Lion Server, VPN and Time Capsule as Router Issue

Well, today I upgraded all my machines to Lion and the experience overall was pleasant. Since I had 4 machines to upgrade, rather than downloading the install 4 times I was able to save the install to a flash drive. I was able to copy the installer to the flash drive so I can copy to the other machines (this can only be done before installing right after the download is complete from the app store - app is in Applications folder).

Anyways getting down to the point. Once I was done, I purchased and downloaded Lion Server for my mac mini so I can enable the VPN services. This should really be an easy 1-2-3 click process but the VPN would fail outside of the network (which is where we needed it to work).

The admin tool set up my Time Capsule (Airport Extreme) base station appropriately as far as ports to open. For 2 hours I was beating my head into a wall trying to figure out why the requests would not pass thru to the server from an external request. I tried many different things from opening other ports, setting a default host etc. But the issue lies in the latest firmware for the stations (7.5.2). I was finally able to find that information in the apple support forums. So I went ahead and downgraded my station to firmware 7.4.2 and everything worked fine. You can easily do this by following these steps:

1. Launch AirPort Utility found in Applications>Utilities>Airport Utility
2. Click on the base station you want to downgrade from the sidebar (left column of the window)
3. In the Menubar select 'Base Station'
4. Select 'Upload Firmware...'
5. Select ‘7.4.2'
6. Select 'OK'

Do that and then try your VPN connection and Voila! It works! Thank you apple for wasting 2+ hours of my day.

UPDATE!!!!

For this to work on 7.4.2+ make sure you do not have any accounts set in your Back to My Mac settings on the station!

Boilerplate Templates

I am a big supporter of standards based development and pushing the envelope when I can. I also promote the use of various frameworks or templates that help you learn and succeed at best practices development. One of those is the html5boilerplate (http://html5boilerplate.com/). This template not only starts you off at a good point but has so many valuable tools and documentation to get you up to date.

With that being said there is another boilerplate that I ran into which I know a lot of us have a headache with especially if you are doing email campaigns and I am hoping it can help us create better html emails. This is the html email boilerplate (http://htmlemailboilerplate.com/).

Check both of these projects out, download them, heck fork them on GitHub if you think you can help them get even better!!!!

Enjoy!

Google's Tribute to Les Paul

I am sure you have all visited Google today and noticed that there is a strange image on the top that seems to represent electric guitar strings as displayed below. The cool thing is you can mouse over the strings and sound will play. Also, you can record a few seconds of music and share it via a short link provided by Google.

I personally think this is freaking awesome!!!!!

To listen to my little diddle click here.

Google maps v3 plugin for jQuery UI and jQuery Mobile

A new jQuery plugin that allows you to work with the Google Maps v3 API using jQuery click events instead of Google event listeners.

Very lightweight, highly customizable and works out of the box with jQuery mobile.

http://code.google.com/p/jquery-ui-map/

Adobe Introduces Creative Suite 5.5, Subscriptions and a new SDK for Photoshop

Today Adobe introduced Creative Suite 5.5 with updates to many of their applications including Dreamweaver, Flash Professional, InDesign, Premiere and After Effects.
Click here to learn more about the new features @ MacWorld!

They have also introduced a subscription payment option.
Click here to learn more

And finally a new DSK with a couple of new iPad apps.
Click here to find out more @ MacWorld