The Covert Family Website

If you manage a large network of Mac OS X clients, the very helpful “Tips and Tricks” document by John DeTroye has been updated.  It now includes 10.5 client and server specific details.  In this day job, John works as a Sr. Consulting Engineer with Apple Education.

Website here.

PDF of the full document here.

I don’t manage quite this many clients in an enterprise environment, but it makes me wish I did.

This is a nice short little article.  I’m always forgetting how to do mail attachments with mailx at work, and this gave me nice reminder: uuencode

The magical command in this one is uuencode, which is used to encode and decode binary files and can be used on just about any file type. The two arguments in the command above define the name and location of the source file and the name the file should have when it’s received. The parenthetical statement at the beginning combines the results of the echo and uuencode commands which are then piped (|) to the mail command.

So, remember folks:

(echo “This is the message body”;uuencode [file_location] \
[file_name] ) | mailx -s “Subject line here” \
someone@adomain.com

New to scripting on Mac OS X?  Check out this introductory guide from Apple:

http://developer.apple.com/internet/opensource/opensourcescripting.html

For those of you out there that have always wanted to learn how to build you own site based on CSS (from the ground up, as opposed to re-using an open source template), there’s a neat guide:

CSS Slicing Guide

Welcome to CSS slicing guide, your number one source for learning how to turn a Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro or Fireworks template into a fully sliced, coded and XHTML and CSS valid web page.

This site is a free resource for the budding web designer looking to take the step into the future of modern web design. Throughout the guide, you will be shown cunning CSS techniques used to keep loadtime to a minimum and to organize and fine tune your content so it is presented in the best possible way.

Found a cool desktop pictures website via digg this afternoon.  Pretty neat backgrounds.

http://www.desktopography.net/

As you may have read here in the past, last year I taught a class on LEGO Robotics at our local elementary.  Well things are starting to gear up again.  Considering all the difficulty I had last year (mostly in terms of learning HOW to teach students, more than anything else), I’ve been trying to read up on the subject.

Ran across this great article.  It mostly deals with integrating a robotics class into a typical curriculum.  My class is more of an after-hours project (2 meetings per week, each 2 hours), so not all of it applies, but interesting read none-the-less.

http://www.botmag.com/articles/01-18-06_Teaching_With_Robots.shtml

Good link here too:  http://www.robo-works.net/roboeducators.html

Much to my surprise, there’s a whole slew of websites devoted towards open source (read: free) web design templates.  Pretty darn cool!

http://www.oswd.org/

http://www.opendesigns.org/

http://www.templateworld.com/

http://www.opensourcetemplates.org/

I was surfing around this evening and found a great little introductory tutorial on Xcode and Interface Builder.  A little 101, sure.  But I’m sure everyone has to start somewhere.

http://www.cocoadevcentral.com/d/learn_cocoa/

Note:  Also found a really good one on building a Core Data app.  Man.. this site rocks…

http://www.cocoadevcentral.com/articles/000085.php

http://www.latenightcocoa.com/

And yet another more fundamental one on Core Bindings:

http://www.cocoadevcentral.com/articles/000080.php

And of course the best guide I’ve found on Objective-C:

http://www.spiderworks.com/books/learnobjc.php

This one alone is WELL worth the money….