Jeremy Simmons: The Blog

Using the Disk Utility application on OSX, it's easy to get an image of a CD as a file on the hard drive.
The unortunate thing is that the image file is going to be a DMG by default.

I wanted to convert this to an ISO, so I could burn the file to media later with software that understood this format.

Conversion is fairly painless. Drop to your console, and use the following.

hdiutil convert /path/to/filename.dmg -format UDTO -o /path/to/savefile.iso

If it's not clear by now, I'm not a Mac user. Things with the Mac OS frustrate me much quicker than Windows, DOS, Unix or anything else.

I have a Windows 2000 Server at work which provides VPN access for me and the rest of my users. You connect to it by firing up any vanilla VPN client, pointing the IP to 'secure.xyzcompany.com' and entering your Domain username/password. Viola. You're on. You can resolve server names, access internal web-applications, or even check your email via the Exchange protocal instead of using IMAP over SSL. It's magical and it's slick, everyone loves it. Except me and my new Mac. When I connect with my windows box, there's an option to "use the remote gateway". This makes sense to me, because I know what a gateway is, and I even know why I would want to disable that. It's also in a very convenient and logical place. You open the properties of the VPN connection, find the networking page of the config, select Internet Protocol from the connction items, then click properties. Of course we want to be using Automatic IP and DNS via DHCP, but I also have all my advanced properties just a button click away,  There's the checkbox for my use default gateway. The Mac Setup however is somewhat more crazy. They have this little application called "internet Connect" within the Applications folder. You make your VPN, and then you're supposed to know that you access options from a menu called Connect. Wait, connect means connect, not Options for connections... WTF?! Send all traffic over VPN connection? Um, yeah... call me crazy, but isn't the standard name for sending traffic to a different endpoint called the "gateway". So much for standard names.

So. The problem would be solved, except that I still can't resolve names with my mac. For instance, the public DNS namespace of the company is XYZCompany.com. The internal namespace is XYZCOMPANY.LOCAL. This way, you HAVE to have acess to the internal nameservers to get any good info out of us. Works great with windows, where when your primary connection's DNS fails to resolve, windows looks at the other connection's DNS servers for some useful info. For some reason, Mac forgot this nicety. Sigh. Anyone who knows how to make this work could certainly email me and show me the error of my ways.

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EDIT

You can actually add resolvers for the lookupd process to go through by adding plain text files to /etc/resolver/
this directory doesn't exist by default, and you don't have access to it if you're not currently root
Enable the root account via the NetInfo Manager application in /Applications/Utilities.
Name the file XYXDomain.EXT and add lines as follows
XYZDomain.com <-- filename

XYZDomain.com           <-- root domain, same as filename
subdomain.XYZDomain.com <-- optional subdomains, one or more
10.10.20.3              <-- domain server IP

After creating this file, kill the lookupd process from the shell, use the gui activity process, or, because you're lazy, just reboot. Of course, one really should use this as an excuse to bust out the good old fashioned vi or emacs and go to town. *I'm a vi guy*. Eww. Flex those command line brain muscles! Now, question why you did that. Requirement? no. Feels good to be a geek and do it for the implicit sake of it. Yeah.

I very much hating the concept of having a Mac to test UI designs for web-applications in. It's not anything big, but today... the Mac OS sucks because by default, tab only gets you through the text-box and list box elements. What about radio buttons, combo/drop downs, and buttons? For the love of all things right and easy why restrict the user and make them move their hand to the mouse after typing??? Microsofto doesn't do that. They don't even give you the option to take away that privilidge from the user. We're Apple, we're special. We enjoy sticking it to the user. We assume that since they purchased our product, they want a trimmed down product anyway. Yeah... This is why I'll never switch.

Today the Mac OS X is different than Windows XP because it comes with the Quicktime player. This player does not have full-screen capability by default. You must pay an extra $30 for the privilige of full screen viewing pleasure. Microsoft has had this ability in Media Player for as long as it's been released for no extra charge.