One of the very few things I liked about Yahoo Widgets (formerly Konfabulator), and one of the only things, was that you could assign a hotkey to bring all of the widgets to the front. I use Harvest for time tracking, DU Meter for bandwidth monitoring (see my modified numeric-only DU Meter sidebar gadget) and the built-in weather gadget. I don't need – or want – to see all of these all the time, but I do like to be able to glance at them all at once, just like the Dashboard allows in OS X.
If you press and hold the Start menu key and then press the space bar (Start+Space) the sidebar and all gadgets will be brought to the front. This is the same as double clicking on the Sidebar tray icon 
. As far as I can tell there is no hotkey combination to hide the sidebar or send it to to the back of all windows.
I recently needed to be able to mount volumes on a Linux server from a script and I ran into the "mount: only root can do that" error, even with an intermediate SUID script (because I believe mount checks the real user id, not just the effective one). The device and mount point are not consistent so adding an entry to /etc/fstab wasn't an option, nor was passing a password to sudo.
Enter the /etc/sudoers file. By default sudo requires that a user provide their password, but you can use the NOPASSWD option to bypass this requirement. This was perfect.
To allow the user corey to run /bin/mount and /bin/umount on all machines without a password add the following line to /etc/sudoers:
corey ALL=NOPASSWD: /bin/mount, /bin/umount
To allow all members of the group 'wheel' to run /bin/mount and /bin/umount on all machines without a password add the following line to /etc/sudoers:
%wheel ALL=NOPASSWD: /bin/mount, /bin/umount
Now one of the privileged users can run:
sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /some/path/to/mountpoint
And mount without issue – or a password prompt.
I'm not a big fan of OCS for a whole pile of reasons, beginning with the inflexible, lacking UI and ending with restrictions on the specific deployment I use that force me to VPN to connect. Mostly issues I wouldn't have with Jabber.
With our configuration (and possibly by default) URLs were shown as plain text and not as clickable hyperlinks. You can enable this with a Group Policy – download the OCS Policies documentation and edit and import communicator.adm, or with a registry edit.
Changing the Registry
Registry edits are quick and easy, and I was only concerned about myself, so I took that route.
Save the code code below into a text file with a .reg suffix and import it, or right click the following link and and Save As to download .reg file to enable clickable URLs in OCS. Once the registry changes have been made or imported you will need to restart your OCS client.
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Communicator]
"EnableURL"=dword:00000001
If you'd prefer to manually make the registry changes:
- Open regedit.ext and navigate to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Communicator
- Create a new DWORD value called EnableURL and set the value to 1 to make the URLs clickable. Set the value to 0 to have the URLs appear as plain text.
Due Diligence
Checking in with an employee at Jabber to see if hyperlinks are enabled in MomentIM.
Good to know.
I had to resort to this after upgrading to the leaked beta of BlackBerry OS 4.5 on my Curve the email-import method did not work. It's a perfectly legitimate method of importing a SecurID token on your handheld, and now I actually prefer it because it is significantly less problematic than emailing the seed file to yourself. For more information see the RSA BlackBerry Soft Token page.
What you need
If your BES' MDS Connection Service port (default is 8080) is open you do not need to run this on the BES. Mine is not, so I pushed my soft token out from my BES.
Preparing your BlackBerry
Install the SecurID software.You can install it from your desktop, from an internal server or using OTA links from RSA. Install version 3.5.0 Standard OTA from http://rsa.com/bb350
Storm2 (9520/9550) users running OS 5.0.0.602 and SecurID Token 3.0.2 should upgrade to version 3.5.x or install the Storm2-specific hotfix from http://www.rsa.com/storm2hotfix
NOTE Sep 20, 2010: BlackBerry 9800 Torch users should use the 3.5.1 hotfix available from http://rsa.com/torchhotfix
Launch it, accept the EULA and open the Settings. Make sure that Listen for Token is set to Yes. When the security prompt appears choose Yes to allow the application to run as a server.
Pushing out the Soft Token with PushToken
- Download and unzip bb350_utils.zip
- Make sure your .SDTID is on the same disk
- Open a command prompt (Start > Run > cmd)
- From the command prompt:
java -classpath <path_to_bb350utils>\PushToken.jar PushToken -e<email address or pin> -h<BES address> <path to .sdtid file>
In my case I ran:
java -classpath bb350_utils\PushToken.jar PushToken -ecorey@mydomain.com -hlocalhost x-rimdevice-xxxxxxxx.sdtid
- If the .sdtid file was valid and you gave the SecurID application permission to run as a server on your BB you should see a prompt on your handheld about receiving a token.
- You may be prompted for a password, if so enter the password you were given with the token.
- If you entered the correct password you will receive notification of the token being imported. You can rename the token by choosing Manage Tokens from the menu.
- That's it. When you open the application you'll be prompted for your passphrase and PIN, and then be shown the generated token. One nice change between versions 2.x and 3.x of the SecurID application is that the numbers are much larger and split into two groups. Think 14 point font instead of 10.
PushToken Command Line Options
java -classpath PushToken.jar PushToken [options] file
Options:
-e E-mail or device ID of BlackBerry
-h Address of BES host (default: localhost)
-p
Port on which BES is listening (default: 8080)
Examples:
java -classpath PushToken.jar PushToken -h123.45.67.89 -p8765 -ejsmith@company.com token.sdtidArchived Versions
Older versions of the RSA Soft Token for BlackBerry app and server utilities.
UPDATED Jan 29, 2009: Links to token app and utilities changed from version 3.0.0 to version 3.0.1.
UPDATED Mar 06, 2009: Links to token app and utilities changed from version 3.0.1 to version 3.0.2, added Archived Versions, OTA installation links.
UPDATED Sep 20, 2010: Links to token app and utilities updated to 3.5.0, added hotfixes for Storm2 and Torch.
