The web page you are currently enjoying is - you may have noted - http://www.randomconsult.com

A trifle confusing, as the company name is actually Random Consulting. What gives?

I would have snagged randomconsulting.com, but that domain is - unfortunately - owned by one Joaquin Rubio down in Argentina. My attempts to buy it from him have been thwarted by our mutual lack of ability to speak each other's language, although I think he'd be amenable to learning something neutral in order to further communication. Dutch, perhaps.

So Joaquin - if you're out there - Oproepen me. Ik wil uw overtollig domein kopen. Spreek.

Barring a few brief outages, business is "as usual" even as the Gap Inferno decimates a decent sized chunk of the region.

Please, I beg you all, try to avoid being horrifically immolated until *after* you settle your bills.

I thank you.

...of professional certification!

Apple finally nailed down their specification for the Leopard certification process, and so I've been out of town for a couple of weeks of intensive operating system kung-fu.

Random Consulting is now fully Leopard certified, and as such is your one-stop shop for installation and troubleshooting of Boot Camp, networking, account management and configuration, as well as web/mail services, all manner of OS X Server work, print, inter-platform connectivity problems and so on. They even changed the catchy acronyms we consultants get to tag onto our business cards, so that we all have to go and get new ones printed. Joy.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to apply ice to my sore brain, swollen as it is with new-found dark knowledge.

Netinfo was always a kind of anachronism - a directory database stored on a collection of flat files works well enough, but surely we can do better than that in this new millenium of disposable paper clothing, genetically modified vegetables of every hue, and the perennial (and personal favortite) flying car. Hey, I saw the Jetsons. I know how it's going to be.

Well Apple agrees. Over the last few releases of OS X, they've been quietly mothballing Netinfo, and replacing it with Open Directory. All well and good, but with the inevitable removal of the old way of doing things, there are a few, well, snags. It used to be possible to look in Netinfo Manager and get all kinds of wonderful information on users, groups, permissions et al, and tinker around with them in a quick, simple, and efficient way. Of course, most of the time it was equally easy to do something terrible and accidentally break things in a quick, simple and efficient way; Netinfo tinkering sometimes necessitated the actual blood sacrifice of a chicken (or goat with the server product) in order to ensure the desired results.

Now, however, we have to do it all through the command line, which is all well and good, as it's sufficiently intimidating to give one pause before hacking away merrily. Firing up the Terminal is a wonderful way of doing very granular adjustment of your system, but it does have the side effect of making you feel like you're doing Something Terribly Important. Let's start small. To pull up a list of all the users on your machine, type in:

dscl . list /users

What you're doing here is telling the command (dscl) to look at the local domain (.) and list (list) the users (/users - self explanatory really).

I'd recommend reading the man page for dscl if you're likely to want to do any serious work configuring your local users and their permissions. It's also something worth knowing if you work with Server, although for most jobs the regular GUI tools offer a good fit for adjustments.

I figured this out for the iPhone, but the same basic idea works just fine on a regular mail client as well. This is, admittedly, pretty convoluted, but I've been using it for a while, and it seems to work pretty well:

a) Sign up for a gmail account for each iPhone user who uses email. Go to http://www.gmail.com, hit "Sign up for Gmail", fill out all the assorted answers.
b) On each iPhone, set up smtp.gmail.com as the Outgoing mailserver address. You'll also have to plug in "myusername@gmail.com" (where "myusername" is, well, your gmail user name), and your password in the User Name and Password fields.
c) Click the "Advanced" button in the Mail preferences on each iPhone, scroll down to "Outgoing Settings", and toggle "Use SSL" to On, and make sure that "Authentication" is set to "Password".
d) Go to your Gmail account on gmail.com, click Settings, then Accounts, then add your existing Cox email account to the "Send as" option. It will send a confirmation email to your regular, Cox email account. Click the link in the email you receive to confirm the request. Then log out of gmail, log back in again, go back to Settings, Accounts, and set the Cox.com email account as the default.

That's it. Like I said, convoluted, but now emails on the iPhone will be sent through the gmail smtp server, yet look like they're coming from your Cox account. Better yet, this seems to work whether you're connected to Cox via the Airport network, or connected via Edge when you're on the road.

...but some things now work that didn't before. I've added some slightly more helpful contact information, as well as a spectacularly brief bio page. Please feel free to peruse these incremental improvements and ponder them as you wind your way around the scenic byways of the internet. Thankyou.

Hey, I'm fooling around with the site. Hopefully I won't break it too badly...