View PDF files directly from Firefox or Camino

One of the nice features about Safari is that it displays the PDF files directly in the browser whereas Firefox and Camino will download them and then open them in Preview.

There is a free non-commercial plugin that will allow Firefox or Camino to display PDF files within the browser.

1. Download here:
   http://www.schubert-it.com/pluginpdf/
2. Mount the dmg file
3. Copy the .plugin file to /Library/Internet Plug-Ins to use for all users or ~/Library/Internet Plug-Ins to use only for yourself

Happy Valentines Day with Camino 1.0!

Camino the web browser designed specifically for Mac OS X by Mozilla now has published their official 1.0 release.

It is built on Mozilla’s Gecko rendering engine. It also is built on Cocoa so it looks beautiful just like the Mac OS X interface.

It doesn’t have the same extension plug-in that Firefox offers, but it makes up for it with its speed (maybe because I have too many extensions installed!)

Check it out – download here!

Configuring your Windows boxes to keep the same time as your Macs

Maybe I’m picky but our Windows boxes (including our email server) were keeping time that was about 4 minutes faster than our Macs. It was driving me crazy.

So I found this article:
How to configure an authoritative time server in Windows Server 2003
And followed the instructions on our PDC (Primary Domain Controller) and chose time.apple.com as the ntp server.

Beautiful, everything is synchroinzed now.

Crontab entries

Wikipedia has a good entry on crontab.

The crontab is used to schedule command to be executed at a later time or periodically.

The best way to schedule the jobs is to login as the user you want the job to execute as and type:
crontab -e

PHP iCalendar

This is a free Open Source php-based web calendar implementation.
It can be downloaded at: http://phpicalendar.net/

To implement it – all I had to do was copy the files to my web directory and add a few lines of code to my Apache config file to enable webdav for iCal publishing:

Greg Westin describes how to enable WebDav for OSX – but on OSX Server there are even less steps:

1. Edit your apache config file: (by default /etc/httpd/httpd.conf) Right before the first tag – insert this code
2. Then create the password file:
   sudo mkdir /etc/httpd/passwords
   sudo htdigest -c /etc/httpd/passwords/webdav.digest “webdav access” mywebdavuser
3. Then on your calendar directory run:
   sudo chown www:www /mycalendarsdir
4. Finally restart apache:
   sudo apachectl graceful

Adobe’s Plans to support Intel Macs

Here is a link to Adobe’s detailed plans on updating their software and newly acquired Macromedia software to Universal Binaries allowing the software to run natively on the new Intel Macs.

Here is an interpretation from Appleinsider that says support will probably not come until 2007.

Sources:
Macworld: News: Adobe offers further details on Intel plans
AppleInsider | Adobe may not deliver native Intel Mac support until 2007