Link via Microsoft

Chrome has been fast, but it doesn’t have a master password. I’m using Firefox right now as my default browser, but this is probably worth taking a look – even if only to see how it renders certain pages.

Link via macosxhints.com

I’ve previously used Apple’s suggested method of cleaning a trackball by holding it upside down and pressing hard on the ball, but the dirt and grease had built up on the ball to a point where this method didn’t work anymore. From the link above, I found out the idea of using isopropyl alcohol and a Q-Tip to get rid of the dirt, and it worked fine. Please not that after you get some response from the ball after the initial cleaning, please give the ball and its socket some time to dry to truly test how well the cleaning has gone. I expect to use this cleaning method again with two young kids and I who love to munch and use the computer.

I recently installed IPNetSentryX on our Macintosh OS X 10.4.11 webserver in order to filter out abusive IPs. In order to make sure this firewall is running all the time, here’s a script I’m calling every minute via cron:

# check daemon
ps ax | grep -v grep | grep IPNetSentryX
# if not found – equals to 1, start it
if [ $? -eq 1 ]
then
/Library/StartupItems/IPNetSentryX_startup/IPNetSentryX_startup
else
echo “eq 0 – IPNetSentryX found – do nothing”
fi

I modified the script from this page:

http://cazatech.wordpress.com/2007/07/07/shell-script-restart-process-if-not-found-running/

I’ve spent so many hours trying to optimize different mail servers over the years to rid myself and my employees of spam. I always hoped for a holy grail to provide a very effective filter against spam, but nothing ever really worked. This morning I switched our spam and virus filtering over to Postini/Google Message Security, and I can already see the amazing results. All types of spams are not getting through anymore. Everything from the image spams to the multitude of solicitations that annoyed and disrupted my workday. I went with Postini because I had seen the effectiveness of its spam filtering technology with my Gmail account. Whereas my Yahoo account was bombarded with spam, my Gmail account was relatively spam-free. The pricing was right at $12 a user, and Google Message Security will also work as a backup mail server in case our in-house server goes down. The final reason I went with Postini is that Google and its services should be around for awhile, so I’m confident that once I had set up our domain and users, I won’t have to switch sometime soon. If you have access to your DNS records, switching over to Postini is very easy, and the gains to office productivity will be well worth the cost of $12 per user a year. I saw that originally, when Google Message Security came out, the cost was only $3 a year, but $12 a year is still very affordable.

Link via Wired.com

Apple’s iPhone application store is as crowded as a Beyonce concert, with more than 20,000 apps available. But one independent developer still managed to rake in $600,000 in a single month with a single iPhone game.

Ethan Nicholas, developer of a tank artillery game called iShoot, told Wired.com he quit his job the day his app rose to No. 1 in the App Store, earning him $37,000 in a single day.

“I’m not going to be a millionaire in the next month, but I’d be shocked if it didn’t happen at the end of the year,” he said in a phone interview. “If it weren’t for taxes I would be a millionaire right now.”

I love iShoot. My son also loves playing the game. We’ve only played the free version, but it appears a lot of people have paid for the upgrade.