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Further proof that, a la Shakespeare, anything rude and crude can become perfectly acceptable art if you’re good enough at it:

If you administer Macs that are joined to an Active Directory, you either need to buy expensive Mac client-side extensions to apply Windows Group Policy, or you can extend your AD schema to include Mac attributes. Neither of these options are to be taken lightly, so when I needed to deny login for a particular group on our Active Directory (in this case alumni who no longer have access to on-campus computers), I wanted a simpler, scriptable solution. Thanks to our helpful software engineer at Apple, I was pointed in the direction of dsmemberutil, a command-line utility provided in OS X to determine group membership. Using that, I created the following script:

#!/bin/bash
result=`dsmemberutil checkmembership -U $1 -G alumni_only`
compare="user is a member of the group"
if [ "$result" = "$compare" ]; then
kill `ps -ef | fgrep loginwindow | grep -v grep | awk ‘{print $2}’`
fi

To make this work for any Active Directory group, just replace “alumni_only” with the name of your AD group. The kill line basically shuts down the loginwindow process and returns the user back to the login screen. I haven’t found a way to pop up a warning to the user when this happens, so I added in a message to be displayed at the login prompt.

When I signed in to my Google AdSense account today, I noticed a link up near the top of the page that invited me to integrate my AdSense with my Analytics account. I followed along through some simple steps to add the AdSense to existing sites, then chose one to be a primary. The primary site will automatically integrate with AdSense data. Any other sites you want to track require that a small snippet of JavaScript be inserted on any page you want to tie in between AdSense and Analytics.

Google says the service takes a few hours to set up and get running. I’m curious to see what I find tomorrow…

If you have not yet experienced the magic that is Swedish euro-pop star Günther, you basically haven’t lived. Fix this tragic mistake and start your life now by clicking this link. Love, champagne, sex, and respect be with you!

If you need additional convincing, here’s an excerpt from his site’s About page:

Pleasureman Gunther is set to have the biggest smash-hit of the summer with his fantastic debut single ‘Ding Dong Song’. Günther is a 29 years old gentleman style 2000 in his best years. Günther is a true European, his origin is Sweden but he sees himself as a global citizen.

Günther has always been in the entertainment industry and now he feels it is time to change the attitude of the world to do something better.

Günther wants to change the worlds look at the sexual way of thinking, so he have started a new trend to sexualise it more in the world. “A Günther trend”.
He has only started his mission to go out in the world and spread the message of Love.

If traditional programming operators and syntax are boring the crap out of you, maybe it’s time you tried coding in lolcode. Based on lolcat speech as popularized on icanhascheezburger.com, lolcode has a small but dedicated (’til naptimez) group of people developing it. Plus, it lets you write cool programs like this:

HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
VISIBLE "HAI WORLD!"
KTHXBYE

There are a few examples on the site, and a basic function and operators list. Under the ‘Implementations’ section you can find some compilers and interpreters to re-convert your lolspeak into normal 1s and 0s.

News agencies in Spokane, WA are abuzz with the news that the parks department is blasting rodents out of the local arboretum using a new device called the ‘Rodenator.’ The Rodenator, which inserts a blast of propane and oxygen into burrows, detonates the rodents and their tunnels with an electric spark. The company that makes the Rodenator claims this is done ‘in a humane way.’ Apparently, according to the recent photo seen below, the chipmunks are responding with their own ‘humane’ methods of home defense…

As I was driving down to Easter dinner in Boston today, I heard an ad featuring Governor Deval Patrick speaking about “another Massachusetts business success story” that he was “proud to introduce.” To my surprise, the company was CampusLive.com, a site that purports to provide students with an alternative campus portal for their particular school. This portal offers things like restaurant listings, access to email, weather, etc. The site happened to originate with students in the Amherst, MA area, so it is natural the company is located there.

Now, the only dealings I’ve had with CampusLive have been negative ones involving some rather deceptive, unsolicited mass e-mail communication (what one might call “spam”), and the sudden demand made to local merchants that they pay for a listing of their menu on the site (a service that was previously free). The company seems to have backed down on both issues for now, but they’re currently running a two-year-old menu for one local establishment that lists prices much lower than those currently charged. Furthermore, it doesn’t take a lot of research to see that their site doesn’t have a lot of traffic, even though the main domain URL covers all traffic for all campuses.

Perhaps the Commonwealth of Massachusetts should do its homework a little better when selecting prime examples of successful businesses in its own backyard. Or maybe they really did pick the best option…after all, the state is considering even more taxes to pay for its out-of-control debt.

According to various tech sources on the web, the Conficker worm might actually be doing something after all. CNET is reporting that the worm is beginning to replicate itself via P2P file sharing, and is downloading additional encrypted files that experts have yet to decrypt, but suspect are some sort of keylogger. All this is happening a little over a week after the April 1st supposed payload date passed by with little to no incidents. The actual propagation of the worm at this point is taking place gradually, so it may actually be more successful in doing damage than if it had hit all infected computers at once and started to keylog and replicate.

So, bottom line: if you haven’t patched your system, do it now. Then keep doing it.

You’ve probably heard by now of the latest incident of law enforcement ‘gone wild’ down in Texas. Apparently abusing pets doesn’t go far enough towards ‘protecting and serving’ the citizens of the Lone Star State–now they’re doing it to people. The newswire is abuzz with the story of how Officer Robert Powell of the Dallas Police is shown on his own cruiser’s videotape detaining a man for almost 15 minutes while his mother-in-law dies in the hospital in whose parking lot the entire debacle took place. Powell acts pretty stupidly throughout, is verbally abusive, and can be seen touching his gun menacingly. He ignores hospital staff’s pleas to let the man go see his dying relative, and even brushes off another police officer who tries to intervene on the man’s behalf.

Now, unfortunately for Officer Powell, the man in question was NFL running back Ryan Moats, and this incident has quickly put Powell in the national spotlight and the Dallas PD in a very bad PR situation. Add to this that Moats is black, and the accusations of racism have begun.

Now, I will say I am normally very, very skeptical when I hear that racism is involved simply because someone of one ethnicity did something bad to someone of another. So I decided to investigate. Here’s the scary thing…it seems Officer Powell was smart enough to set up a blog on xanga.com, and one of the entries that allegedly was pruned from his blog reads as follows:

Saturday, October 21, 2006

You drink, You drive, You rear end another car, You dont speak english, You smell like alcohol, You cant stand up straight, You cant walk a straight line, You go to jail!!!

Now, this scares the living crap out of me. Look at this list. All of the things are clear, definable crimes in our legal codes, except one. Not speaking English is NOT a crime in this country. Now, I will admit that Officer Powell seems to have taken down his xanga site as well as his MySpace page. I am going on the word of briancuban.com that the site rip of Officer Powell’s site is legitimate. However, a Google cached page that I found of Powell’s site does include this:

Monday, August 28, 2006
The count downs begin:
18 days of work then the real work starts and I can shoot people

Tuesday, September 26, 2006
So this is the day after my first day as police. First night was full of waiting for a wrecker, meeting a he/she, taking a guy to jail, known as Lew Sterrett, 911 hang up, and some BS security guys calls that people arnt going home. All in all it was fun, and I have to ask: they are paying me to do this?

Now, this cache is of March 27th, and Powell has clearly removed a bunch of the later content that might get him in trouble. However, the two statements above display what a disgusting human being Powell seems to be. He seems transvestites as sub-humans, is thrilled with the power of his gun, and shows a general lack of comprehension for the basic rules of English grammar, itself a crime according to the alleged statements on his blog.

What I want to know is: why didn’t the Dallas Police pay more attention to what Officer Powell was writing back in 2006? This man shows clear lack of respect for others, or any of the attitudes necessary for a police officer. He shouldn’t just be fired now for what he did to a celebrity, he should’ve been fired years ago for displaying his lack of moral fiber on the Internet for the world to see. It doesn’t help that now NFL linebacker Zach Thomas is saying his Latina wife Maritza was a victim of a Powell power-trip recently as well…

Pope Benedict XVI, proud ex-Nazi leader of one of the world’s most corrupt religions, arrived in Africa this week and confirmed that the Catholic Church still supports the misery and death associated with overpopulation and AIDS in that continent, and cares not at all for human beings.

The pontiff reiterated the Vatican’s policy on condom use as he flew from Rome to Yaounde, the capital of Cameroon, CNN Vatican analyst John Allen said.

Pope Benedict has always made it clear he intends to uphold the traditional Catholic teaching on artificial contraception — a “clear moral prohibition” — Allen said. But his remarks Tuesday were among the first times he stated the policy explicitly since he became pope nearly four years ago.

This is undoubtedly a proud moment for the Catholic faith, which has thankfully seen its numbers dwindle in the United States in the face of repeated instances of child abuse by priests and the systematic concealment of their crimes by the Church. After all, by keeping the population of Africa religious, diseased, starved, inaccessible to medical assistance or schooling, and therefore ignorant, the Catholic Church could actually gain some ground in the continent. It looks like their last hope: based on recent history, do we dare to dream that perhaps this ancient and terrible cult is finally outdated and obsolete?

Source: CNN.com