There doesn’t appear to be a decent solution for this problem on the mac. VNC is a joke. It will just take my 24 inch iMac screen and shrink it down to the laptop’s screen size. And yes I have played around with smart zoom but it’s really painful.

Isn’t there an equivalent for the mac to Microsoft’s outstanding Remote Desktop Connection application and RDP protocol?

For what it’s worth I signed up to be notified when AquaConnect releases their mac remote desktop product which is based on RDP but they aren’t even announcing dates.

Any ideas or am I just out of luck?

And yes, I know, it is possible to run iLife '08 on these machines but we wouldn't have any official support and if there is a problem we can't even return the software since, it is my understanding, that Apple won't take back open software boxes. So we're screwed. I typically upgrade my computers every four years or so, so I was planning on upgrading my box in 2008 but even then I can't move to iLive '08 because we won't be upgrading my wife's machine until 2009 and we share iPhoto by file synching (as in, my wife's machine is the 'master' and I synch off her drive). And no, terminal serving in to my machine from her machine won't work. The whole reason we got my wife a Mac is to make her life simpler, not more complex. Besides, she downloads the pictures to her machine, not mine.

Normally Apple makes me really happy but I feel seriously screwed by iLive '08. Obsoleting a main line machine in under 3 years is just wrong.

When I first reviewed LY X a year ago I decided it was good enough to use (and have done so regularly since) but still painful. With the 1.5.1 release I can revise that review to say that it's only minorly irritating to use LY X but it's good points are so numerous that it's more than worth the pain if you need to deal with large documents, with math formulas or with large bibliographies. And thanks to the efforts of folks like Dr. Richard G. Heck (who has my undying gratitude for fixing HTML generation in LY X) LY X is substantially better at generating HTML.

LY X does have a learning curve and one is well advised to at least read the tutorial (Help->Tutorial). But I believe that the modern versions of LY X have vastly improved over their predecessors and the learning curve is well worth the effort.

Contents

1 Starting a New Document

To start a new document I begin by using File->New From Template and then pointing at the locally saved version of my template file. This file sets a few environmental variables that enable URLs and set a few other things the way I like.

2 Math

TEX, the underlying technology for LY X, was original invented in order to produce beautiful mathematical equations. So as one would expect LY X comes with a fairly nifty equation editor. For example, here's an equation I pulled out of my book on retirement planning:

What's especially nice is that I can enter the TEX formula commands directly into the dialog and LY X will translate the command on the fly to the right graphical representation. But there is also a graphical formula palette available by right clicking on an equation. The only trick I've had to remember is to press command-return when I want to enter multiple equations at one time.

3 Bibliographies

One of the more unpleasant tasks in writing a paper with lots of references is keeping track of those references, linking to citations and making sure the bibliography is properly formatted and ordered. Thankfully there is a great standard called BibTex that handles a lot of the drudgery. The first step to using BibTex is to get a bibliography manager program which can keep track of all the bibliographic entries. For OS X there's BibDesk[Bib(2006)]. It's pretty nifty but I did find perusing its manual worthwhile, especially regarding its AutoFile feature. With AutoFile, BibDesk is designed not only to keep track of reference information but also of the underlying documents being referenced.

To get BibTex references working I double click on the "BibTex Generated Bibliography" icon at the bottom of the new file created from the template and navigate to the .bib file generated by BibDesk. To add actual citations I use Insert->Citation which will list all the citations available in the BibTex file. It's worth pointing out that BibDesk only updates the BibTex file when the File->Save command in BibDesk is used.

One of the issues I've noodled on for a while is how to get decent bibliography entries for Webpages. BibDesk supports URL, Electronic and Webpage styles but I find that they either don't have enough information or require too much information to properly fill out. I now find myself mostly using the "proceedings" style where I put the web page name as the title, a year and then enter the URL. I find this publishes quite nicely.

4 URLs

A real weakness in LY X is its URL handling. There is a special URL dialog but unfortunately it can only produce URLs of the form text /lyx. That is, some text followed by a URL. To get around this I use Evil Red Text (ERT). I create an ERT by pressing the TEX button and then entering information of the form \href{http://www.goland.org}{this URL} which is the command I used to generate this URL.

5 Adding Cross References

TEX supports a very simple type of cross referencing using \ref and \label that allows one to reference anything that has been labeled. These references, especially if set to 'reference', will work in HTML but references always reference the nearest section to the label, they don't link to the actual labeled text. This is fine for printed documents but less than optimal for HTML.

One horrendously painful workaround is to use the \hypertarget{Label}{Text} and \hyperlink{Label}{Text} macros. Both macros are inserted using the TEX button to create ERT. For example, I use \hypertarget{L1}{this text} to link this text to this link that I created using \hyperlink{L1}{this link}.

6 Making Pretty HTML

File->Export->HTML. Thanks to Dr. Heck it's as simple as that.

7 Conclusion

Although LY X isn't necessarily the easiest word processor ever invented it richly rewards the investment to learn it by providing an environment that lets the author focus on the text above all. I really enjoy editing text in LY X even for its various glitches and issues. I also give a hearty thanks to the LY X developers for doing a great job of continually improving LY X.

References

A Appendix – Creating the Template

A.1 Configuring URL Output

The HREF function described above is enabled via a package called hyperref. To enable hyperref and also to set the output behavior so that hyperlinks will be colored when outputted in PDF documents (a useful feature since PDF viewers like Apple's preview do not highlight URLs by default in PDFs) the text below needs to be added to the preamble of the document. Preamble is accessed via Document->Settings->LATEX Preamble

\usepackage{hyperref}

\hypersetup{colorlinks=true, linkcolor=blue, filecolor=blue, pagecolor=blue, urlcolor=blue}

A.2 Configuring BibTex

I added in a BibTex based bibliography by going to the end of the document and using Insert->Lists/TOC->BibTex Bibliography. As described above(3 ) I point the file at the appropriate .bib file. I set the style to "plainnat" because I like how it outputs citations (author's last name + Year) and it also will output URLs listed in the bibliography. I also check "add Bibliography to TOC" so the Bibliography shows up in the table of contents.

A.3 Making Simple Quotes

I think the default quote format in LY X is a bit odd. I prefer simple quotes. To enable this I set Document->Settings->Language->Quote Style->"text".

A.4 Avoiding Problems With Fonts

Leaving the fonts (available via Document->Settings-Fonts) all on default will produce reasonable output. Messing around with the choices can be a bit dicey in terms of generating HTML as there is a problem with some of the fonts generating bizarre ligatures. For example, set Roman to Bera Serif and generate a HTML file that contains the strings "fi" and "fj". The HTML output will invert them, "fi" will come out "fj" and "fj" will come out "fi". If you keep all the fonts on default then all will be well.

B Historical Cruft

Before Dr. Heck fixed LY X it used to be that it wasn't possible to generate HTML from LY X that honored bibliographies. The dance below fixed that problem. It's no longer necessary but I paid a really painful price to figure out the exact right set of commands so I'm keeping a copy here, just in case.

Let's assume that file is called "myfile.tex". I next open a terminal window, navigate to the directory containing myfile.tex and type in the following commands:

latex myfile

bibtex myfile

latex myfile

latex myfile

htlatex myfile xhtml

Notice that the extension ".tex" is not used. Then end result will be a file called myfile.html that will contain a full HTML representation, with a bibliography and will generate gifs for any math formulas.

Building a Jar File That Contains Jar Files

My project has a bunch of classes, which is no big deal, but it also includes a bunch of Jar files for things like Xerces & MySQL. Unfortunately the classpath argument in a Jar file's manifest works in some bizarre way too hard for my limited intellect to grasp with the result that, in short, you can't put Jar files into Jar files and expect things to work well.

When I asked the Java gurus at work how to handle this they said I was supposed to unzip the Jar files I was depending on, flatten out their directory structures and then jar up the whole bloody thing. This is as nasty as it sounds and the way most people deal with it is they develop using the Jar files directly (something Eclipse handles wonderfully) but when the time comes to create their own Jar file they have ANT scripts which do the dirty work.

I, however, took one look at ANT and realized that I could easily waste days trying to understand it. I had no doubt that all I needed was 10 lines of ANT XML but figuring out which ten lines would take me forever.

Thankfully however I found a program called One-Jar which is designed to create a Jar file that contains other Jar files and to make all the dependencies work. It does this through the nasty expedient of introducing its own class loader (a time honored Java hack) who does all the dirty work. I'm probably a bit thick but I found the instructions on the One-Jar home page a bit hard to follow. Here's my own even harder to read version.

Setting Up to use One-Jar

I have a directory called JavaStuff that contains within it a directory called MyJavaCode which contains all of my Java classes as well as the Jar files my classes make use of, e.g. Xerces and MySQL. To make it easy for me to create my custom Jar file I created a child directory to JavaStuff called onejarstruc which itself contains three subdirectories, main, lib and boot. So the file structure looks like:

                        JavaStuff 
                       /          \ 
             MyJavaCode            onejarstruc 
              /                    /    |   \ 
 Jar Files & Java Classes         main lib  boot

What matters in this set up are the directory names "main" and "lib". One-Jar depends on finding exactly those names to do its magic.

I then copied the Jar file I downloaded from One-Jar into the boot directory and executed "jar -xvf one-jar-boot-0.95.jar" in terminal which exploded the Jar file's contents into the boot directory.

The next step was to create a manifest file. This file's only job is to point to the class that contains the main method that should be called when my Jar is executed. To do this I created a file called blog.manifest inside of the MyJavaCode directory. It's contents are:

Main-Class: org.goland.blog.ReadPost

Making It Easy To Use One-Jar

The process of creating my custom Jar file using One-Jar has the following steps:

1. Remove any old files hanging around

2. Create the "core.jar" file which just contains my Java classes and is set to use blog.manifest and put the resulting jar file in the "onjarstruc/main" subdirectory.

3. Move the Jar files I depend on (like Xerces, MySQL, etc.) to "onjarstruct/lib"

4. Create the final jar file, I call it blogupdater.jar and put inside of it the contents of the main and lib directories

5. Update the contents of blogupdater.jar to contain the manifest and classes provided by One-Jar

The script that does this for my project is:

#!/bin/sh
# Configuration
commonRoot=/Users/xxx/yyy/JavaStuff
java5BashRC=$commonRoot/java_functions_bashrc
oneJarRoot=$commonRoot/onejarstruc
# The compound Jar file with the One-Jar class loader
updateJarLoc=$commonRoot/blogupdater.jar
javaCodeRoot=$commonRoot/MyJavaCode
# The manifest file for core.jar
coreManifest=$commonRoot/MyJavaCode/blog.manifest

# Clean up
rm $updateJarLoc
rm $oneJarRoot/main/*
rm $oneJarRoot/lib/*

# Create core jar file (org is the directory with my java code)
jar cmf $coreManifest $oneJarRoot/main/core.jar -C $javaCodeRoot org

# Move helper jar files over to library
cp $javaCodeRoot/*.jar $oneJarRoot/lib

# Create the compound jar file
jar cf $updateJarLoc -C $oneJarRoot main -C $oneJarRoot lib

# Change the classloader for the compound jar file
jar -uvfm $updateJarLoc $oneJarRoot/boot/boot-manifest.mf -C $oneJarRoot/boot .

I save this script as "buildjar.sh" and after running "sh buildjar.sh" in terminal I have a nice shinny new blogupdate.jar file which I then can execute. Thanks to the magic of One-Jar all of the references in my Java code to classes inside of the subsidiary Jar files work just fine.

Tor is an EFF supported open source software project that makes it difficult for anyone to figure out who a Tor user is talking to on the Internet. For example, someone using Tor can pretty effectively hide which websites they visit, where they download content from, who they are sending e-mail to, etc. As I explain below, Tor is a tool everyone should be interested in, even those who don't think they have anything to hide.

Unfortunately Tor's performance can be quite slow. But using proxy configuration files (pac files) it is possible to configure browsers to use Privoxy/Tor for some websites but not others. This is not a perfect solution since, as I explain below, there are some trivial ways to get around this technique but it is better than nothing.

But I have Nothing to Hide!

I can hear the responses now "But I have nothing to hide, why do I care about Tor?"

You see, the funny part is, you probably don't know what you have to hide. The classic example of this was communism in America during the 1930's. With the great depression leading many to believe that capitalism had failed, the happy communist platitudes of 'from each according to their ability to each according to their need' suddenly didn't sound so bad. Many people went to communist events, read communist literature and even joined the communist party. These folks weren't anti-American, they were just looking for a system that didn't produce as much misery as what they were experiencing in the U.S. at the time.

Later on, as the economy recovered and the facts of what communism in practice looked like came out most people left behind their dalliances with communism realizing it to be a fundamentally flawed belief system that ignored the basics of human nature and created an idealistic fantasy land whose every implementation (think the Soviet Union or China) turned into a nightmare of death on a massive scale.

After World War II ended, the American economy took off and the Soviet Union became America's #1 enemy. This period heralded the "Red Scare". Any person who had so much as touched a communist pamphlet could now find themselves being accused of being a communist sympathizer and thus facing the prospect of either ratting on their friends or having their lives ruined. One can just imagine how many people during this period, innocent upstanding Americans who were curious about Communism in the 20's and 30's lay awake at night wondering if there was any record of what they had done or if one of their 'friends', desperate to avoid the destruction of their own livelihood, would rat them out.

The reality is that we don't know what we have to hide. As the government extends systems like Carnivore and Echelon and as laws such as the U.S. Patriot Act make it easier for the government to collect 'traffic analysis' information (such as who people call, where they send e-mail, etc.) without having to provide any real justification we can expect efforts such as "Terrorism Information Awareness" to bring us that happy day when each of us will have a file either in a government or private database that attempts to identify every website we visit (how often and what we look at), every person we send an e-mail to, who we IM with, etc. In fact, according to CNET's Declan Cullagh, both Europe and the US are now actively working on rules and laws to require that ISPs keep records of all Internet activity for all of their users. As these rules/laws get passed, using the usual three horseman of terrorism, drugs and child pornography, every e-mail, chat session and website that anyone visits will be logged and recorded for anywhere between months to years.

I can only imagine how many Arab and Muslim Americans are now laying awake at night wondering which of the charities they may have innocently given money to or Mosques they may have visited or lectures they may have attended pre-9/11 involved people or organizations that are now on the U.S. Government's official terrorist organization watch list. "Do you now or have you ever supported terrorist activities?"

You don't know what you have to hide and by the time you figure it out, it will likely be too late. This is where Tor comes in. It makes it much easier to hide. The reason to use Tor isn't so much because you have something to hide, the reason to use Tor is so when you find out you had something to hide you can rest a little easier knowing that your secret may be protected.

How Tor Works – The 30 Second Version

Tor is based on various folks volunteering computers which act as Tor routers. Someone using the Tor software on their client is able to bounce their messages around these various routers before their message reaches its final destination (for example, a website they want to retrieve content from). The trick to all of this is that when the message is bouncing around the Tor network it is encrypted. The only router that can view the content is the one at the end who makes the actual request. Similarly, using further encryption tricks, the routers that the message bounces around don't know about each other.

Imagine a message starting at an initial router A, going to router B, followed by router C followed by the final website (or e-mail server or IM server or whatever). What happens is that the client sends an encrypted message to router A. Router A can't read the message and only knows that it is to forward the message to router B. Router B also can't read the message but it knows to forward the message to router C. Router C can read the message, decrypts it and forwards it to the final destination, the website (or e-mail server or…). The website then sends the requested web page back to Router C who encrypts the response such that only the original client can read it. Router C then sends the message to B who sends it to A who sends it to the client who decrypts it.

Notice what happened. Router A knows the identity of the client but doesn't know what message the client sent or where it is going. Router B knows it is routing something (it can't read it) between A and C but doesn't know anything else. Router C can read the message but it doesn't know who sent it. Each router only knows enough to do its job, no more.

The end result is that someone listening at any one point in the system can't figure out anything useful. So someone listening between the client and router A knows that the client is sending out requests but it has no idea what's in the requests or where they are going. Someone listening between Router C and the final website (assuming SSL isn't being used) can see the requests and responses but has no idea who made the request.

The end result is a fairly robust (but not perfect, see below) privacy.

The More People Use Tor, The More Security Tor Provides

One of the more interesting aspects of Tor is that the more people use it, the more security it provides.

The first reason is that if the only people using Tor are people who currently have something to hide then anytime a government or other interested entity sees Tor traffic they can use it as a flag that whomever the original client is, they are probably worth investing further. But the more people use Tor, especially people who have nothing to hide (that they know about) the less useful that flag becomes. In other words, using Tor when you have nothing to hide will make it much more useful when you do.

The second reason is more technical but equally important. Organizations that can intercept Internet traffic at multiple points can perform certain kinds of analysis that would potentially allow them to break Tor's anonymity. For an extreme example imagine a Tor network that consists of a single router and only one client. If the observer can intercept all communications leaving the client and all communications leaving the router then they know who the client is talking to since they know that all the data the router is sending must have come from that client. But as more and more people use the router it gets harder and harder to figure out which requests came from which sources. In the general case this means that the more people use Tor the harder it is to use multi-point intercept analysis to figure out anything useful.

Tor's Main Downside – Speed (and how to work around it)

When I first wrote this article in January of 2005 Tor was so slow as to be unusable. Although its speed has significantly increased it is still quite slow and I find that keeping it on for normal browsing is just too frustrating. But there are specific web sites which pose such a significant privacy risk that I'm willing to use Tor with them. The top of my 'privacy threat' websites is Google.

I love using Google but as a consequence it knows a lot more about me than I want it to. So what I wanted was a way to configure my web browser so that requests to Google would go to Tor. The easiest solution I have found is a pac file.

Pac files were invented by Netscape, the original documentation is available here, but they are now supported by all major web browsers. In essence they are Javascript files that are called by the browser to find out if a particular website should be accessed via a proxy. Below I give the pac file I use. It routes all Google requests through privoxy/tor as well as requests to privoxy's 'reserved' addresses that give one local control over privoxy's behavior:

function FindProxyForURL(url, host) {
        if (shExpMatch(host,"*google.*") || 
            shExpMatch(host,"config.privoxy.org") ||
            shExpMatch(host,"p.p")) 
                return "PROXY 127.0.0.1:8118";
        return "DIRECT";
}

Just save this text to a file and call it something like tor.pac and then point your browser's proxy pac file to it.

To configure Firefox to use a pac file under OS X go to Firefox->preferences->General->Connection Settings…->Automatic proxy configuration URL:. Enter in a URL (you can use file:// to point to a local file) that points to your pac file and click reload.

I would avoid using Safari under OS X because its pac file support is seriously buggy.

Note, however, that this technique is very far from secure. A trivial way to defeat this approach is for a website that is on your 'proxy' list to include in its pages a picture from a different domain that it owns. The domain the picture comes from won't be on the 'black' list and so the site can find out who you are. Yes, Firefox can be configured not to load pictures from domains other than the current one and to restrict cookies but my guess is that using scripting or other tricks it will still be possible for a determined site to use 'allied' domains to find out who you are. Therefore this technique is only useful with sites like Google that aren't malicious but, due to their nature, can collect a lot of information you may not want them to.

Using Tor in this way is clearly sub-optimal but I think it's better than not using it at all, which given it's current performance, would be my only other choice.

How Tor Works with a discussion of a few issues (WARNING THIS SECTION IS FOR PROTOCOL GEEKS ONLY)

Tor uses a circuit based design where a Tor client accesses the Tor directory (implemented using Tor's own directory protocol, we don't need no stinking standards) to download a list of available Tor onion routers and their encryption keys. The Tor client then selects a subset of the available onion routers (usually 3) and creates a circuit between them. I'll spare the reader the details of exactly how a circuit gets established and just say that once established each onion router only knows about its predecessor and successor. In addition all data sent down the circuit is encrypted using the final onion router in the circuit's (called the exit router) encryption key. The end result is that only the initial onion router knows who sent the data and only the exit onion router knows where the data is going. Tor only supports TCP connection but it supports both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses.

To use Tor one downloads the Tor client which is a socks proxy that runs on one's machine. One then configures either the OS or individual applications to use the local Tor socks client. Tor supports socks 4, 4a and 5. This is where things get interesting. It turns out that socks 4 could only accept IP addresses. This means that if one uses a socks 4 compatible web browser, for example and navigates to www.cryptome.com the local system will make a DNS request for cryptome's IP. The result is that anyone listening on the client's local network will now know that the client PC wants to contact cryptome. Socks 4a fixes this flaw by modifying socks 4 to accept DNS addresses. In that case the DNS address will be resolved by the exit onion router. The only problem is that there are relatively few systems that support socks 4a. In theory socks 5 solves the issue because socks 5 natively supports accepting DNS addresses. However the Tor folks have found that in practice most socks 5 clients will actually resolve the DNS address locally anyway and pass the IP address to the socks 5 proxy. To be clear, this is not a flaw in the socks 5 protocol, it's a flaw in how the clients are implemented. In fact, to date, the Tor folks have found exactly one socks 5 client that doesn't do the wrong thing – Apple's Safari browser.

There is a workaround for the DNS problem, at least for web browsers (which is good since I use Camino not Safari), use Privoxy. Privoxy is a HTTP Proxy that runs locally and supports socks 4a. It also throws in some other nice features like blocking banner ads and cleaning up HTTP requests to remove sensitive information like the referer (sic) field.

Fundamentally I think Tor should be able to scale. The circuit based design is a bit nasty but it's a hack to deal with current bandwidth and processing speed limitations. Since bandwidth only increases while the size of the source routing list stays constant I suspect bandwidth motivations to use circuit switching will quickly disappear. The circuit switching design is also nice for performance reasons, requiring less processing by the onion routers to route packets, but that too I suspect is just a passing phase that increasing processor capacity will make no longer compelling.

As such my guess is that Tor will eventually become a true packet switched network with every packet individually source routed. In other words, Tor will re-invent TCP over TCP. The only real long term challenge I see to Tor is latency. Tor's security depends on routing packets randomly which means intentionally sending them in sub-optimal (from a latency perspective) directions. It doesn't take a visionary to recognize that latency will increasingly be the single biggest performance issue for most Internet operations. Today latency is hidden by the relatively low bandwidths and slow processes currently in use. But over time as bandwidth bloats to fantastic portions (terabyte per second networks anyone?) and processors reach speeds that today we would only use in comic books the constancy of the speed of light will increasingly stand out.

This will be, I suspect Tor's greatest long term threat. But even this threat can be dealt with. For example, by intentionally sending bogus data in various directions and hiding one's real requests amongst the bogus ones it should be possible to more optimally route one's requests. I also expect that ridiculous levels of effort will be put into caching and distributed processing technologies in order to push services and information as close as possible to users in order to minimize latency. The consequence of those distributed technologies is that it will be easier to send one's data in various random directions and still hit the service one wants since the service itself will be seeded all over the place. There are, as always, limits. Certain services will absolutely require global coordination which means a global synchronization point which means introducing lots of latency. But I suspect we will be amazed by our future selves' creativity in reducing such synchronization points to an absolute minimum.

In any case, my guess is that onion routing and its progeny are a workable approach which is why I keep playing with Tor.

Magnatune makes all of their music available as free MP3 downloads so you can try before you buy. They use m3u files (e.g. play lists) to provide access so the MP3s. Unfortunately iTunes opens a m3u file by just dumping all the music listed in the file into the main iTunes library and then playing the first song. Unfortunately the songs are now in 'library' order so the next song played will probably not be the next song in the m3u list, meaning I have to hunt around the library to find the rest of the songs. This "hunt and peck" also makes deleting files a real pain if I decide I don't like the play list.

Thankfully there is a fix, iTunes Opener. Download the file, uncompress it and drop it into the Applications directory. To make sure that iTunes opener is always called when clicking on a m3u file you have to go to the finder. First, open the finder, then select a m3u file, then go to file->get info, then go to "Open with", select "iTunes Opener" and then press "Change All…". What iTunes Opener does is open the playlist as a separate group in iTunes and gives it a default name of the current date and time. This allows the play list to be played in order and makes it easier to delete an unwanted play list (just drag it into the trash).

Ahh, but the fun doesn't end there. Magnatune offers a number of download formats but from a quality perspective WAV and FLAC are best since they are lossless. FLAC is preferred as it is both an open format and usually around 1/2 the size of a WAV file but with no loss in quality. Unfortunately iTunes does not play FLAC files. Since I don't want to waste the time downloading WAV files I choose to download FLAC and then use xACT which can translate between FLAC and AIFF or WAV. AIFF is Apple's lossless music compression format and is supported by iTunes. Unfortunately xACT can't seem to maintain the FLAC tags (e.g. album name, music title, tract number, etc.) on the AIFF file so when the file is imported to iTunes all the tags are lost and have to be typed in by hand. xACT does have a "FLAC tags" tab that allows one to read the tags on the FLAC files but I still have to select the song in iTunes and then select File->Get Info->Info to type in the data. It is really annoying.

BTW, Magnatune happily allows downloading AAC files which are iTunes native compressed (hence lossy) format as well as a Mac friendly MP3 format, Ogg, etc. FLAC is not some strange format and I think it was a bad call on iTune's part to not support playing FLAC files or at least support importing them into the AIFF format.

I did some research and all I could find were complaints about USB KVMs, the main issue being switching time. It seems that switching between machines can take several seconds. Does anyone know of a good quality USB KVM that can switch really fast? If so please drop a comment on this article. Thanks!

N.B. I am aware of Synergy. But Synergy has never worked very well on Mac's and my PC is actually running a VPN which ends up meaning that the keyboard and mouse commands would have to be routed over the open Internet, this is both a security and a performance nightmare.

Stuart actually suggested two solutions. I selected his second solution and describe in detail how to implement it below. At the end of this article I explain what his first solution was and why I didn't choose it.

The crux of Stuart's solution is to create a second Ethernet configuration on both my wife and I's machines. This is trivial to set up (once you know how) and from there everything will just 'work', e.g. the printers will just show up.

Instructions for the machine that is hosting the printer:

Step 1 – Go to system preferences (you can get there by clicking on the apple in the upper left hand corner of the screen)

Step 2 – Go to 'Sharing'

Step 3 – Select 'Services'

Step 4 – Select 'Printer Sharing' (depending on how you configured your machine you might have to click on the lock icon at the bottom left hand corner of the dialog box and type in your administrator password before being able to change the Printer Sharing setting)

Step 5 – 'Show All'

Step 6 – 'Network'

Step 7 – 'Show – Network Port Configurations' (this is a choice in the drop down titled 'Show')

Step 8 – Select 'Built-in Ethernet'

Step 9 – Press 'duplicate'

Step 10 – Enter in a title, I choose 'Local Only Ethernet'

Step 11 – Press 'Apply Now'

Step 12 – Select 'Show – 'Local Only Ethernet''

Step 13 – Set 'Configure IPv4' to 'Manually'

Step 14 – Set 'IP Address' to '10.0.0.1'

Step 15 – Press 'Apply Now'

The computer hosting the printer is now ready to share that printer with all local machines (including one's your ISP has given the same subnet address to, so beware!).

For each of the machines that you want to be able to use the printer with do the following:

Step 1 – System Preferences

Step 2 – Step 11: Follow the instructions specified above for steps 6-15 with the exception that in step 14 when entering the IP address enter 10.0.0.2. If you are adding multiple machines then each one needs its own IP address, just increment, e.g. 10.0.0.3, 10.0.0.4, etc.

Step 12 – 'Show All'

Step 13 – 'Print & Fax'

Step 14 – Press the '+' Button

Step 15 – The printer on the other machine should show up in the list of available printers, select it

Step 16 – Press 'add'

That's it. The whole process should take about two minutes.

What the previous does is create a second Ethernet interface on both machines that use an IP address from the reserved 10.X.X.X range. This is what is known as a 'private address space', that is, IP addresses in the 10.X.X.X range are marked as being 'private' and with a few exceptions I won't get into here are not to be routed so this means that machines that are not physically attached to my local network can't use this address at all. The next trick is that Apple's default subnet mask for manually entered addresses is 255.255.255.0 which means that all addresses in the 10.0.0.X range are automatically on the same subnet. So the end result is that both machines now have alternate locally routed only addresses that are on the same subnet. So, voila, CUPS work.

The previous describes Stuart's second solution, his first solution was to change the CUPS configuration to allow connections from computers that aren't on the same sub-domain. Then I would go to my wife's machine and manually create a printer queue that used my machines ".local" DNS address. The ".local" domain triggers the use of multicast DNS resolution. In other words when a computer looks for a DNS name like "foo.local" it will try to find the computer that owns that name by essentially 'yelling' out to all the local machines "hey, anyone go by the name foo?". While my wife and I's machines are on two separate subnets they are still physically connected by the same Ethernet switch and so can see each other's multicast packets. All OS X boxes give themselves ".local" names (go to System Preferences – Sharing – you should see text at the top that says "Other computers on your local subnet can access your computer at X.local") so by giving the Printer Queue my machine's .local name as its address my wife's machine would always be able to find my machine and it's attached printer even when my IP address is changed by DHCP.

I didn't like this suggestion for two reasons. First, I didn't like the idea of opening up my CUPS configuration, that sounded like a security hole since anyone that knew my IP address could now print on my machine. Although, if memory serves, it is possible to configure CUPS to provide access to specific DNS addresses so I could just have listed my wife's ".local" DNS address. Second, I like things to work automatically and having all these configurations in CUPS and in my wife's machine made me nervous. I wanted something simpler. Which is why I choose Stuart's second suggestion.

She didn't really want me to buy her a new computer. Sure her existing laptop was horrible, it sometimes refused to boot, when it did boot it would take forever to load, it would sometimes just 'lose' the network, when it did run, even if it was just running Firefox and nothing else, it would run like molasses. Printing stopped working months ago. It was just a nightmare. But she only used the computer to browse the web and type the occasional document. So if she needed to print a recipe she would forward it to me to print out and otherwise she would just use her computer for browsing.

Recently however we got back from vacation and her computer just wouldn't boot. Was it the disk? Was it a screwed up XP install? I don't know nor care. To her (and to me) a computer is more appliance than tinker toy, we just want it to work and this computer never did. So eventually my wife relented in her objections to my pleas to buy her a Mac.

Watching her with the iMac has been a revelation. She loves the machine! She loves to play with it. She suddenly went from someone who used the computer only when she had to, to someone who wanted to learn, to explore, to try out new things. Unlike XP where every action involved some kind of pain the Mac just worked. Yes, I occasionally had to show her a thing or two but over all she figured it out all by herself. More over, because the Mac was so friendly she became a lot bolder in her own explorations of its capabilities. The Mac's ease of use gave her the confidence to try things on her own.

Another interesting note is her use of the Apple mouse. When we bought the iMac I hooked up both the apple single button mouse and my wife's old two button wheel mouse. She asked me to get rid of the wheel mouse. She loves the single button mouse! I have to admit that it weirds me out but she really just likes using a single button. For her it was one less thing to worry about. Yes, it does mean a few things are a little harder to do but over all she finds the trade off worth it. Go Figure.