• The Author – Bart Busschots

  

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Following a spate of embarrassing news stories detailing what appeared to me to be some very serious censorship of science that the Bush administration don’t like NASA have released their new media policy. You can see the details here: http://www.nasa.gov/audience/formedia/features/communication_policy.html

This was all triggered by individuals in the NASA press office toning
down reports on Global Warning and the Big Bang and even going so far
as to attempt to prevent one climate scientist who is a leader in the
Climate Change field from talking to the media after he made a speech
saying that his evidence showed that the measures being taken by Bush
were not near enough to prevent disaster. There was also a reported
issue where reports on research into the Big Bang were being toned
down. Both of those things really disgusted and annoyed me and I have
to say I blame the Bush Administration for trying to silence a great
scientific institution in order to maintain their lies that climate
change is not a reality and to protect their fundamentalist religious
beliefs from the cold realities of the universe. NASA is not supposed
to be a mouth-piece for the government, it is supposed to be a
scientific institution of the highest caliber where all that matters is
getting at the truth, regardless of whether the President finds is
comfortable reading or not!

Anyhow, Micheal Griffin’s letter impressed me. In his letter he sums up the key principles outlined in the new policy and top of his list is this:

"A commitment to a culture of scientific and technical openness which values the free exchange of ideas, data and information. Scientific and technical information concerning agency programs and projects will be accurate and unfiltered."

This is very positive IMO as it makes clear that the press-office cannot go round re-writing the science to reflect the spin Washington wants to see. The next key point IMO is that it sets in stone the right of NASA employees to talk to the press. The policy goes even further into what I would consider to be best practice and "requires that [scientists] draw a distinction between professional conclusions and personal views that may go beyond the scope of their specific technical work, or beyond the purview of the agency". I think this is a very healthy thing and will make it much harder for the press to spin scientific conclusions and personal opinions and will also help to distinguish between what science is saying and what scientists extrapolate from that based on their own views and instincts.

Basically, I am yet again impressed by Micheal Griffin, he would appear to be the best NASA Administrator we’ve seen in a while.

Astro2 held an observing session along with the Physics department for today’s partial solar eclipse. They had a nice array of Telescopes there, two set up to project an image onto screens and then a PST for observing the Sun directly in H-alpha. I was technically at work so I couldn’t stay for the whole eclipse but coffee time coincided nicely with maximum eclipse so I got to see about 20 minutes starting just after maximum. The view in the PST was spectacular, some lovely prominences and also two small sunspots near the eclipsed bit of the moon.

Myself and another colleague watched a live webcast from Turkey from work for a few minutes either side of totality. It was no where near as impressive as actually being there but it was still nice to do something for the eclipse.

Tagged with: Sun • Astro 2 • eclipse • observation log • astronomy

I’ve just released the first episode of a podcast I’ve stared to do for the Irish Federation of Astronomical Societies (IFAS) and thought I’d share some of my experiences in making it. First thing to note is that I had zero experience in anything audio related on computers apart from listening to stuff. Hence, I think it is fair to consider myself a total newbie at this stuff and you should judge the result based on that! I also decided to do a little experiment. Apple have a name for making really intuitive software that lets you do really powerful things with no training and a minimal learning curve, basically their apps are supposed to be a usability dream. So, could a complete noob like me, having never used iLife (or any audio software of any kind for that matter), manage to make a podcast and publish it in reasonable time and to a reasonable standard? You can judge the results for yourself here: www.minds.nuim.ie/~ifas/podcast/

Lets start by setting the scene, the machine I did this on was a first generation G4 Mac Mini (1.42GHz and 1GB RAM) running OS X 10.4.5. This machine pre-dates the whole iLife thing so although I had some of the apps that are now bundled as iLife they were old versions and I didn’t have iWeb at all. As I mentioned before the first generation Mac Mini’s don’t actually have an audio in port so I would have to spend some money before I could go anywhere. The following are the things I bought and connected/installed before I started:

1. Trust Headset (www.komplett.ie/k/ki.asp?sku=108145)
2. iMic (www.griffintechnology.com/products/imic2/)
3. iLife 06 (www.apple.com/ilife/)

So, with my shopping all done I’d spent about 140 Euro and for that I had a mic to record with, a way of connecting my mic to my Mac Mini via USB, and the software to record, edit and publish my Podcast. The question is, now that I had everything I needed, how easy would I actually find it to produce something decent?

Recording the Audio

The hardest part of this was to get over feeling like a complete idiot sitting in my room by myself talking out loud to my computer! I used the Podcast Studio in GarageBand to do the recording and I have to say it was trivially simple to use. I had the hang of it and was recording away in literally a few minutes. Initially I did the entire podcast as one recording in one go but when I played it back I realised that I’d made a mess of some bits and left out some important things I should have said in the middle etc so then it was time to start really using the software and breaking my big long track up into bits, naming them, deleting the bits I messed up, re-recording bits and then splicing it all together. I even got a 5 minute piece contributed by someone else that I now also had to include. This is the hard stuff so how did I find Garage Band for that? TBH I found it excellent. I had it all nailed in no time at all and in no more than 2 hours work I’d gone from nothing to a fully edited 23 minute podcast that was ready to go out into the big bad world.

Exporting the Audio Out of Garage Band

This is where things got a bit more interesting. In theory I should just go to the Share menu and select Send Podcast to iWeb and it should just happen. Well it did, kinda, but not perfectly. Firstly, because my Mac Mini is not exactly a PowerMac it took an annoyingly long time to first merge the various tracks in my podcast down to a single master track and then transcode this track into a format for publishing. This is not really a big deal. Had I started it and then gone and gotten myself a cup of tea, it would have been done well before I got back, but since I was sitting there watching it I found it annoyingly slow. The second problem however is a much more serious one. GarageBand will not export a podcast in MP3 format, it insists on using AAC. This is fine for iTunes users and users of some other players but is a serious problem for users of WinAmp and other free players. Since I have a real issue with people forcing me to use certain software for things when there is a perfectly good open alternative I just couldn’t go ahead and publish my podcast as AAC only. I go mad at people who mail me Word documents instead of PDFs, just think of how much of a hypocrite I’d be if I started going round publishing just AAC files and telling everyone go get iTunes! So, using iTunes (somewhat ironically) I converted the AAC file to an MP3. The MP3 file was smaller but I have to say I noticed a difference in Quality between the AAC and the MP3 so I decided I would publish both and have two RSS feeds for my podcast, an AAC one and an MP3 one.

Publishing my Podcast

So, I had now exported my podcast to iWeb for publishing, how did I find that? TBH I found iWeb immensely easy to use. It did all the hard stuff automatically and generated a nice, clean looking page that works well and looks good and it did all that in literally a few minutes. It even let me add in the second feed with minimal efford. Right up to the point I went to actually publish to the web I was absolutely delighted with iWeb.

The publishing though is where I got grumpy with iWeb. If you forked out on a pointless .mac account it would publish straight to the web for you but if you haven’t it won’t. This annoyed me because, firstly, FTP and SFTP are hardly difficult things to incorporate into your web software and secondly, considering .mac uses WebDAV, not letting you publish to your own WebDAV server is even more ridiculous. Basically iWeb is actively trying to pressure users into getting a .mac account and IMO that is just not acceptable behavior from software that you have BOUGHT! The fact that iWeb will not publish directly over anything but .mac is a real black mark against it in my book. Having said that it was not that big a deal to publish it really. All you do is tell iWeb to publish to a folder on your hard drive and then upload that folder to your server with what ever software you like.

Conclusions

At no point did the software make me feel stupid and at no point did it confuse or scare me. It worked and it worked well, so, from a usability standpoint I’d give it full marks. However, iLife did two things to annoy me and they are very symptomatic of Apple’s obsession with trying to get everyone to use their software and nothing else. Honestly, there are some things Apple could teach MicroSoft about railroading people into a particular piece of software! Anyhow, I digress, the things that annoyed me were GarageBand’s refusal to export as anything but AAC and iWeb’s refusal to publish directly to anything but .mac. All in all though I’m very happy and feel that the software deserves it’s reputation for being easy to use and powerful because it really is both. Bottom line is that I consider iLife to be excellent value for money and would recommend it to anyone interested in starting to play with podcasting and multimedia in general.

Tagged with: tutorial • podcasting • software • OS X

My broadband has now returned to normal at long last (has been for about a week now). I actually credited Pat Kenny and Eircom with it for a few days but an email I got at the end of last week set me straight on that one. I had sent in a big long detailed description of my problem to the Pat Kenny Show when they did a bit on broadband and that duly got passed on to Eircom. I then got an email from an Eircom "escalations manager" asking for my landline number so I sent it to her and then, pretty much the next day (may have been the day after) my broadband suddenly sprung back into life. I naturally assumed this Eircom person had banged some heads together and got some results. Nope. Despite the fact that I had laid out in clear detail my situation, explaining that I was a DigiWeb Customer and that DigiWeb had a call with Eircom on my line that had been un-updated for almost two months I got back a one-liner from Eircom telling me I was not their customer and that I needed to talk to DigiWeb. Goes to show that their escalations people are either not literate or not bothered. Either way I let loose and really enjoyed writing my reply. It was very therapeutic.

Bottom Line, Eircom think it’s OK to bugger up everyone’s net connection for two months and then to get stroppy with people who complain at them. Bollox to that! The sooner our local exchange gets un-bundled the better!

The full Story:

• Eircom – Incompetent and Downright Rude
• They Sure Know How to Rub it in
• I Did Not Even Think it COULD Get Worse

Mar

22

They say that tomorrow never comes, well, I’m starting to think Microsoft Vista is just like tomorrow! I’ve now lost count of how often MS have pushed back Vista or announced a reduction in features. We’re now back to early 2007 for the general plebs. Steve Jobbs had a great slide at last year’s Apple Developer Conference showing the number of OS X releases versus the number of Windows releases over the last 10 years …. it was a very on-sided slide slide. He also put big question marks next to Vista in 2006 … he got a good laugh but it looks like he was bang on the money! There is a good chance that the next OS X (‘Leopard’) will make it onto the shelves before Vista, worst case I’d say they’ll be out at the same time.

Des has mentioned a few times how "Web 2.0" is a pile of hype with no substance despite the fact that the pointy-haired-bosses of this world think it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread. Well, today’s Daily WFT installment reminded me of the one piece of management waffle I hate more than all the Web2.0 hype – Enterprise. Saying your software is Enterprise Level seems to be code for saying it’s "too complex for the job it’s being used for and built for an extortionately high amount but it will look great on paper and PowerPoint". If someone can tell me without respoting to management speak what it means for software to be ‘Enterprise Level’ I’ll consider changing my mind but right now it strikes me as nothing but hype designed to get idiotic managers to take on your product and nothing more concrete than that. In fact, most Enterprise things seem to result in making the lives of people harder rather than easier! Anyhow, here’s the link to todays WTF: http://thedailywtf.com/forums/64597/ShowPost.aspx

Burning a CD on OS X is trivial and involves no more software than finder. You stick in the blank CD, it shows up in finder, you drag the files you want to burn onto it and then click the little radioactive icon to burn the CD. Simple. However, if you go looking in finder to copy a CD you will be disappointed. Does this mean you need to install 3rd party software like Roxio Toast? Nope. The key lies in knowing how to use the Disk Utility app that comes with OS X.

Lets say you’ve just purchased a copy of a software app, for example, MS Office X, and you want to make a backup copy for when you inevitably loose or damage your disk, here is how you would do it, step by step.

First you need to stick the original CD into the drive and then launch Disk Utility which you will find in the Utilities folder in the Applications folder. The icon is shown below:

When you have it open you will see all your hard disks in a tab down the left hand side as well as your CD/DVD drives and what ever CDs are in them. Select the disk you want to copy (shown below):

Then go to File -> New -> <Your Disk> (as shown below) and select a place on your hard disk to save this file. This will generate a ‘disk image’ from the CD you want to copy which you can then burn to a blank CD (as often as you want in fact, though not that you’d do such a thing with a copyrighted disk of course!).

This will take a while to complete but when it is done your saved disk image will show up in the bottom section of the left hand panel. To burn this image to a new CD eject the original CD and insert a blank one (if a window pops up asking you what to do with the blank disk click Ignore). When you have the CD inserted select the saved disk image as shown below and then click the Burn icon (yellow and black icon that looks like a radioactive sign at the top left) and away you go!

Tagged with: operating system • tutorial • OS X

Well … I didn’t think it could get worse, but it has. My "broadband" is now running at about 8kbps, yes, eight KILO bytes per second. That’s not broad band …. it’s not even ISDN …. it’s not even twice dialup!

I have been defending DigiWeb up to now but bugger that. Since the 20th of January my broadband has been fucked, that’s almost two months! In that time DigiWeb have not even been able to tell me WHAT the problem is let alone what is being done to fix it or when it will be fixed. They seem to think that "it’s an Eircom problem" is still a sufficient answer to my questions at this stage. Well I have news for them IT ISN’T! It got me off their backs for a while but that is no longer a good enough answer.

I’ve been on to ComReg and got talking to a very nice lady there who explained to me that I can’t make a complaint about Eircom, that the only people who can are DigiWeb because they are Eircom Customers, not me. Basically, the ONLY people who have the power to sort out my line are DigiWeb and they are failing MISERABLY and what it worse they have not told me one thing to give me any confidence in them at all. They get annoyed with me when I ring and ask for update reports, apparently I’m being impatient! They are letting Eircom walk all over them and it is ME and other DigiWeb customers who are suffering.

Word of advice – if you’re thinking of getting broad band – DON’T get Eircom (their Customer ‘service’ is bad enough to be a health risk) and DON’T get DigiWeb, they are incapable of dealing with the service provider they use on your behalf to a satisfactory level.

There has been a lot of media hype in the last two weeks or so about OS X security and it seems to be sexy now to have a go at the mac. The amount of half-thought-out and poorly researched hype about OS X vulnerabilities of late is just astounding. To read some articles you’d swear that there was millions of destroyed macs littered all over the Internet. But there aren’t, there are two minor ‘viruses’, a vulnerability in a web browser, and a dubious hacking claim.

Two ‘Viruses’

So, what were these ‘viruses’, well, the first one, the wonderfully named "oompah loompah" virus (or Leap.A to be more formal) was a Trojan that spread it self via iChat. People had to open a file that they received via iChat to get infected. The second one allowed people with bluetooth devices to get too much access to your machine. Not good but the patch to fix this problem was released months before the virus so any sensible person was safe.

What can we learn from these two ‘viruses’:

1. Don’t open files you get from an un-trusted source
2. Keep your OS up to date

As for the first point, if you get a strange file from a strange person over ANY medium and you are stupid enough to open/run it you DESERVE to get your machine destroyed! Any file you run runs as YOU and has all the permissions YOU have so it can delete all YOUR files. That’s not a security problem that’s a fact of life on any OS. Programs you run can do what you can do and you can delete your own stuff!

The second point is another no-brainer. Linux and Unix are more secure than windows but ONLY if you keep them updated! Same goes for OS X, or any OS for that matter. Apple are very good at brining out security updates and patches, if your machine is going to be online INSTALL THEM!

You’ll notice that the two rules of thumb above are not OS X specific, they go for all OSes. Windows users have been aware of these realities for a long time, perhaps Mac users have not, well, they should have been!

One Vulnerability

The Safari vulnerability however was more worrying. In this case Apple did something stupid and they should have known better. Safari was susceptible because it opened files automatically on download. That is dangerous and the horrible experiences MicroSoft had with things like this SHOULD have served as an example to Apple for what NOT to do. It didn’t. I hope they’ve learned their lesson now!

And a Misreported Hack Success

Finally, the hack reported on ZDNet. Firstly, I’m disgusted with ZDNet for their shoddy reporting on this one. I read the ZDNet article and the implication was that the machine had been hacked remotely in 30 minutes. That would have been worrying. Thing is that is not what happened. The guy GAVE login accounts to the people who were doing the hacking! The exploit was NOT remote, it was local, and that makes the world of difference. I was disgusted when I found out from another source that that was how it had been done, ZDNet really let themselves down by leaving that vital piece of information out of their story, I for one will take everything they write from now on with a grain of salt.

What difference does it make if the exploit was remote or local? Well, on ANY OS you should only give accounts to people you trust. If you have to give accounts to un-trusted parties you need to take extra precautions to protect yourself. I very much doubt there is a single OS out there (be it a Linux, Unix or Windows variant) that does not have a local exploit, why should OS X be any different? What is important is that if you put a Mac on the internet that you are safe, that means that you should be protected from remote attacks, so far OS X seems to stand up very well to those, no doubt due to it’s excellent firewall which it inherited from it’s FreeBSD roots. In fact, another Mac was set up as a hack challenge, but without giving the attackers a login account and it lasted 38 hours before the test was cut short by University Administrators who didn’t like a machine in their network being advertised as a hacking target!

You Mean OS X is not Perfect?

So, OS X is not perfect, OS X users need to use common sense too, are you surprised? If you are then you were living in fantasy land! Linux is also not perfect, neither is Unix. There is no perfect OS! So, does that mean OS X is no better than Windows for security? Nope. Not at all. OS X has a better security model than Windows (as does Linux). The way attackers carry out remote exploits is by using a known or un-known flaw in some world-facing service on the target machine (e.g. the dreaded blaster used the RPC service to gain access to machines without the users having to do anything). The more services you have listening the more potential avenues for attack there are. You need to minimise the services you expose and you need to keep the software for those services as up-to-date as possible. On Windows there are loads of services open by default. Regardless of whether you ASKED your windows machine to run these services or not, ‘out of the box’ it will be running them, and each one is a potential entry point for nasty people into your computer. To make things worse it is actually quite tricky to turn off services on Windows, you need to be more than just an average user to have the skills to do it.

OS X and Linux by contrast have ZERO world-facing services by default! You, as a user need to turn on what you want. On OS X this is trivial to do, there is a nice simple GUI in the System Preference App to do it. The other nice thing is that the OS X firewall is tied in to the services and it’s default behavior is to block off all ports that are not needed by the services you have selected to activate. This means that, in general an attacker has FAR FAR fewer avenues of attack on an OS X or Linux machine than on a Windows machine. In fact, in general you don’t need any services open so you can keep everything closed and know that you are well protected, much better than you are on Windows unless you get technical or install third-party addons.

Finally … Some Conclusions

In Summary, here are the simple steps all Mac users should take to protect themselves:

1. Turn on your firewall, Apple provided you with it for a reason!
2. Don’t activate any services you don’t need!
3. Keep your OS up to date
4. Don’t open up any files (including apps) you get from un-trusted source

Finally, these are the reason I believe OS X is more secure than Windows

1. OS X only opens the services you ask it to
2. OS X has a better built-in firewall (the defauls are perfect for home users and power users have the power to do MUCH more, see The RIGHT way to set up a Custom Firewall on OS X and IPFW Firewall Script (Suitable for OS X))
3. The core of OS X is opensource and based on the very solid FreeBSD.
4. Apple seem to be quicker at getting out security fixes
5. OS X has a better user-model, the Unix one
6. OS X has a better file permissions model, again, the Unix one.

Tagged with: OS X

Well I was about half right with my predictions for yesterday’s Apple announcement. New Mac Mini’s are a reality but no super video iPod and, as I expected, no iTablet. What we did get instead was an iPod stereo. I have zero interest in the iPod stereo so I’m just going to talk about the new Mac Mini.

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Tagged with: hardware • review • Mac • MacMini • Apple

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