Selective sharing of Google Sites outside your domain

Google Sites does not have ACLs yet, so in the meantime here is a way to selectively share a site outside your domain.

Part 1: The person you want to share your site with needs to go to the Team Edition web site at http://www.google.com/apps/business/index.html and sign up. NB I haven't tested freebie webmail accounts other than gmail - you cannot use a gmail.com address.

When they get the confirmation email tell them to click the link, follow it through and they will get the dashboard logon.

Part 2: When they tell you this is done, you share out your site with this other account. Personally I would select 'viewer' for them.

You copy the URL from the site you are sharing, and send it them. When they load it they get this screen:


Part 3: They click on 'sign in with a different account' and put in their Team Edition credentials into the box labelled "Enter your email address", NOT the box above! Then press 'go'.
and they get the Site.

If you revoke their share permission they will get a denied page:

OSX Server: servermgrd CPU ramps and consumes the system

I had a problem with my OSX Server box running 10.4.x where the daemon servermgrd would take ever greater amounts of CPU.

It seems this can be a problem even on very recent builds.

To fix I ran

killall -HUP

This kills and restarts the process.

To get the process ID you can of course do a 'top'

Apple DVD player - getting 5.1 surround sound

Its not particularly well known that recent Apples support 5.1 surround sound via optical output. The headphone socket on the side does plain audio out for regular headphones.

But get a TOSlink adapter and you can feed the optical into your receiver. Then you'll need an application that can output source to 5.1 optical, such DVD Player.

To make DVD Player output 5.1 go to Preferences, Disc Setup pane and change Audio Output popup from the default to get the disk's 5.1 sound through the optical.

NB This option will only exist if you have a TOSlink connected.

Importing email into GMail part 4

If you've been reading the other parts (one, two and three) 0f this story, well, thank you! Here we are at part 4 and its looking good.

One of the things you can do in Thunderbird is to have tags, or in GMail speak, labels, for your email. Thunderbird allows you to colour them. So does GMail.

First create your labels, and then scroll down and then in the the small box to the right of the label, click in an select a colour.

Importing email into GMail part 3

So following part 1 and part 2, we've moved all the email stored remotely into GMail, but now what to do with the email in Thunderbird's local folders?

Well again Apple Mail comes to the rescue. We need to import the Thunderbird folders in Mail, and then we can drag and drop into GMail.

To do this safely, I went into the profile folder where Thunderbird keeps its mail

~/library/Thunderbird/profiles/xyz123.default/Mail/Local Folders

and in there found the items with email: Inbox and Sent. Copy them elsewhere, and stick a .mbox on them ie so they are named Inbox.mbox and Sent.mbox.

Then go into Mail and go into File>Import Mailboxes and select 'other'. Navigate to the folder where your mboxs are. They will be greyed out. Don't worry. Select 'continue' and they will be imported anyway.

After a few minutes they'll show up in Mail and you can then drag and drop into GMail.

Importing email into GMail part 2

In a previous post I discussed how to move email into GMail.

Some people have seriously large email collections ie tens of GBs, perhaps 1TB or more.

So if you want to move them to GMail you will need to factor the rate of ingestion ie how fast GMail is at importing email. This article talks about this issue - they did 10,000 emails in 3 hours which works about to be about 1 per second.

Darwine applications have no fonts in OSX

After installing (dar)WINE on my Leopard MBP, I tried to run DPlot (a great graphing windows only application from www.dplot.com).

It runs, but had access only 2 of fonts, which is clearly not enough.

You can get extra windows compatible ttf fonts called Liberation fonts from Redhat. Unzip them and then copy then into the correct directory:

cp ~/desktop/liberation-fonts/* ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/fonts/

This puts the fonts in your own WINE settings, for other users copy for them as well