Carve a digital pumpkin

Mom emailed this to me last night. Carve a digital pumpkin here. It would be cooler if the results could be posted to a blog or something, but still.

This one at freeonlinegames.com is a lot more involved, including templates and different knives.

Adobe posted a Leopard/CS3 guide

Given all of my Leopard testing, I was happy to see that Adobe took the work out of this one for me.

The most awesome football play ever

Trinity College in Texas lateralled more times that I’ve ever seen to score a touchdown and win the game. Watch it here.

Leopard and Cisco VPN

I jsut got around to trying VPN on my MacBook Pro that is running Leopard. Cisco VPN 4.9 has to be reinstalled, even if you do an upgrade or ‘Archive and Install’. The same goes for Toast or any other apps that install system level drivers.

The MacOSXHints forum has a great thread with details here.

Guitar Hero 3 is here

We picked up our copy of Guitar Hero 3 today. Jennifer had never seen any of the games and I had never played any of them, so it was like Christmas for us. We started up in training mode and botched up ‘Hit Me With Your Best Shot’ pretty badly. After we got the hang of it, we did pretty well. I made it up to 87% on ‘Slow Ride’ before I called it an evening.

I’m off to find a second controller, but it appears they don’t exist yet.

Leopard problems: Active Directory Integration – Now Definitely Fixed in 10.5.2!

We loaded Leopard on a couple of machines yesterday. It went very well, except for two significant problems.

First, Active Directory integration is broken. It centers mostly around authentication issues. If the Mac was joined to the domain before it was upgraded, it can’t log on after. Directory Utility returns a “Server can not be contacted” error. If the machine was not joined to the domain, it fails while trying to with an “unknown error” in step 3 of the bind process.

The other issue is in Safari through a Microsoft ISA 2006 proxy server. When going to an SSL website, Safari crashes after it tries to authenticate. Firefox still works.

I’m guessing that both issues are related to the re-written Kerberos engine. Our call with Apple support has been escalated to engineering, so I’ll post when we get a solution.

Update: As of 4:00PM EDT on Monday Oct 29, we haven’t heard anything from Apple support.

Update 2: One of my coworkers didn’t have a problem joining his domain at home. The difference is that he is in AD Native Mode and has DNS/DHCP hosted on Linux at home. We’re in Mixed Mode and Windows-based here at work. Still no update from Apple.

Update 3: Matt (below) had success by adding his root-level domain as a search domain in the network preference pane. It didn’t help me (I had already set it), but give it a try if you’re failing in step 4 of the bind. I’m still failing in step 3.

Update 4: 10.5.1 didn’t seem to fix my problems, but it fixed some that others were having. Apply it if you haven’t already.

Update 5: We finished out migration to Active Directory native mode on our domain today. Both of my Leopard machines will now join the domain and the Safari crashes are not happening anymore.

Update 6: 10.5.2 took all of the fidgeting out of the bind process for me. It works like a champ on all of the machines we’ve tried it on. Safari still crashes when authenticating to our ISA server in production, but not in the lab. We’re still trying to determine what could possibly be causing that issue.

Wal-Mart really is an amusement park

You can buy funnel cakes and everything!

Lake Lanier in drought

Jennifer and I went around the southern end of Lake Lanier today. It was amazing to see how little of the lake is left after it loses the top 15 feet. Jennifer took some great pictures and posted them to her Flickr photostream.

This picture gives a pretty good idea of how much water we’ve really lost. We only have 79 days of water left, assuming current consumption levels and no rain.

Swearing at work boosts team spirt, morale: research – Yahoo! News

Regular swearing at work can help boost team spirit among staff, allowing them to express better their feelings as well as develop social relationships, according to a study by researchers.

via Swearing at work boosts team spirt, morale: research – Yahoo! News.

Harry Potter/Star Wars Synopsis

John Gruber linked to this comparison of Star Wars and Harry Potter. Sad, but true.

No more analog TVs at Best Buy

Best Buy has decided to stop carrying analog TVs in their stores. Best Buy has a history of doing this sort of thing. They were one of the first to stop carrying cassette tapes a few years ago, so they don’t mind pulling the plug on aging technology.

I don’t question the move as much at the folks at Engadget did. LCDs have come down significantly in price and the argument about video game console TVs doesn’t make much sense. All of the current consoles support a higher-than-standard output level, so people have started moving more in that direction.

The 300 new features in Leopard

Lots of good stuff in there.

Chris Walla’s confiscated album

The guitarist for Death Cab for Cutie had a hard drive confiscated by airport security. It had his next album on it. Fear not! He still has the original tapes.

Half-Life 2 Episode 2 + Gnome

I find this kind of thing extremely funny. This guy played through the entire game with his character holding a garden gnome. Pardon the language.

What The Office did during summer hiatus

The Office is one of my favorite shows, obviously.