash Light and Adobe Air updates take a very long time–as long as 45 minutes on a fast MacBook, and 90+ minutes on a slower PowerBook G4. If you’re running these updates from Adobe Updater instead of manually, know that Adobe Updater isn’t providing you any granular feedback about what stage in the install process it’s in. It gives you only a blue progress bar. And on these loooooong updates, it appears that the Updater has actually stalled. On several occasions, I found my technicians forcequitting or cancelling the Adobe Updater because they believed that it had hung on something. If you wait long enough, these updates will complete. If you run these long updates manually, you’ll recieve better feedback and see that they’re installing many many thousands of HTML and help files, accounting for the very long install.
8. If you install Adobe CS3 fresh on a machine and then run Adobe Updater to get updates (remember to run it from Acrobat Pro’s Help menu), you can expect there to be approximately 600MB of updates. Plan for about 90-120 minutes for all of these to install, per machine.
9. Run Adobe Updater until it says there are no more udpates. At the time of this writing Acrobat Pro was verison 8.1.4, and is only available to install once you’ve gotten Acrobat to 8.1.3.
10. Learn to curse Adobe Updater. It’s very therapeutic. Every day, my coworkers and I would create new ways to curse Adobe Updater. I’m not sure what a wanker or a knobend is, but Adobe Updater is surely one.

Lastly, I’m fondly looking forward to Adobe CS5. Word on the street is that the installer will finally be package-based and we can expect the Updater7 to be a well-behaved application instead of the misbehaving and almost unusable douche-nozzle that it currently is.

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[William Smith writes]: I’d like to hear something from Adobe about plans for Acrobat and their installer. On the Mac side, Acrobat seems to be a stepchild of Adobe’s installer technology and I don’t understand why.

[Adobe staffer answers]: The Acrobat installers are actually completely separate from the suite installers. Its more of an organizational issue than anything else. The Acrobat installer and the Reader installer are completely different technology and a completely different team.

That said, the Acrobat installer for the next major Acrobat release plans to be completely PKG for the Mac. In addition, the self-healing functionality should be gone (that is the technology that tries to do further setup after first launch.) They planned to get rid of self-healing in Acrobat 9 but couldn’t quite get to it. For the next version it is already removed so really should ship without self-healing.

Adobe finally seems to be listening to the screaming coming from their customers. I have spent so many hours struggling with Adobe’s installers and their ridiculously bad updater software, and I know I’m not alone. Someone even created DearAdobe.com, where people have been griping and voting for months about the poor quality of Adobe’s installers, updaters, and softwares.

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For many years, I argued against abandoning support for the AppleTalk protocol on networks because of the problems presented by printing postscript data over IP (instead of AppleTalk). Mostly, I was right; printing postscript data over AppleTalk is easier and more troublefree. However, even Apple doesn’t fully support AppleTalk anymore. The world has moved to IP, and you should move along with it. But moving your network printing from AppleTalk to IP can be a headache.

How many times have you printed a document with postscript data in it and gotten many pages of several lines of gibberish code instead of your document? Yup, me too. It rarely happened when you were printing your postcript documents to your HP printers over AppleTalk. Now it happens quite a lot. The technical reason for this is that most of the print drivers from HP don’t fully support printing postscript data via IP. All of the design programs I know (Quark, Photoshop, Illustrator) default to sending their postscript data in binary format. HP’s printer drivers don’t understand this and will not parse the data correctly, resulting in reams of wasted paper (unless you catch it in time and cancel the job). The good news is that there’s a solution. The bad news is that the setting you’ll need to change is in a different place for each program.

In each case, we’re going to change the program to send your postscript data in ASCII format instead of binary format. HP’s printer drivers are better able to understand the data and I’ve had very few printing errors on my network since doing this.

Quark XPress 6.x
Quark is the odd duck when it comes to print dialogue boxes. Most Quark users are familiar with this and know their way around.
1) With your document open, go to Print and the dialogue box pops up. Along the top are six tabs for setting different print setttings.
2) Click on second tab called Setup and make sure you’ve selected the correct printer description file for your printer. Having the wrong file or a generic B&W PPD can cause problems as well. Also make sure you have the desired paper size selected.
3) Click on the Options tab and you’ll see a popup menu next to Data. Here is where you can tell the program to send postscript data as ASCII instead of Binary.

Unfortunately, this is a per file setting. If you click the Capture Settings button, it’ll save it for that file, but you do need to do this for each file.

Adobe Photoshop CS
1) With your file open, go to the Print with Preview dialogue box. Note that the only way to change this setting is through the Print with Preview box. The standard Print dialogue box does not contain this option. In the Print with Preview dialogue box you’ll see an option for switching between Color Management and Output. Switch to Output.

2) Now you’ll see an option for switching your postscript data between Binary and ASCII formats. Make sure ASCII or ASCII85 is selected.

Adobe Illustrator CS
1) With your file open, go to the Print dialogue box. Make sure the correct printer description file is selected and paper, orientation etc. Now click on the Graphics option from the list on the left in the dialogue box. This will open the settings for your graphics. Under the Data Format option, you’ll see a popup selector for changing between Binary and ASCII formats. Select ASCII. If it’s greyed out, you do not have any postscript data in your document.

Adobe has made this easier for us to manage than Quark. Once you’ve set it to ASCII for one file, it should stick for subsequent files (possibly, unless created by older versions of AI, PS, etc.). With Quark the default is almost always binary and you have to do it for every single file!

To be fair, this problem is mostly with HP’s printers not fully being able to interpret (interpolate?) postscript data as it’s sent over the IP network. I’ve never seen the reams of gibberish errors when printing to Xerox, Canon, or other manufacturer’s models. I remember reading somewhere a technical explanation for why HP’s drivers do this, but have long lost the link. In the meantime, here’s what we do to save ourselves headache, grief, and reams of paper. I hope it works for you too.

[Update: Some of these settings exist in previous versions of these software packages but I don't have them installed on my computer to get screenshots. Quark is in the same place but Adobe moved some things around between the last version and the current one. The important idea is knowing to make the change, not necessary where it's located in the software.]

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Bjango’s iStat. ($1.99). This is my favorite app. It allows me to see the health and status of my servers at a glance. Yes, I could install Simon, Lithium, Nagios, or a similar type of monitoring software and access their status pages via Safari on the iPhone, but this is much easier.

Server Admin Remote. ($4.99). This is another must-have app. Server Admin Remote allows me to toggle services on my Leopard servers, check services statuses, and most importantly, read my log files.

Zinger-soft iSSH. ($3.99). Quite simply enough, this allows me to SSH to my servers. I’m still searching for the best SSH iPhone app. I’m moderately happy enough with iSSH but am on the lookout for a better replacement. For now, it’s adequate.

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For what it’s worth, I have a similar issue with Growl and its interaction with some of my programs. I haven’t turned it off yet, but have tweaked its settings to be less intrusive.

On a related note, this is an excellent post from Chris Hedgate on using Spaces and Quicksilver to help him focus on tasks at hand not be distracted.

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