SayWhat

ict in education, technical musings, general geekery

Windows Remote Desktop Client for OSX

Apr 7

Posted by colin in Blog, Technology | No Comments

Now that I have pretty much completely turned to the Dark Side and use a MacBook Pro for nearly all my work, I need some way to manage our Windows network in school. We currently run 5 Windows 2003 Standard Edition servers. Using the Microsoft Remote Desktop Client for Mac works ok, but it is by no means perfect.

Then by complete chance one day, while watching an episode of Hak5 (excellent video podcast, go subscribe to it now!), I spotted @hak5matt using his MacBook Pro to demo some software, and noticed the app name CoRD in the title bar.

On further investigation I found CoRD is a remote desktop client for OSX that utterly rocks. It has a really useful sidebar that you can keep all your commonly used servers in so they are just a double click away. Makes switching between servers an absolute breeze. Read the rest of this entry »

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Artisteer – Wordpress theme creation

Mar 31

Posted by colin in Blog, Technology | 2 Comments

We all know Wordpress is awesome. Brilliant piece of blogging software, open source and all that other good stuff. But sometimes finding a decent theme is difficult. Or when you do find a decent one you know you have seen it on ten other sites and you want something a little more custom.

Enter Artisteer!

Artisteer front page

I found this little tool almost completely by accident. But what a find! It is basically a point and click template generator. It can generate basic HTML/CSS templates, Wordpress themes, Drupal themes and Joomla themes amongst others.

Currently it is only available for Windows, but with the excellent VMWare or VirtualBox programs, Mac and Linux users can still access the program with relative ease.

Example of 5 minutes work in Artisteer

Once installed you can simply click “Suggest a theme” and it will randomly pick colour palettes, header styles, button styles etc for you. Sometimes jsut clicking this button a few times will at least give you something you like and can then simply tweak to make your perfect theme.

You can select everything, right down to button styles and the wee arrows and dots you get on list items!

Also from my experience, all code that it generates is 100% valid HTML and CSS, and passes all the tests at the w3C Validator, a massive plus point now that even Internet Explorer seems to be wanting to be standards compliant!

And it is very keenly priced. Home/Academic edition is only $49.95 and the Pro version (which allows custom widths and a larger graphics library) is $129.95.

I would make a lot of websites for friends and small businesses, and Wordpress is a great solution for that, allow the client to easily update their own site. With Artisteer you can easily make custom themes for your clients or even just your own blog, quickly and easily.

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Free Virtualisation with XenServer

Mar 30

Posted by colin in Blog, Technology | No Comments

I have been looking around for some time for virtualization solutions for our school network. The primary reasoning behind this is that I believe that virtual machines provide a much easier method for disaster recovery. If you have a Windows Server virtualized (i.e. your Active Directory Domain Controllers) they essentially are all contained within a single file. This makes backing up the entire machine very straight forward, and would allow versioning of your backups. For example if your physical server went down, you can quickly move the backup of the Virtual Machine (VM) to another server and have it up and running in minutes. Also if you version your backups, you could backup the entire VM ahead of a major upgrade, and if it all goes horribly wrong, simply revert back to the backup. Read the rest of this entry »

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