Om points out grants.gov bias against Apple. The portion of the Washingtonpost.com article New Grant System Excludes Mac Users that I was able to read was light on details, so I did some looking around at Grants.gov. It didn’t take much.

I went to their Apply for Grants and the very first step requires you to download the PureEdge viewer. The requirements for this software are:

Windows 98, ME, NT 4.0, 2000, XP
500 Mhz processor
128 MB of RAM
40 MB disk space
Web browser: Internet Explorer 5.01 or higher, Netscape Communicator 4.5 – 4.8, Netscape 6.1, 6.2, or 7

So the only way to submit an application to grants.gov for a government grant is purchase software from a government convicted monopoly? Talk about getting it coming and going. A few quick stop by Google shows that PureEdge is now owned by web and called IBM Workplace Forms. But apparently they have a plan for non-Windows users, their PureEdge software will be available for other-than-Windows-platforms (OTWP) “by November 2006″.

I don’t know what these forms look like, I’ve never used them, but if this boils down to having special software to fill out forms I’ll be very, very disappointed. Hey grants.gov, 1989 called, they want their proprietary Windows only software back.

Yesterday Think Secret posted rumors about a real video iPod. The details mentioned included a full frontal 3.5-inch diagonal touch screen display with a digital click wheel that is activated when you touch the screen. All of this sounded pretty neat.

This morning I come across a site with “pictures” of these new video iPods: http://ipod-fullscreen.blogspot.com/. Are these real or fake? I don’t know.

UPDATE Thu 23 Feb 2006 @ 12:55pm: There is another picture out claiming to be the real video iPod.

A flood of MacGyver memories came back to me after I came across this post about the various ways MacGyver solved problems. You never knew what MacGyver was going to pull out of magic hat to save the day. It usually included the use of a Swiss Army knife and duct tape. Most of the kids I knew in school at the time were fans of the show, but even back then we made fun of the mullet.

While catching up on my MacGyver trivia I came across the Mastercard MacGyver Superbowl commercial. The commercial is great spoof of the MacGyver character and they posted some behind the scenes clips.

So when are the MythBusters going to try out some of MacGyver’s methods?

At work we’ve got all of our user account information Active Directory running on MS Windows 2003 servers. Since Active Directory makes this data available via LDAP you can use it as an address book back end for Thunderbird, Outlook and Maill.app (the built in email client on Mac OS X). I recently wrote up step by step instructions on how to setup each of these and thought others might benefit from this.

The instructions below assume that your Active Directory forest was setup using the domain example.com and that your username is billg, so be sure to replace that with your own information. The instructions also assume that you haven’t setup SSL/TLS on your Active Directory servers. If you have then please make use of that.

Thunderbird (version 1.5)

Tools -> Options -> Composition -> Addressing
Address Autocompletion: check "Local Address Book" and "Directory Server"
Edit Directories -> Add
General:
    Name: EXAMPLE.COM
    Hostname: ldap.example.com
    Base DN: cn=users,dc=example,dc=com
    Port Number: 389
    Bind DN: billg@example.com
    (SSL is left unchecked)
Click Ok
Click Ok
Make sure the new EXAMPLE.COM directory is selected for "Directory Server"
Click Ok
Tools -> Account Settings
(Under the EXAMPLE.COM users account section) -> Composition & Addressing
Addressing: select "Use a different LDAP server."
    Set it to the new EXAMPLE.COM directory.
Click Ok
Address Book: Select the EXAMPLE.COM directory, perform a search.
    It might prompt you for a password.

Outlook (version 2003 SP2)

Tools -> Email Accounts
Directory: Select "Add a new directory or address book"
Click Next
Select "Internet Directory Server (LDAP)"
Click Next
"Server Information": Server Name: ldap.example.com
"Logon Information": Check "This server requires me to log on"
    "User Name": billg
    "Password": B1lLGpW
Click More Settings ...
(It will probably warn you about not being available until after your
    restart Outlook.  That is fine, click OK)
"Search" tab -> "Search Options": cn=users,dc=example,dc=com
Click OK
Click Next
Click Finish
(Close Outlook and open it up again)

Mail (Mail 2.0.5 / Mac OS X 10.4)

Mail -> Preferences -> Composing
"Addressing": Check "Automatically complete addresses"
Click Configure LDAP ...
Click +
"Server Info":
	"Name": EXAMPLE.COM
	"Server": ldap.example.com
	"Search Base": cn=users,dc=example,dc=com
	"Port": 389
	(leave "Use SSL" unchecked)
	"Scope": Subtree
	"Authtype": Simple
	"User Name": billg@example.com
	"Password": B1lLGpW
Click Save
Click Done
Close the Preferences window

I noted the version of each software that I tried this on. It many cases these same instructions will work with other versions of the same software, but I can’t guarantee that. Please remember to substitute example.com along with the billg user account and password with your own details.

For those of you that are concerned about having to enter your password to access your Active Directory/LDAP address book, there is another method that I should mention. In order to get around this at work I created an Active Directory user called anonymous, with the password of anonymous. This account has limited abilities and doesn’t have permissions to any files or shares. The only thing this account does is provide a way to get LDAP user account info. Once you’ve created this account you can follow the same instructions as above substituting the username/password billg@example/B1lLGpW with anonymous@example.com/anonymous.

If you have any other tips about this subject please leave a comment. If for some reason you don’t feel comfortable with that please drop me a note via my contact form and I’ll add the details to this article.