Continuing my series on Mission Control Desktop, this post covers some enhancements I made for configuring email accounts in Thunderbird. The mail.* branch is one of the largest group of preferences you can manipulate using autoconfig. Setting up the right combination of mail.account, mail.server, mail.identity and mail.smtpserver is just a little tricky. With the exception [...]
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Things Adrienne & Dean Do, Think and WriteBrowsing Posts in Enterprise Software
Suppose you have two Solaris machines and you want to bring them to the same patch level. Or you are troubleshooting issues on two machines that are supposed to be identical. I wrote a perl script that compares patch levels on two machines. It shows something like this: malfunction % patch_diff sr-host-01 sr-host-02 Patches [...]
Nobody likes boring code Mozilla products like Thunderbird and Firefox represent setting choices in a textual “tree” system. (Read the intro.) Preferences that begin with print. live on the tree branch dealing with printing while those that begin with app.update. are on the auto-update system’s branch. An easy concept to grasp. In practice, however, the [...]
Security Conscious Javascript Normally, javascript does not have access to local files. Rightfully so because almost every web server should be untrusted and allowing anybody to read your files is a large security risk. Mission Control Desktop, however is a javascript application with access to XPCOM, Mozilla’s component object model. This article is an example [...]
Individual in the Enterprise Firefox, Thunderbird have full-fledged graphical settings editors. It is easy for a user to change the behavior of his or her web browser with a few mouse clicks. While this approach is sensible for the home user, GUIs hamper software configuration in the corporate enterprise. Although Mozilla products textually represent preferences [...]
Previously, we saw that Mozilla MCD can inspect a user’s environment using getEnv(). It can also retrieve information from an LDAP directory. I use this feature to inform Firefox and Thunderbird of the user in detail. The corporate directory knows the user’s full name, mail server and authentication credentials. autoconfig takes this and, among other [...]
A challenge with software Managing software for thousands of users presents a formidable challenge to the system administrator. Publishing corporate policy, using standard environments and providing clear end-user documentation helps. However, it doesn’t beat automatically doing it right. This is the power of MCD autoconfig. In an earlier post, I introduced MCD as a way [...]
What is MCD? MCD (aka AutoConfig) is a script used to programmatically configure Mozilla products such as Firefox and Thunderbird in the enterprise for multiple users. Part of my job is to ensure 33,385 people have the right settings to check their email and browse the web. Centralizing their set up with autoconfig removes the [...]
It is a pretty well known fact that using javascript to add decimals 0.1 with 0.2 does not result in 0.3. [1] Try it yourself with the FireBug console. For the uninitiated, the problem stems from javascript’s internal representation of numbers. They are actually binary numbers that are usually exact, but sometimes for example, are [...]
Extending acts_as_commentable
acts_as_commentable is a nice little ruby on rails plugin. It extends your ActiveRecord classes giving them comments. We are going to use comments on all kinds of things, starting with recipes, of course. However, AAC lacks a critical feature: the ability for users to approve comments before they are displayed. In this post I am [...]