Here's one for the Mac OS X hackers out there: Mac OS X has the nice notion of locations, which allows you to switch groups of network configurations depending on your location. I'm looking for a way to have location specific sets of firewall rules. In addition, I want to have on set of rules for the wired ethernet interface and a separate set of rules for the Airport interface. So far, here's what I've been able to turn up on my own:

• Setting up firewall rules - gives a sample rule set
• mfw multiple firewall configuration - but isn't location dependent.
• SunShield - a preference pane for the Mac OS X firewall.

Is anyone out there using such a setup? Does anyone know how to get the value of the current location from a command line tool or script?

One of the things that I hadn't gotten around to doing was to try to move my data from my Outlook address book on the Window box into my Address Book on the PowerBook. I did a fair amount of googling that turned up solutions that involved programs written atop libpst. This didn't work for me.

What ended up working for me was simple and easy:

1. Go to your Outlook contacts
2. Select the contents you want to transfer (select all is fine too)
3. Go to the Action menu and select forward as vCard
4. Mail the contacts to yourself
5. On the Mac, save the attachments into a directory
6. Drag the vCard files onto the Address Book app

Presto, the entire address book transfered mostly painlessly, and conflicts with existing records resolved beautifully. Now the only address book information that I am missing is e-mail addresses harvested by ThunderBird. For reasons that I'll detail in another post, I've decided to try to use Mail.app instead of Thunderbird. This made getting the address book up to date more important. When I was using Thunderbird, I just used my Windows Thunderbird address book, which got imported from the Outlook address book. Now I can use the Mac OS X address book for Mail.app, iChat, and other addressbook aware applications, like iSync. If only the Address Book has some more features like categories...