ICTA has been given permission to offer you early access to Bible Islands, a safe, online learning game adventure experience for kids 4-99.
ICTA’s Christmas gift to you:  you and your family can all PLAY FREE in Bible Islands with a two-week family FREE Trial Subscription good through January 2nd (it becomes a one-week trial after that.)  Then if you opt to become a member of Bible Islands, using the ICTA link provides access to discounted 6 or 12-month family membership packages.  The makers of Bible Islands will also donate a significant portion of your family membership to ICTA ministry projects.   So check this out, tell us what you think…and pass along to others who may be interested.

More details below the fold…

Bible Islands is a hi-tech education experience for kids, designed to be an attractive and fun online gaming experience to reclaim an hour or two a day from that 4-6 hours a day kids are consuming mainstream media.

Bible Islands introduces kids to Bible stories, character building games and concepts, creative activates and also games in cross-curricular subjects of math, science, English and even Hebrew letters – all from the Christian faith and a “family values” perspective.

Bible Islands also has a completely safe and monitored online communication system for kids to send pre-selected text and picture messages to friends, parents and grandparents who are connected in the Bible Islands’ LINKO system.

Play special Christmas games and see Hermie’s “Meaning of Christmas” song in Bible Islands’ Glueworks Cinema

Bible Islands provides a personalized player account for each child, then it starts at their age appropriate level and grows with them to keep them challenged.  Parents also get a special account to play too, plus a special parent’s webpage to guide and monitor their child’s progress and time spent in Bible Islands.

Bible Islands features animated characters, stories and music from several popular Christian Children’s DVD series (Glueworks, Hermie & Friends, Gigi, God’s Little Princes, On the Farm, and many more.)

We would love for you to take advantage of the FREE Play Trial of Bible Islands and tell us what you think (even if you just want to play the Hebrew letter learning games for yourself.) Until January 3rd, you get a two-week free trial that includes Christmas-only games and videos. This is a very dynamic system, with more material being added all the time. (Note: you are welcome to share the link with others.)

It only took me five minutes to discover that Mac marketing hype has its limits.

Administrating a Mac server requires the ability to look at a variety of configuration files, particularly when doing anything beyond the bare basics.

So, one of my first goals was to make it easy to see the “hidden” files on the computer.

It’s easy on Windows. Just open up Tools->Options and change a checkbox or two.

How about on the mac?

Nope, there’s no option for this. It’s not in the user guide. Nowhere. I guess they just assume people don’t need to see hidden files.

So, I searched Google… and found a good set of instructions. Here’s what it takes:

1. Open Automator (in your Applications folder) and choose Service from the list of templates provided and click the Choose button.

2 In the left hand column under Library, select Utilities.

3. In the second column, drag “Run Shell Script” to the right hand pane.

4. At the top of the right hand pane where you dragged the Run Shell Script action, click on the right-hand popup menu and change “any application” to “Finder”. This sets the service so it only appears and can be activated by the keyboard shortcut when Finder is the active application.

5. Then click on the popup menu next to “Service receives” and choose “no input”. It’s important you do this step after step 4 because if you do the reverse, Finder won’t be available as an option in the right hand menu.

6. Copy and paste the following text into the empty text area of the Run Shell Script action:

7.

osascript -e 'tell application "Finder" to quit'
SHOWHIDDEN=`defaults read com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles`
if [ $SHOWHIDDEN -eq 1 ]; then
   defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -bool FALSE
else
   defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -bool TRUE
fi
osascript -e 'tell application "Finder" to activate'

Completed Automator action, ready to save (click to enlarge)
8. Choose File–>Save, and give the new service a meaningful name like “Toggle Hidden Files” that will appear in the Services menu. Once you’ve done that, you can go to the Services menu (located in the current application menu, next to the Apple menu) and your newly created service should appear there. You can even run it, it’s already functional, just lacking a keyboard shortcut.

9. Open System Preferences–>Keyboard–>Keyboard Shortcuts and select Services in the left column.

10. Setting the keyboard shortcut (click to enlarge)
11. Scroll down to the bottom and under the General category, you should see your newly created service listed there. Select it, then Double-click close to the right side of the selected line to reveal a field where you can enter a custom keyboard shortcut. Enter “Shift+Command+.” (might as well keep it consistent with the shortcut used in open/save dialog boxes), and then quit System Preferences.

The good news: follow those instructions carefully, and you will now be able to view or hide the hidden files. (By pressing Shift, Command and “+” together.)

Update (March 7, 2011): A friend has discovered an easier solution, albeit still non-standard. The built-in Dashboard app supports several thousand user-supplied “widget” mini-apps. One of those apps is the Hidden Files widget. With that widget installed (and the Dashboard icon dragged to your icon bar), toggling hidden file visibility is as simple as firing up the Dashboard, clicking on the Widget, and re-hiding the Dashboard.

It is strongly recommended that you create recovery DVDs/media before using your computer for the first time.

(further explanation of why this is such a Good Idea…)

For complete detailed information on how to create recovery DVDs/media, see the “Creating Recovery DVDs/media” section in the electronic User’s Guide preinstalled on your computer.

Hmmm… the instructions are in the computer, but I need to read them before I turn it on.

Maybe I need to lay hands on the computer… like with a hammer?

I’ve certainly learned something from this exercise.

Stay calm…

Would you believe we’re learning a bit about Mac? … yes, the computer.

A friend was nice enough to donate a fully-redundant pair of high end Mac Mini servers, with all the accessories, to upgrade our decade-old Linux-based office infrastructure. Thousands of dollars of equipment, complete with full warranty, etc. THANKS!

The donor, as well as a few other friends who have heard about this, have asked me to share my experiences as we go through this adventure.

I know Linux, I know Windows, I know lots of older systems… but I don’t really know Mac at all. So this will be a great learning experience!

Our goal: move our existing Linux-based highly tuned email server (and everything that goes with it) over to the Mac server. And do so retaining as much of the vaunted user-friendliness of the Mac as possible along the way.

Our situation is a bit more interesting than some because of our very advanced custom email filtering: our underpowered decade-old Linux box automatically handles thousands of spam attempts every hour, plus up to 20 denial of service attacks per second on a bad day. And we have to be very conservative in our spam-blocking because we work with partners all over the world (yes, even Nigeria!) How do we do it? Stick with me and I’ll tell all…

Let’s get a few techie bits out of the way.

In this series, I’ll try not to submarine too deep into tech talk; after all, many of our friends are non-tech. So if you don’t understand something in here, feel free to ask. Even so, I assume this series of blog posts is of more interest to tech-savvy folk…

What’s a Mac Mini Server? It’s a tiny all-in-one computer about the size of two bricks side-by-side. It has a bunch of connector ports, and an on-off switch. That’s it. You can’t change any of the parts inside the box (at least on our version.) Some of the parts and ports of most interest:

• Two internal 500GB hard disks. One of them comes with the Mac OS pre-installed. The other starts out blank
• 4GB of RAM, which is plenty
• One Gigabit wired network port. That’s going to hurt because we’d like to have two parallel networks here
• One firewire port. We’ll use that to connect a redundant disk drive (two 2TB drives set up to mirror in case one goes bad) as the main system drive. That way if a drive dies we can keep running, and can replace it without losing the server. We may also use this for some other interesting tricks.
• Several USB ports. We’ll eventually attach a (regular 10/100) wired ethernet cable to one of them, to act as the gateway to our DSL service.
• One mini-DVI display connector. This requires a special adapter to connect to a screen; we’ve got all that as well.

That’s it. Some things I wish it had (but as Grandma used to say, if wishes were horses, beggars would ride…)…

• Regular VGA display connector so we could use our KVM (Keyboard/Video/Mouse) switcher. Not going to happen.
• A second Gigabit wired network port. Nope.
• A second firewire port

As for the Mac operating system (OSX 10.6.4, “Snow Leopard”)… it’s actually a version of Unix, with some Apple-provided GUI “eye candy” on top. Don’t disparage the eye candy too much — it makes things simple for casual users…at least some of the time. More on that later!

Initial Setup

The first step is to get one of the servers running, with a proper basic configuration.

Getting started was mostly a smooth process. After skimming about nine inches of System Administrator books we were given, I decided I didn’t really need to learn a lot up front. So, I plugged the parts together, fired up the computer, used the built-in utility to reformat the external RAID drive (into a 500GB “system” partition and 1.5TB of “data” space), copied the system files across (yup, just drag-n-drop), and told the computer to boot from the external drive. Not bad so far. ‘Twas as easy as using Windows

Next, I wanted to arrange some form of remote access since none of us in the office want to have to go to the server closet every time we need to do something. Even more so if everyone’s at home… or visiting India!

I tried several remote-access solutions, including the popular VNC (there’s a built-in VNC system in the Mac). Unfortunately, none of them worked well. Happily, our Bomgar remote-desktop system works VERY nicely!**

Before I finish this intro story, I’ll leave you with a puzzler…

Unlike other computers, if you unplug the LCD display from the Mac, it will no longer allow remote GUI access!

Anyone know how to fix this?

Please stop by and visit! And, if you see a current web page with our old/wrong address, we’d love a reminder to get it changed. Our new headquarters address:

ICTA
5555 Erindale Dr., Suite 205
Colorado Springs, CO 80918 USA
(tel) 1-719-785-0120

Mostly
harmless

Please comment on this post if you have any trouble… we want to know!

After tearing out a few more of my dwindling collection of hairs, I think site registration is now working for everyone. Had to create a plugin to fix it; tech details below!

For now, we’ve enabled comments even if you can’t register. Please tell us…

• Is registration working for you?
• Does the blog site look ok?
• Is anything hard to navigate?
• Do the private and/or public RSS feeds work?

Thanks!

Tech Details

This blog is built using WPmu – multiuser WordPress. There are settings that allow new user registration and even new blog creation. Unfortunately, what they don’t tell you is this: there’s no way to enable the setting that allows users to register themselves!

I’d love it if software designers put more effort into serving the needs of blog administrators, as well as you the blog readers. We’d call that a SLTy perspective: serving well.

Bottom line: a bit of web searching revealed the issue and the code I needed. Moments later, I had created a plugin that does what we need. It’s short and sweet:

<?php
/*
Plugin Name: ICTA WPmu Registration Setup
Plugin URI: https://blogs.icta.net/plugins/
Description: Decipher users_can_register from WPmu registration setting
Version: 0.1
Author: Mr Pete
Author URI: https://blogs.icta.net/plugins/
*/

global $user_ID;

function wpmufrl() {
     $registration = get_site_option('registration');
     if ($registration == 'all' || $registration == 'user') {
         return true;
     } else {
         return false;
     }
}
add_filter('option_users_can_register', 'wpmufrl');
?>

There are some things you should know about our ICTA team, and about this blog. Someday we’ll take time to describe these in more detail, but right now we’d like to just list them as some of our initial assumptions:

• This is a safe place to grow together. Mistakes are forgiven, people change and develop their perspectives. Comments (and most blog posts) are not indexed for posterity in Google or Archive.org. That’s why you have to log in to comment, and RSS feeds are private.
• We have significant commercial high tech experience. The methods, tools, process of business today are familiar and “easy” for us. We do our best to avoid diving into complicated jargon. At the same time, sometimes a bit of vocabulary is important for a given topic.
• We appreciate and value a Bible-based spiritual perspective.
• We appreciate and value good science, good use of math, engineering, planning and more. (We believe our minds and skills are gifts of God.) Sometimes you might even see a bit of math here. 2 + 2 = 4 anyone?
• We pray. Not asking a God made in our image to fulfill our desires, but talking with and listening to the God who loves us and loves to hear our hearts.
• We hope you, like we, are not out to offend but find a path together. This is not about unity at the expense of truth. But since we’re all seekers, we probably have more in common than we think, as we journey together toward God who loves us all.
• In other venues, we might write “G-d” instead of “God” out of respect for the Jewish tradition of never writing or speaking the holy name of God. However, as this is our venue, we hope you will not be offended that we do speak God’s name. In fact, a uniqueness of Jesus is that he introduces us to God as intimate Father who loves us more than we can imagine.

What do you think? Does anything else need to be said up front?