August 2009
43 posts
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Snow Leopard: What you should know about… Malware
While viruses don’t besiege Mac OS X, and isn’t likely to any time soon, there are other types of malware which can steal your wallet and strut around your home wearing your clothes, laughing manically. Metaphorically.
Trojans are pieces of software which are offered for download (or bundled alongside another download) and simply trick a user into running them. A common tactic is that they’re...
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Snow Leopard: What you should know...
The Snow Leopard Installer has been revised over previous versions, and no longer has separate “Upgrade” and “Archive & Install” options. You can still choose to perform a clean install, by invoking Disk Utility when booting from the DVD.
The clever parts of Archive & Install have been rolled into the Upgrade logic, and so what Snow Leopard does when you install it is a combination of...
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Snow Leopard: What you should know about… 64-bit
Most Macs won’t boot into the 64-bit kernel by default. Many Macs can’t boot into the 64-bit kernel at all, even though they have a 64-bit CPU and firmware.
For the most part, this doesn’t matter. Unlike Windows (and like Leopard), Mac OS X can run both 32-bit and 64-bit applications under a 32-bit kernel, provided the hardware supports them.
Snow Leopard is a lot more 64-bit-savvy, though....
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STEVEN FRANK RETURNS TO IPHONE
stevenf:
Here’s hoping I don’t awake to headlines of STEVEN FRANK RETURNS TO IPHONE because, honestly, it isn’t news, and I think everyone is rightfully beyond caring at this point. I know I’m certainly tired of talking about it.
Well, in fairness, I kinda had to.
I think he’s hit the problem which ultimately prevented more people from boycotting the iPhone in response to the App Store...
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Flash
adobegripes:
Why is the only choice for advanced online Multimedia also the worst choice, tedious and shit for animation, horrendous for positioning sound, terrible for integrating video unless its just a basic video player, fucking crap interface for coding.
You can tell the team don’t use it themselves because instead of designing an interface that works by researching it they just said “oh...
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Megrahi
By “Calgacus”, some guy I don’t know from the Internets, responding to comments on the story of Jack Straw’s response to Megrahi’s release.
Calgacus
26 Aug 09, 10:40pm
Kenk1966 wrote
well you killed thousands of Iraqis so nothing you say means anything even if the Libyan DID bomb the plane” … until the next evidence comes in
The majority of posters are...
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Ultimate iPhone App Organizer Hits The Web →
eli:
Have you ever wanted to rearrange your applications on your iPhone, but ended up messing up pages of apps? Well, now there is a solution for that, and it’s called Movement. Movement…
I seem to remember that a lot of people hoped that this would come as part of iTunes when iPhone OS 3.0 shipped (mind you, I’d still rather the actual syncing engines from iTunes were split out into iSync—with...
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“I wish there was some way to channel all the stupidity on the internet into...”
– Gus Mueller (via marco)
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Boycott Scotland
http://www.boycottscotland.com:
Although the great majority of letters we receive are supportive, there are also the inevitable letters of criticism and condemnation.
Some Scottish and British respondents ask why we do not print such letters?
Quite simply, because most of them display the most foul and disgusting language directed against the American families and friends of the...
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“Hi Mo, What’s your view of the Libya issue?”
The full answer:—
I support the early release of a prisoner who is dying. I don’t believe this is a new policy anyway, but it’s worth saying. In a limited set of circumstances, there may be justification for forcing them to die in prison; this has nothing to do with the crime they committed per se, but the Prison Service’s assessment of the risk they pose to themselves and society in general by...
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A sign of government gone sour is when the period of contemplation which follows new legislative proposals largely exists in order for people to try to figure out how to explain how ridiculous the proposals are.
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Humble beginnings
Something oft-mentioned is the fact that the Internet has its roots in a US Government Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) project. This is occasionally thrown around as though it’s a damning indictment of the idea that the US still controls the Internet and everything which sails upon her.
The fact is, it’s pretty much irrelevant how it all came about. TCP/IP is popular now for a...
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©
There’s a tendency for copyright “debates” to be overly simplistic arguments over black and white. On one side, invariably, is Big Content, the Government, and people who think they have a moral high ground; on the other, the elusive but growing population of filesharers and people who think they have a different moral high ground.
The fact is, neither society in general, the law, nor copyright...
stevenf:
When I think back to using the Apple ][ lab in elementary school, four pieces of software come immediately to mind, as vividly as if I’d just run them this morning:
1) Rocky’s Boots - Taught the fundamentals of digital electronics and Boolean logic.
2) Lemonade Stand - Taught the basics of supply and demand economics.
3) Logo - Taught the basics of functional programming, and...
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How UNIX file permissions work
This is a subject which bamboozles lots of people new to UNIX (or at least, new to the command-line), but it’s useful to know.
It’s easy to get confused by the likes of drwxr-xr-x when you do a ls -l, but it’s not as complicated and arcane as it might first appear.
Part 1: The basics
First of all, let’s look at user accounts. Every user account has two pieces of important information...
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stevenf:
Upon further reflection, I think the true litmus test will be how Apple and AT&T formally respond to the FCC inquiry about Google Voice. That is due no later than the 21st; a week from Friday. That decision really cuts to the crux of the whole thing for me, and the great thing (for us users) is everyone has to come out and say something about what happened. No more speculation.
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URL shortener tr.im is dead →
marco:
… all tr.im links will continue to redirect, and will do so until at least December 31, 2009. Your tweets with tr.im URLs in them will not be affected.
We regret that it came to this, but all of our efforts to avoid it failed. No business we approached wanted to purchase tr.im for even a minor amount. There is no way for us to monetize URL shortening — users won’t pay for it — and...
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Plug-Ins
This is one for the Mac OS X developers.
I’m developing a framework which, like most non-Apple frameworks on Mac OS X, will get shipped inside application bundles.
But, this framework will be plug-in-driven: as a database access layer, there will be drivers for talking to different database systems. At least one, for awkward complicated legal reasons, will mostly not be compiled into the...
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Bundled up
I wonder if there’s a market for a new type of bundle.
See, bundles have some distinct advantages over standalone executables: notably, you can stow frameworks within them and tell the load-time dynamic linker to use a path relative to the dependent binary (or alternatively, a path relative to the ultimate executable) in order to find frameworks. This is a very handy thing indeed, because...
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How to build Universal Binary MySQL client...
You’ll need three ingredients:
This script
This patch
This tarball
You’ll also need an administrator account, and (to save complicating the script), you’ll need to make sure that whatever you set $prefix to is writeable by you (either because it already exists and is writeable, or because the parent is writeable).
Step 1.
Run the script:
bash ./build-mysql.sh
Step 2.
There is...
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