Symphonious

Automator is a cool little app that comes with OS X that makes it much, much easier to programmatically control the various applications on your computer (all the good ones anyway). It’s all done by dragging and dropping actions into a workflow - the output of one leads to the input of the next. In Leopard, Automator got a big upgrade so it can now handle loops and variables but most of the time you don’t need them.

One handy feature that’s not obvious though is that if you save your workflow as an application (File->Save then select Application instead of Workflow) you can drag and drop files onto it and they become the input to the first action. So to create a droplet that resizes images to 50%, just drop the resize image action into a workflow and save it as an application. Any image you drop onto it will be resized to 50% (overwriting the original - you might want to take Automator’s advice and add a copy task too).

This proves particularly useful when combined with the wireless printer/scanner I have since it can automatically open the scanned file in any application you specify. I now have a “Process Receipts” workflow that copies the file to my Ephox Receipts folder, adds the date to the filename, resizes it to 25% (seems to be the right balance of file size vs readability) and opens a new email in Entourage with the file attached and template text, ready for me to send off to the magical fairies that know what to do with that stuff (we call them Irene, Therese and Michelle). In the time I saved, I wrote this blog post…

The server migration to a new data center last night went horribly wrong when the new IP didn’t (and still doesn’t) have a reverse DNS lookup. Sadly that means the secondary DNS where all the actual requests go to refused to pull the updates and the site was effectively down.

I think I’ve managed to sort out the DNS issues for all the domains hosted here now by making one of the secondary DNS’s the primary DNS and generally juggling things around. This is probably a smarter set up anyway so I’ll probably leave it this way in future. Still, annoying….

Arrived safely in the UK early this morning with no hassles from customs thanks to my shiny new visa. Somewhat ironically I also got my first serendipitous travel event from Drupal:

The problem of course being that this was my reminder to change my home location from Brisbane to London so I actually miss Andrew by a week. Never mind, he's heading over here next anyway.

For those who are interested in my travelling around Europe and general personal life, my wife has taken to blogging a lot over at "The Suttons".

I woke up this morning to discover that I can no longer access my GMail account (using Google apps for your domain) via IMAP. It just returns an error saying that IMAP is not enabled for your account. The IMAP option has even disappeared from the web interface, now only allowing you to enable POP access. The same is true for a second Google Apps for your domain account that work uses.

I guess that's what you get for using free stuff but it really stinks that there was no notice given.

UPDATE 10 minutes later: Wow, complaining on your blog really works - suddenly it's back. Not quite sure how you mess up the web UI and the actual IMAP system at once though - perhaps someone deployed an old version….

Symptoms

• You have a NetGear FVS124G router providing VPN.
• You use IPSecuritas to let Mac users log into that VPN.
• VPN has worked in the past.
• VPN is no longer working and you haven't changed any settings (in our case there was a power outage and the modem configuration didn't come back as expected initially then was fixed so all the settings were the same as they used to be).
• In the IPSecuritas log you get a message stating "inappropriate sadb message passed." and  Phase 1 never actually connects (thus Phase 2 times out because of a lack of Phase 1 connection).

Solution

1. Log into the admin interface of the NetGear router and go to Management->Settings Backup.
2. Click "Back Up" and save the backed up settings file to your local hard drive.
3. Under "Restore saved settings from file" click "Choose file…" and select the file you just downloaded.
4. Click Restore.

If you're having the same problem I was, your VPN will now work.

Commentary

This is brain dead behavior and I swear I will never buy anything from NetGear again.