Cicsco VPN Client on Mac OS X Leopard 10.5

I have been trying to set up my MacBook Pro to use for work for the last couple of weeks in my spare time. Getting applications installed, getting stuff configured etc...

So today I finally made the decision to make the switch for work. The litmus test for me is of course, the Cisco VPN 3000 client must work period. If I can't log into my work computers, I'm wasting my time. So I got the latest version from Sun and installed that to get the settings. Then found the latest version of the client on version tracker.

Everything installed fine, but after I restarted my machine I got the infamous "Error 51" blah blah, your VPN client doesn't work error.

Well I thought I was hosed, then I found this post by Anders Brownworth and it saved my bacon. Run this command to reset the client:

sudo /System/Library/StartupItems/CiscoVPN/CiscoVPN restart


and you are good to go.

MySQL on OS X Leopard

Apparently there are some issues getting MySQL server installed correctly on OS X Leopard. So I found this page that does a step by step walk thru of compiling and installing MySQL on your machine. Followed the steps and it appears to have worked for me.

The only caveat I have for others on the article is I would skip the instructions for auto starting the MySQL server. They are way to complicated. Just use Automator instead. Much easier and should work just as good.

NetBeans 6.0 Great Ruby IDE

Finally found some time to play around with Ruby on Rails on NetBeans 6.0 beta 2 very late last night. I downloaded the Ruby specific version since I still need to use 5.5.1 for work. All I can say is wow!

You get a complete Rails development environment (except for the database) in a 20 meg download. Everything runs fast and loads fast. I had the Hello World! app created and running in about 5 minutes. Very impressive. In the past, I have run into a number of roadblocks just getting rails setup, especially on OS X. If you have been itching to learn Rails, this is the tool you need to start with.

Android?

I was too busy with work to notice the big Google Android announcement. A phone platform based on Linux and open source standards. Sounds like a good idea to me. It will be interesting to see what the SDK looks like next week.

In my opinion, the success or failure of this will depend on the openness. Will you be able to create GPS apps for it? Run Skype? Run GAIM? My iPhone is really fun, but it is too cell centric when it needs to be Internet centric. Competition is a good thing.

Halloween Gadgets

Posted by Kathy Walrath, Technical Writer

With October 31st looming, it's time to decorate your desktop with spooky gadgets. Here are three new ones you can try out.

	Halloween Pumpkin By Benjamin Schirmer Create a custom jack-o'-lantern on your desktop. To change the look of your Halloween pumpkin just click the eyes, nose, or mouth. Beware: sometimes this pumpkin makes spooky noises!
	Halloween CountDown Gadget By Vishnu.S If you can't wait until Halloween � and you don't have a child reminding you how very long it is until trick-or-treat time � you need this.
	Spooky Clock By Lahiru Lakmal Priyadarshana Every day is Halloween when this clock is on your desktop. The pendulum swings back and forth, reminding you that the witching hour is never too far away...

You can find these and more at our holiday gadgets page. If you feel inspired to create your own holiday gadgets, visit our Developer Site and be sure to grab the Google Desktop SDK.

Happy Halloween from the Google Desktop Team!

JRuby on Rails?

Rails has been running on JRuby for some time. I know the development team has used that as one of their benchmarks for Ruby compatibility. But check out this post from one of my fellow Sun employees. Basically what the graph shows is over time, Rails runs about the same speed on Java as it does on C. Very interesting.

Add to that great Ruby support in Netbeans 6.0 (due out in a month) and the ability to deploy Rails applications to Java application server. Things get very interesting indeed! Methinks Ruby will be getting a closer look in the enterprise.

Mona Lisa Smile

Earlier this week I found this story on some scientific research done on the Mona Lisa. Much like the Sistine Chapel, the researcher thinks the original painting was quite a bit more colorful than the one we see today. Here is a link to a picture comparing the original and his color restored version.