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Protect your Mac!

Apple computers recently have exploded in popularity, Apple stock is soaring and Apple computers are now and have been for some time prime real estate for sticky fingers. So what is an Apple user to do, keep your beloved computer locked up? With the threat of loss, or theft of Apple devices being a reality many companies and many solutions have emerged in the marketplace. While looking at the options out there for laptop security and recovery, and reviewing all the options, it seemed wise to take a step back...

cocoa-code

Cocoa Control: Horizontal Graph View

I have been struggling for years trying to get NSRect to play nicely and draw a cool looking responsive graph in a Cocoa application. I was trying to create a controller that could be used with iOS and Mac OSX and I found that the two had too many internal differences for one controller class to make sense. As a novice Cocoa Programmer I turned to HTML & CSS. I created the Animal Age program as a test, and included some static data and it worked. The premise is simple....

casper-munki osx-system-administration

Munki Report-PHP, the new old kid on the block

In my organization we use Microsoft SCCM for managing Windows clients and Munki for managins OS X clients. I have used SCCM for a while now and have to say that I find it very very powerful. The fact that collects plenty of information from the clients, uploads it to a SQL db and keeps a history, plus the ability of create dynamic computer collections based on querys to the SQL and then target those groups with tasks makes it extremely useful in an enterprise environment. Plus the amazing reports...

casper-munki osx-system-administration

Munki Software License Tracking

Beginning with the 0.9.1 builds of the munki tools, Munki can query a webserver to determine if there are available seats for licensed software (or any software you wish to make available via optional_installs, yet control the number of deployed copies). In order to use this wonderful new feature here are the things you need. lient running munkitools 0.9.1.x or later Web service that is tracking available seats and that provides information in a specific format in response to queries. One such server is MunkiWebAdmin as of 16 July 2013....

cocoa-code

Cocoa App: Animal Age

In an effort to learn more about Objective-C programming I have created a simple OSX Application that mimics one of my more popular widgets the Dog Age Widget. Its a native Objective-C Animal Age calculator that allows you to convert the ages of various animals against human lifespans and see life expectancies based on different breeds of animals. While this may not seem like an exciting or useful application I am using it as a tool to learn more about GIT how it works and also to learn more about...

cocoa-code

Cocoa Control: Print View

Apple has changed decades ago by introducing to the world single window applications. Ever since we have seen tremendous applications all taking advantage of this form. Functionality that compliments that form are things like window sheets, those cool pop-under windows that slide up and down from the top of the application top bar. Sheets magically show us controls when we need them and then whoosh them away when we don’t. Not surprisingly Apple has built in controls for system level windows to use this wonderful technology. However its not very...

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