Saturday, August 23, 2008

Resetting/Changing Mac Password

Among the many computers that John owns is a MacBookPro that sits on his bookshelves gathering dust. "Why are you wasting such a beautiful piece of machinery?", I asked. John was embarrassed: "I forgot my password, tried so many different combinations, but none worked."

I searched google, found this article: Mac OS X Password Recovery | Elliot Lee and did the following as instructed:
  1. reboot while pressing Cmd-S
  2. type the following commands at prompt:

    /sbin/fsck -y
    /sbin/mount -uw /
    /sbin/SystemStarter

This unfortunately did not work. SystemStarter never returned on this Mac OS X 10.5.x machine and did not respond to ctl-C or ctl-Z. But it turned out that I could change John's password with just two commands:

/sbin/mount -uw /
/usr/bin/passwd john

Here, john was John's username.

Friday, August 22, 2008

What Price Computer Illiteracy?

When traveling, I frequently run into sub-optimally working computer systems that
  1. waste people's time, day in and day out
  2. are awfully under-utilized
A typical example is a computer with a powerful Intel Pentium 4 CPU, yet absolutely inadequate internal memory (such as 512 MB), or harddrive space (such as 20 GB). Another example: in a family of many computers, with a DSL conection, both wired and wreless Internet access and a very high-end HP network color printer, the printer was connected to a desktop computer using a USB port, instead of directly connected to the network and used as a network printer. Why? Because the owner or the installer did not know any better.

When I upgraded the Pentium 4 system to two Gigabytes of memory costing less than $45, the speed improvement was immediate. In the second scenario, when the printer was properly installed as a network printer and all household computers were set up once to use the printer, all compuers started to print conveniently to the network printer. The owners are left wondering how they had suffered for years from snail-like slow speed and from the great inconveniences with printing.

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Why you should use Firefox

For two reasons:
  1. It is a tabbing browser. Everybody should be using a tabbing browser, which enables one to display n web pages simultaneously using n tabs in one single browser window. In contrast, for a non-tabbing browser such as old IE, this opens up n browser windows cluttering your precious desktop space. This used to be reason enough to use Firefox, but no longer. Firefox makes it necessary for any browser to be a tabbing browser to survive in the market place.
  2. The most important reason to use Firefox is that it is extensible. There are many extensions or add-ons that you can install on your copy of Firefox to add functionalities to it. For myself, all of my client computers run Firefox with different sets of add-ons installed. The intersection includes:
    • Answers
    • Clipmarks
    • FEBE
    • Firebug
    • iMacros
    • Live HTTP Header
    • WebMail Notifier

Monday, August 18, 2008

Microsoft owns Taiwan

It is widely known that Microsoft owns Taiwan. Here is a news that says that Microsoft has over 98 percent of market share in Taiwan. How frightening is this?
  1. More than 98% of computers in Government offices, schools, companies, and families pay hefty sums to Microsoft for software licenses. This adds up to monies that boggles the mind.
  2. Even more frightening is the fact that many Taiwanese simply identify computing with Microsoft technologies. In many universities, for example Tamkang University (淡江大學), the distinction between computer science and Microsoft technologies becomes unclear: computer education is Microsoft software training.
What to do?
  1. Use better and free software such as Linux distributions and Google family of programs (Doc & Spreadsheets, Calendar, Picasaweb, ...)
  2. Teach fundamental Computing principles. Refrain from software training of particular vendors.