John Welch

Ah, more iPhone news, and of course, the Internet is a-twitter over it. Apple has now given us a release date (June 29th), and a series of commercials showing off the iPhone. Of course, this is feeding the echo chamber that’s been set up around the iPhone, with the usual two camps forming: “It’s going […]

In my “real” job, we, like every other company on the planet have our periodic “reminders” about security. We did something a bit different (for us), and picked up some interesting ideas/tips along the way, that could be handy for any of you about to start up a similar cycle. First, you can’t solve every […]

So now that the QuickTime Java hole has been discovered and plugged, within eleven day’s time, what does that say for Mac OS X’s security? Is Mac OS X really just a house of cards, ready to be destroyed by The Bad People? Have Mac users been deluding themselves? Or was this really nothing, and […]

On April 12th, Apple announced that the next major release of Mac OS X, version 10.5, aka “Leopard” would be delayed until October. As Apple explained: iPhone has already passed several of its required certification tests and is on schedule to ship in late June as planned. We can’t wait until customers get their hands […]

With the announcement of Adobe’s CS3, and the articles about Microsoft Office 2008 being in private beta, I thought I’d talk about something near and dear to every sysadmin’s heart. Installers. Okay, so installers are usually closer to another part of the anatomy and quite painful, and that’s a real problem. What’s the first thing […]

For the past few weeks, I’ve been in a virtual nirvana of sorts, working with both the latest Parallels release and the second VMware Fusion beta. Both products provide an interesting contrast in the things they focus on. For right now, Parallels is all about Windows. It supports Linux, but you lose Coherence (the ‘rootless’ […]

While the iPhone and AppleTV and all the rest got all the press at Macworld, there was one product that was impressing the heck out of everyone in the networking/IT space: the Lithium Network Monitoring Platform, from LithiumCorp. Now, right off, as many of you will think, there’s not anything that the Lithium NMS does […]

I’d like to talk a little more about the iPhone. Yes, I know, I did so in my last column, but I hadn’t watched the keynote when I wrote that. So now that I’ve “seen” the iPhone, and talked to some people who have really seen and touched it, I thought I’d take some more […]

“The time has come,” the Walrus said, “to speak of many things.” With apologies to Lewis Carroll, the time has come to discuss what happened at Macworld. By this of course, I mean the iPhone. Well, there was some other stuff announced, but really, this was the iPhone Macworld. First, I’d like to address the […]

The one big problem in Mac OS X 10.4 that needs to be fixed: Directory Services on a laptop. There are many new features in Leopard that have the Mac faithful excited. Time Machine, Core Animation, changes in iChat and Mail, rumors of ZFS support. However, there is one thing, one fix that I really […]