Over the years, we've encountered various problems/issues that we wanted to share with the world. And we've participated in various on-line discussion forums where we needed to post files on a server for others to retrieve. This page is a collection of these tips, tricks, solutions and software that we've accumulated over the years. It doesn't include the hundreds of pages covering
Material Safety Data Sheets,
organometallic chemistry, and other topics that already have homes on our site.
The following items are offered without support or guarantee. For the most part, we will be unable to respond to specific questions you may have - these items are intended to be resources that you can use to figure out something on your own.
- AppleScripting QuickBooks 2009 Mac - We and many others have been asking Intuit to add formal AppleScript support to Quickbooks for Mac for over ten years and they continue to ignore us. We developed our own in-house solutions for this that works beautifully and have decided to share our knowledge and experience with some tutorials and sample code that can help others leverage this powerful (but otherwise inaccessible) combination.
This item includes our JavaScript Payroll Calculator which can be run as a standalone app or used in concert with our AppleScript solution to enter the calculations into QuickBooks 2009 for Mac automatically.
- How To Configure DNS Blacklists in WebSTAR - This is a simple screen shot showing how to set up the DNS Blacklists configuration pane of WebSTAR Admin. WebSTAR was one of the original Mac-based web server (as well as FTP and mail server) programs and was a beautiful package. Kerio bought the suite to harvest the customer base and left WebSTAR to die a horrid slow death, really making the case for open source software for any mission-critical application.
- Chemventory is a HyperCard-based full-featured solution for managing chemical inventories in research laboratories. Of course, even companies like Apple orphan products once in a while and so this version only runs under OS 9. Too bad, because it's a real gem.
- The Headless Mac Adapter - certain PowerPC models of Mac will not send a video signal when they are booted headless (without a monitor attached). This causes big issues when you try to administer the server with remote control software like Timbuktu. We delved into some tech articles and found a way to create an almost zero-cost adapter that solves the problem and shared it with the world.