• The Author – Bart Busschots

  

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  Unless otherwise stated, the content on this site is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution, Noncommercial, No Derivative Works 3.0 License

  

What started off as a hack of a MacBook Pro at a security conferences has now been revealed to be a hack exploiting a vulnerability in the way Quicktime talks to Java. What does this mean? It means that this is not just an issue for Mac users, Windows users are vulnerable too! Thankfully the solution is simple, turn off Java (not JavaScript) in your web browser.

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Tagged with: vulnerability • web browser

Ireland is not a big country, only a small percentage of people in Ireland are interested in Astronomy, only a small percentage of those get actively involved. So, the Irish Amateur Astronomical community is small. Yet, it is plagued by a decades old feud. On one side you have the combined entity of Astronomy & Space Ltd (a company) and Astronomy Ireland (a club), and on the other you have everyone else, mostly combined under the banner of the Irish Federation of Astronomical Societies (IFAS). The level of animosity between both camps is astounding. The stories you hear are often shocking and the depth of emotion almost unimaginable. There are a few rare people like myself who straddle(d) the divide, but most are in one camp or the other. There are also many people who are new to the community and who don’t know nor care about the history that started the feud. Many of these get so put off by all the animosity that they just give up altogether and withdraw from the community to enjoy the wonders of the night sky by themselves.

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Apple laptops have very impressive battery lives. My MBP can run for almost 4 hours if I’m not doing anything too intensive on it (e.g. playing Solitaire on a plane). A big contributing factor to this great battery performance is very aggressive power management. If you have the back-lit keyboard turned on it turns off after a minute of inactivity, after only a few minutes of inactivity the screen dims to about half it’s regular brightness and so on. This is all good and well until you start doing something on your Mac that involves no user interaction but that goes on for a long time. The best example of this would be watching a video. You have to keep jiggling the mouse or the screen will dim. Good media players like VLC automatically stop this happening but many players, including Apple’s QuickTime, don’t. Also, with the popularity of sites like YouTube you often don’t use any media player to watch videos, just your browser. So, what you need is a simple piece of software that will prevent the power saving features kicking in while you’re watching videos. The answer – give you Mac Caffeine!

[tags]Caffeine, MacBook, MacBookPro[/tags]

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Tagged with: utility • software • review • OS X

On the Mac you can turn anything you can print into a PDF for free right out of the box because the standard OS X Print Dialog has a button for making your print job into a PDF. Now you can get the same level of functionality for Windows for free with no strings attached (released under GPL) with PDF Creator. This works by providing a special printer driver that saves your print jobs as PDFs.

[tags]PDF[/tags]

Tagged with: utility • Windows • software • review

At work we don’t have much use for FTP but every now and then we have to install an FTP client for someone and configure it to use our SOCKS proxy. We first try FileZilla, but it has issues connecting to some servers through our proxies (have yet to figure out a pattern), so, if that happens we try SmartFTP (free for Educational use) instead. In the past we always used SmartFTP 2.0 and setting up the proxies was simple. You just went to Tools -> Settings -> Connection -> Proxy and entered the details. Today we installed SmartFTP 2.5 for the first time and discovered that the proxy pane was gone from the Connection Dialog in Settings. Looking a little further revealed it was NOWHERE in settings anymore, or indeed in ANY of the menus in the menu bar. I did eventually find it, but the steps you have to take are absurd.

1. Select Favorites -> Edit Favorites ... (opens a new window)
2. In the new Windows go to Favorite -> New -> Favorite (opens another new window)
3. In this second new window right down at the bottom is a ‘button’ that is not so much a button as a piece of blue text labeled ‘Edit Default Favorite’, click on this.
4. Now, finally, you can edit the proxy settings under connection.

What ever idiot thought that this was an improvement over the way things were done in 2.0 should be fired at once and barred from writing software for life! This level of utter incompetence and total disregard for users and the basic tenets of HCI should be sufficient to end anyone’s career. If you value your sanity, AVOID SmartFTP!

[tags]SmartFTP, HCI, Proxy[/tags]

It’s been an eventful half week. Having gone about two years without feeling the need to post a single personal post now I’m writing a second one in less than a week! The first one was a difficult post to write. Mind you, writing it was very therapeutic so I’m glad I bit the bullet and did it. This one however isn’t hard to write at all, quite the opposite in fact. The short version is that myself and my partner are back together, and back stronger than we were before. In fact, we are now technically engaged.

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Well, I had predicted that Apple would try get Leopard out by WWDC. In a statement today Apple did say that was their plan, but it hasn’t worked out. Apple blame the iPhone saying they have had to borrow developers from the OS X team to get the iPhone ready for June. I guess the good news is that the iPhone is on target for its June release date, but the cost of this is that Leopard will not be out till October. The only silver lining I can see is that Apple say OS X 10.5 will be ‘feature complete’ by WWDC and that developers will be getting a beta version at WWDC. This means that although we won’t get our hands on Leopard in June, we should at least get to see the final feature set. Putting my prediction hat on I expect we’ll see an extended Leopard demo during Jobs’ keynote at WWDC in June.

[tags]iPhone, OS X Leopard, OS X 10.5, Apple[/tags]

Tagged with: news • iOS • OS X • Apple

I’ve always said I wouldn’t blog about personal things but this is my blog so I can break my own rules when I think it’s the right thing to do. I see this blog as a tool, and right now I need a tool to save me having to repeatedly re-tell something that it will hurt me a lot to have to keep repeating. Myself and my partner of over three years have parted ways. I’m pretty devastated, to put it mildly. In my mind I had been planning our life together and really thought this one was for the long haul. Now there’s a very large hole in my life that’s going to take some time to build a bridge over. Right now I’m still very numb and have lost interest in all the things I used to do and care about. I don’t feel in the humor for working on www.IrishAstronomy.org and blogging is not really something I think I’ll be in the humor for for a while. I’m working on a lot of posts at the moment but I just don’t see myself having the energy to finish them just now. Somehow, not having someone to share my daily life and minor triumphs with makes everything seem rather pointless. I’m also going to have a lot of very unpleasant and difficult practical tasks to do to un-tangle our very inter-twined lives, joint bank accounts to close, a room with our stuff to separate, both of us being total nerds, a joint server to separate out and that kind of thing. I think that will be enough to keep me ‘entertained’ for a while anyhow, after that’s all done I’ll probably be able to start getting back to a normal life and settling in to being single again.

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I’m in my parents place this week and out here in the heart of Ireland broad band is not available. I find dialup so frustrating that I generally don’t bother even going online. So, I managed to miss Apple’s big announcement till now. For those of you on another planet (or deprived of broad band like me) Apple and EMI announced on Monday that they would start selling high quality DRM free music on iTunes. The price is the same for albums but more expensive for individual tracks. Since the quality is higher and the files are DRM free that seems fair enough to me. I just hope this experiment goes well. I really want this to be the start of a whole new era for digital music, the end of the failed experiment that is DRM.

[tags]DRM, EMI, Apple[/tags]