A Leslie Wong Blog

Ryan Faas at Computer World has written an informative article on supporting Macs in an Active Directory environment.

He reviews the advantages and disadvantages of Apple’s Active Directory plug-in, Thursby’s ADmitMac and Centrify’s Direct Control for Mac.

It’s a good article for system administrators working in a Mac-Windows environment.

The second annual Amgen Tour of California started in San Francisco yesterday with the prologue running from the Ferry Building to Coit Tower.

Unfortunately, last year’s winner and 2006 Tour de France champion, Floyd Landis, will not be riding in this year’s Tour (both), but you can follow the teams in the peloton virtually, in real time, thanks to CSC’s Omnilocation and Google Earth.

Seven riders, plus the lead vehicle and broom wagon will carry a small GPS tracker. Using dynamic mapping developed by CSC, cycling fans to track racers and the peloton using Google Earth. This is a link to the Google Earth tracker and this is a link at CSC’s web site using Google maps.

If you want to try repairing your LCD display, you can check the Google or view my experiences with an HP f1703. There are over a hundred comments too, many people are successful, some aren’t.

If you’ve given up, Luke Sluder recycled his display like this. (via Make: Blog: Why throw stuff out?).

Today’s (Feb 5, 2007) news update at Macwindows.com (http://www.macwindows.com/) has a link to a freeware java app, HFSExplorer 0.11, written by Eric Larsson, that allows Windows users (e.g., Boot Camp) to access Mac OS Extended (HFS+) volumes.

read more | digg story

noahw, at instructables.com, has a good soldering how-to for beginners. This article might help people who have a broken Hewlett-Packard f1703 flat panel display and are tentative about soldering. The comments following the article also contain some good soldering advice.

Instructables.com‘s about page describes their site: “Instructables is a website where passionate people share what they do and how they it, and learn from and collaborate with others. Instructables was started by the partners at Squid Labs because we needed a quick and easy way to document and collaborate on our many projects.”

I was watching Bill Gates’ CES keynote today and Justin Hutchinson, group product manager of Windows Client at Microsoft, demonstrated some Vista features that I hadn’t seen before.

Hutchinson controlled a live.com Virtual Earth 3D fly-over of Las Vegas with an Xbox 360 controller (There was tepid applause). Chris just got an Xbox 360 for Christmas and we’ve been playing Gears of War and Lara Croft Tomb Raider LEGEND, so I thought at least we can get our money’s worth using the Xbox 360 controller on our PCs.

I found drivers for Vista and XP at Microsoft downloads. Microsoft has an KB article on How to connect an Xbox 360 Controller for Windows to a computer. Unfortunately, the Xbox 360 Wireless Controller must need a dongle to work with a PC

This seems like another end-of-an-era thing. I learned Morse Code when I was in the Boy Scouts but I can’t remember if it was to get the Radio Merit Badge.

On the other hand, last year Jay Leno did a competition between two Morse Coders and two Text Messengers – the Morse Coders won. Unfortunately, the video is no longer available, but it was interesting to watch.