If you've upgraded your Mac to 10.4 and can no longer access a samba server, it's probably because of one or two configuration options on the samba server. 10.4 assumes passwords are encrypted. This is a good thing. It also seems to not work with SHARE level security. Switch Samba to USER or DOMAIN. Look in your smb.conf file for options like these:

encrypt passwords = yes
security = USER

Set them as above, create the smbpasswd file and set a password for your account, bounce samba, and try accessing it from the Mac again.

I made a "widget" for Mac OS X 10.4's "dashboard". It pulls down slashdot headlines via RSS every half hour and displays them in a nice window.

Interestingly, Univers Mac ("MacWorld's French equivalent", according to the email) will be including SlashBot in their next issue's CD-ROM. Google reveals that I received a boilerplate email from "Pierre Fontaine" asking for permission, but hey. French people will be using my widget. :)

If you want it, go here: http://fbm.bentpixel.com/SlashBot.html

Widgets are pretty easy to make. And the tools and SDK are free!

Skype is a free VoIP application. You'll remember from a previous post that I was using SJPhone. Well, screw that. Skype is a much nicer application. It works on my Mac and on Windows, and works really well. Hear a pin drop and all that. On a multi-party conference, it can get a little cpu hungry, and I've noticed that doing certain things with conference calls can cause it to crash. But on the whole, it just does the job. The GUI is pretty nice too. And -- unlike SJPhone -- it actually has an application icon.