Apparently Comcast is going to be rebranding itself as “Xfinity”. We are all of course to believe that this has absolutely nothing do with the general connotation of the word Comcast being something akin to “terrible service.”

What we can all really expect from this rebranding is nearly spelled out by Marc Brownstein:

“Verizon has FiOS. Comcast now has Xfinity. It’s rebundling it in a high-tech package. You are rebundling an improved product, an enhanced service,” said Marc Brownstein, president and chief executive officer of the Brownstein Group, a Philadelphia brand communication, public relations, and advertising firm.

When you read that sentence about “You are rebundling an improved product…” just imagine that you are the subject and what he is really saying is that “you will be paying more money for an ever so slightly enhanced service with a different name.”

They also have a clever and vacant holding page for a new website. Is it just me or does this look like the cover of a Jehovah’s Witnesses pamphlet? Seriously. All they need is a little Jesus on those clouds.

Dear Comcast: Good luck making people like you more once you’re called Xfinity. Here’s a tip, if your services still cost a fortune and barely work, and your customer service is atrocious on top of that, that new name will be just as dirty as the old one.

I might have just read the best description of how companies should approach “Social Media” ever. My department has been constantly talking about how best to reform their curriculum to incorporate social media. Great. The part the kills me is the floundering for a purpose or point. I’m not sure I have much steam left for the whole “We need to teach Twitter!” and “What is Twitter?” conversation. Seriously? Teach Twitter? You set up and account, and then you type. I’m sure most 12 year olds can figure this one out pretty easily. Just make sure that once the accounts are set up, there’s a point to write about!

Anyway, Quote of the Week is courtesy of John C. Welch on Social Media:

If you make it more complicated than that as a concept, stop. You’re about to go off the cliff into New Media Douchebaggery, and you don’t want that. Ever.

Perfect.

Recently, since I can’t stand reading articles on websites with bad type and flashing articles everywhere, I’ve taken to actually saving the pages and writing some quick CSS rules to reformat the text in to something readable. As it turns out, there are some other people as crazy as me that took the time to create a bookmarklet to reformat web pages. Readability has been tested on several major websites and really helps out. It doesn’t always work, but works quite well most of the time. You can read more about the bookmarklet on the lab.arc90.com website.

Awesome plugin for Quicklook which allows you to view markdown documents in a formatted style. This is really nice. I’ve taken to storing a lot of my documents in markdown, since I like using plain text files, but find the formatting in markdown a lot easier to use.

Since we deployed Leopard to the computers labs at work, I’ve been running in to this annoying problem involving Kerberos. I hadn’t spent any time trying to figure out how to circumvent it until now because it really only affects administrators. We can deal with our own problems right?

When a user logs in, they authenticate to our server using their account username (use Alice for this example). At this point they are given a Kerberos ticket. From then on, in Leopard, whenever the user attempts to connect to an AFP share on the server, Leopard assumes that they are connecting as the same user, Alice. Because the Kerberos ticket is still valid, the user is automatically authenticated as Alice. Of course, this makes perfect sense. That’s the whole point of Kerberos: single sign-on.

The problem resides in the assumption that the user wants to connect as the same user every time. What if Alice is actually an admin who needs to log on to a share using different credentials? Here’s an example: I’m testing a student account, with normal student privileges. During the course of my testing, I need to access a document from our administrative share point. Now, obviously the student account does not have access to the administrative share point. I would need to log in to the share using a user with permissions to access the administrative share point.

Unfortunately, Leopard will not even ask me what user account I want to use because I already have a valid Kerberos ticket for the student account. Fortunately, after finally getting fed up with this problem, a quick bit of googling solved it.

All that needs to be done is to destroy the Kerberos ticket. Simply open Keychain Access and select Kerberos Ticket Viewer from the Keychain Access menu. Select your Kerberos ticket from the window and click the destroy button. This doesn’t actually harm anything, it simply makes your Kerberos ticket expire. The next time you try and connect to the server, you will be asked to authenticate again; at which point you can authenticate as a different user.

Alternately, you could also create a new Kerberos ticket using a separate username to the same server. The before authenticating to a share, you would simply change the active user. Unfortunately it seems as though you can only access one at a time. For example, I could not mount two different user’s home directories at the same time. I would have to activate a user, mount their home directory, eject it, activate the second user, and then mount their home directory. Hmm, as you can probably see, there doesn’t really seem to be a reason why this would be useful. Probably simply destroying the ticket is the best bet.

For more information on this, check out the Mac OS X 10.5: About Kerberos in Mac OS X 10.5 clients knowledge base article from Apple.