First, I wanted to say thank you to everyone who has kept me in his or her thoughts and prayers this past week. I am feeling much better and my facial wounds have healed much quicker than the doctors expected. In fact, my doctor removed the all the external stitches yesterday, because I was healing so well.
Using Apple computers at work has both advantages and disadvantages. One of these disadvantages lies in the small number of side utilities for Mac OS X as opposed to Microsoft Windows or Linux. One thing I have been wanting to test for the past few months is how our sites will load on a slow connection (ie. 56K / dialup). There are many utilities and even some Firefox plugins that exist for this purpose, but only for Windows and Linux.
However, I recently came across the post at Mac OS X Hints which shows how to configure the Darwin firewall to acheive the same effect. I extended this by creating an Automator workflow as shown in the picture and saving it as an application. The script must be executed using AppleScript so that the user will be prompted to type in an administrative password. Otherwise, the script will fail because it does not have proper permissions. Once, the workflow has been exported as an application, it can be added to the dock and executed with a single click.
