It’s one of those stories that makes my blood boil:

Judge, Mark A. Ciavarella Jr., and a colleague, Michael T. Conahan, appeared in federal court in Scranton, Pa., to plead guilty to wire fraud and income tax fraud for taking more than $2.6 million in kickbacks to send teenagers to two privately run youth detention centers run by PA Child Care and a sister company, Western PA Child Care. – NYTimes

One of their victims:

At worst, Hillary Transue thought she might get a stern lecture when she appeared before a judge for building a spoof MySpace page mocking the assistant principal at her high school in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. She was a stellar student who had never been in trouble, and the page stated clearly at the bottom that it was just a joke.

Instead, the judge sentenced her to three months at a juvenile detention center on a charge of harassment. – NYTimes

It hurts to think of all the lives they destroyed. Disgusting.

http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&ei=kASWSevTGZjeM5GhgI4M&resnum=4&ncl=1303722996

Venture Beat: Early pictures: Google Chrome on the Mac

Great post by Paul Boag over at BoagWorld.com entitled 10 things a web designer would never tell you

#7 is my favorite:

Fit as much on the homepage as possible

Without a doubt the homepage is by far the most important page on your site. If I look at my own website statistics the majority of people who come to my site never get further than the homepage (I have no idea why this is the case!) This is a problem. – Paul Boag from 10 things a web designer would never tell you

Whenever I come across a site that adheres to this “rule”, I’m halted, my sub-conscience broken, and I begin to explore all that the site has to offer.

Ha! Funny stuff…

On my PowerBook I run quite a few sharing services, things like Web Sharing, Bonjour for file sharing and Screen Sharing. But the thing is, I only need these services running when I am at home; I’d rather not “publish” theses services when I am surfing at my local Internet cafe.

I’d also like to enable some sort of password protection for when I walk away from my PowerBook momentarily.

Enter MarcoPolo

MarcoPolo lets you switch your Mac between locations; Which it can do automatically or you can manually switch it. This means that when I am at home, I can switch to my “Home” location profile have any password protection disabled and all my services flipped on. When I am at a cafe, I can switch to my “Public” profile I can enable a screensaver password protection and have all my services flipped off.

Rules enable automatic switching between locations.

The only problem I found with MarcoPolo was the poor help documentation and poor verbage within the app itself. So, here is…

How to use MarcoPolo to enable a screensaver password

Once downloaded and installed, click the compass icon on the menu bar and select “Preferences…”.

1. Click the context tab and then the plus symbol and add a profile named “Public”.

2. Click the actions tab, then the plus symbol and select “Add ScreenSaver Password Action…” and enter info as below:

3. You will now want to create another “Add ScreenSaver Password Action…”, but with the context set to “Automatic” that is set to disable the screensaver password so you don’t have the password prompt when at home.

That’s it. Now when you flip to your “Public” location there will be a password that flips on when your screensaver kicks in.

There are actually quite a few actions your Mac can take, based on your location:

• Setting your default printer
• Changing your desktop background
• Enable or disable particular firewall rules
• Setting iChat status message
• Setting the default IMAP or SMTP server for Mail.app
• Mounting network shares (smb://, afp://, etc.)
• Muting or Unmuting system audio
• Changing OS X network location
• Opening a file (an application, a document, etc.)
• Quit an application
• Enabling or disabling screen saver password
• Start/stop screen saver
• Changing screen saver idle timeout
• Running a shell script (or any other kind of script, via Platypus)
• Turning on or off Bluetooth
• Turning on or off WiFi (AirPort)
• Establish or disconnect VPN

You can also set you Mac to automatically switch between locations automatically based on quite a few rules

• Visible WiFi networks
• Current Audio Output device (headphones/internal speakers)
• Discoverable Bluetooth devices
• Advertised Bonjour (Zeroconf) services
• Attached FireWire devices
• Assigned IP addresses
• Ambient Light level
• Attached Monitors
• Active Network Links
• Power source (power adapter/battery)
• Running Applications
• Current Time Of Day
• Attached USB devices

You can even run AppleScript or shell script actions when switching between locations…

Very cool!

Great interview with Brian Greenstone of Pangea Software on NPR’s The Story this afternoon. Topics include games, software development and the iPhone.

http://thestory.org/archive/the_story_703_iPhone_Apps.mp3/view