The ambassador at vintage cocktail lounge, best new use of absinthe

If you have updated silverlight recently, and now can’t playback netflix streaming content, getting an error message such as N8156-6013:

You can fix it by simply deleting the “Playready” folder located in /Library/Application Support/Microsoft/ and reloading your browser of choice.

Apparently the media keys or similar file used to authorize your account aren’t readable by the newer version of Silverlight, or they weren’t updated along with the plugin update. Either way, deleting that folder and reloading my MST3K fixed the issue for me.

So the Flash 10.1 RC Installer (which sometimes asks you to force quit the finder), is actually a wrapper around a standard Apple OS X .pkg installer. Just right (or control) click, and select Show Package Contents, and browse to Contents/Resources.

Not only can you install the plugin this way (and skip the “Flash Installation Manager” it tries to install as well), I did it just now with Safari open as I was writing this. And it worked ok (even loading the adobe flash version checker page showed the right version), but you will probably want to quit / reload your browser before you go off to youtube or something.

These may be fake or just mock ups, but it sure does look pretty.

If you have updated your servers to 10.6.3 recently (or just installed a server fresh), you will want to make sure you have installed the v1.1 version of the combo update. The old build didn’t include the /usr/sbin/serialnumberd fix for the multiple nics causing serial number issues (Apple KBase ts2959). Just like with 10.5.8v1.1, the v1.1 update wont show as available for server running the 10.6.3 update, so you wont know if you need to run the update until you get a serial number error (which is not exactly a friendly way to help us sysadmins).

You can tell if you need to run the 10.6.3 v1.1 update by using md5 on your /usr/sbin/serialnumberd

(/usr/sbin/serialnumberd) = cdb6ed2faa6f4cb32a01d67d7a28e395

Is the proper md5 hash for the 10.6.3 v1.1 update, along with the a server updated to 10.6.2 then ran the 10.6.3 update.

For reference, the build number of the os after the supplemental update is 10D578.

My friend Josh created thinkstank which begat this.

Simple way to disable the iWork registration prompt:

defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.iWork09 RegistrationHasBeenSent true

Gladstones bar in LAX, Virgin / Alaska terminal.

Cosmopolitan is mostly vodka, but it is their “special”, so worthy of investigation. Not a bad drink (not a value either).

Delete /var/db/.configureLocalKDC and reboot.

(Or if you are creating the image, make sure to remove this from the .dmg before deploying)

(Or if didn’t notice this until you deployed a few hundred machines, you can use ARD to just push a unix command as root, rm /var/db/.configureLocalKDC)

Scenery passing on my train ride to Chicago for advanced camp.