The Author – Bart Busschots
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Jul
30
Apple’s Complacency Threatens OS X Security
Filed Under Computers & Tech, Security on July 30, 2007 | 14 Comments
I regularly have a go a Microsoft for not patching vulnerabilities quickly enough. The recent shambles with the animated cursor flaw proves that MS still have a long way to go in terms of security. However, they are a not alone. Apple have a definite advantage over MS when it comes to security, they have built OS X on top of the very robust and security conscious FreeBSD distribution of Unix, while MS are building on the shoddy foundation that is DOS and early versions of NT. A lot of current Windows vulnerabilities lie in this very old code, the Animated Cursor flaw being a good recent example. However, Apple are being complacent. They seem to be drinking too much of their own cool-aid and are acting as if OS X really is immune from attack. It is of course not immune, and with Apple TV and the iPhone now also running OS X it’s becoming a bigger target every day. When vulnerabilities are reported Apple have to respond promptly, unfortunately the current SAMBA flaw in OS X proves they are not doing this.
[tags]SAMBA, OS X, Security, Apple[/tags]
Jul
20
Figure Out Where All Your Disk Space Went With Disk Inventory X
Filed Under Computers & Tech, System Administration on July 20, 2007 | Leave a Comment
Although we should all be very well organised and we should never forget about files on our disk, we all leave files lying around where we shouldn’t. Then we forget about the files, and a few months later we’re wondering just where all our disk space has gone! Ideally you’d want to be able to get a visual representation of your disk where large files stand out no matter where they’re hidden. Windows users have had a solution to this problem for a long time with WinDirStat. There is now a port of WinDirStat for OS X called Disk Inventory X. This is very simple and very intuitive program and what’s even better is that it’s free and open source! Although it’s a port of a Windows program the port is well done so it looks like a proper OS X application.
[tags]Apple, OS X, Disk Inventory X, WinDirStat, Freeware[/tags]
Jul
13
Apple See Sense at Last – Free Full-Screen in QuickTime 7.2
Filed Under Computers & Tech on July 13, 2007 | 2 Comments
There are some things we expect every media player to do out of the box, you know, the basics, actually playing media and that kind of thing. Most people would consider a full-screen mode to be one of these core features that all media players must have. Apple didn’t think so. Past versions of QuickTime made you upgrade to the pro version for $30 if you wanted full-screen playback. Needless to say this annoyed a lot of people. It just looked like greed on Apple’s part and drove people away from Quicktime towards free alternatives like VLC. However, as of QuickTime 7.2 which was released this week you get free full-screen playback. Great to see common-sense finally winning out in the QuickTime division of Apple. THANKYOU!
Jul
5
Simple Sortable Tables
Filed Under Computers & Tech, Software Development on July 5, 2007 | 4 Comments
Despite the advent of broadband excessive round-trips to the server still slow websites down. Having to send a request to the server to get the same data again but in a different order each time someone wants to sort a table is just not efficient. Hence, what you want is some nice simple JavaScript to do it for you. Ideally this JavaScript should be cross-browser and should not require you to make any substantive changes to your mark-up. Well, the good news is that this ideal has been realized and has been released under the free and open source MIT License. I’m talking about Stuart Langridge’s Sorttable.
Assuming you use proper XHTML markup for your tables, in particluar thead and tbody tags, making your tables sortable is a two-step process:
- Include
sorttable.js - Set the class of the tables you want sortable to
sortable
For a basic setup that’s it! If you want to get a little more fancy you can by doing things like making some columns un-sortable but that too is trivially easy. Honestly, I have no complaints at all about this script, it just works!
[tags]XHTML, tables, sortable tables, JavaScript[/tags]
Jul
3
Perian Goes 1.0
Filed Under Computers & Tech on July 3, 2007 | Leave a Comment
I reviewed Perian a few months ago when it was at version 0.5. I was already very happy with it then, but it’s gotten better. It used to just be a simple QuickTime component, now it comes as a Preference Pane so it can be easily controlled from within the System Preferences app. It still does everything it used to do, and indeed more, but now it’s easier to manage. If you run OS X Tiger (doesn’t work on earlier versions) and you haven’t already done so, now is the time to download and install Perian.
[tags]Perian, Apple, OS X, Video, QuickTime[/tags]
Jun
27
At Last – A REAL iPhone Review
Filed Under Computers & Tech on June 27, 2007 | 3 Comments
The amount of non-news and pure garbage that the iPhone has spawned is amazing. You have analysts predicting failure and success without ever even having TOUCHED an actual iPhone. I mean really, how low can journalistic standards go? Since when is guesswork (often un-educated guesswork) news? There have even been iPhone stories complaining about the amount of iPhone stories! But, at long last, amidst all the crap, we finally have real review from someone who’s actually GOT an iPhone! What’s better still is that it’s a real review rather than the fan-boy rubbish we are sure to see spewing forth from the blogosphere as soon as the infernal thing finally gets out. Anyhow, go read David Pogue’s review and get some real iPhone news for a change.
[tags]iPhone, Apple, David Pogue[/tags]
Jun
26
My Visit To Hosting365
Filed Under Computers & Tech on June 26, 2007 | 14 Comments
As some of you may remember I was getting rather frustrated with Hosting365 a while ago. However, Hosting365 responded very positively to the frustrations I expressed and, at their invitation, I paid them a visit today. Firstly, it was nice to put faces to the names. The guys all seem dead sound and the big-wigs are all Mac users so they must be alright 😉
Anyhow, I didn’t trek over to Park West at rush hour just to attach faces to names and engage in some Mac nostalgia. I went down there to see for myself what kind of infra-structure I’m entrusting with the task of hosting my sites and my customer’s sites, and to see how Hosting365 are going to resolve their problems with domain registrations. Bottom-line, I’m happy with what I saw.
[tags]Hosting365, Hosting, Domain Registration[/tags]
Jun
23
Namely – The End of a Long Quest
Filed Under System Administration, Computers & Tech on June 23, 2007 | 2 Comments
There are many people who like the dock and many who hate it. Me, I like the dock, but I know it has limits. It’s excellent for keeping those programs you use day-in-day-out at your fingertips. That’s what the dock is for after all, it’s not meant to be the place you keep ALL your apps, just your favorites. On OS X you’re expected to user the Finder to launch those apps that you don’t keep in the Dock. Apple tried to make it a little easier with a keyboard shortcut for going to your applications folder (command+shift+a) but that’s not all that great and it only works from within the Finder anyhow. So, that’s why I’ve been on a quest to find the perfect application launcher for the Mac for quite some time now.
[tags]Apple, OS X, Quicksilver, Spot Light, Himmel Bar, Namely, Application Launcher[/tags]
Jun
22
SMARTReporter – Automatically Monitor Your Mac for Iminent Disk Failures
Filed Under Computers & Tech, System Administration on June 22, 2007 | 1 Comment
Modern hard disks have a built-in system called SMART for monitoring themselves. SMART makes information on the health of the drive available to the OS. It’s far from perfect, SMART errors don’t always means your drive will die, and not all drive deaths are predicted by SMART but it’s still a good indicator all the same. Now, it’s great having all this SMART data there but it’s no good if no one reads it! OS X CAN read it but it doesn’t do so on an on-going basis. In fact, the only time a default OS X install will read the SMART data is when the Disk Utility app is opened. That’s where SMARTReporter comes in. It polls your SMART data at a given interval (default is once an hour) and lets you know if there’ any problems. It can do this in three ways: it can change the color of an icon in your menu bar, it can pop up a message, and it can send an email. You can choose to have it do all, none, or some of these things. The menu bar icon is perhaps over-kill but some people may find it re-assuring to see a nice health green hard disk icon indicating that SMARTReporter is running and that it has found no errors on any of your drives. As soon as it finds a problem this icon will turn an ominous red color. I’d suggest everyone run this app on their macs but just turn off the menu bar icon. That way it runs totally in the background and totally out-of-sight until there is a problem, which will hopefully never happen! I should also mention that because of limitations with the USB to ATA bridge this will not work with USB hard drives. It will also not work with FireWire drives because Apple’s drivers for FireWire don’t pass on the SMART data. This limits this app to internal ATA(IDE) and SATA drives, i.e. regular internal hard drives. Finally, this app is both free and open source being released under the MIT license.
[tags]Apple, OS X, Hard Disks[/tags]
Jun
22
ByteController – Turn Any Keyboard into a Multimedia Keyboard on OS X
Filed Under Computers & Tech on | Leave a Comment
On all my desktop machines I have nice ergonomic multimedia keyboards from Logitech so I can always shut-up iTunes with the stroke of a key when the phone rings or someone comes in to talk to me or something. This is something I really miss on my MacBook Pro. Today I found a free and simple solution, ByteController which you can download from bytetastic.com.
This program does two things, it gives you iTunes controls in your menu bar, and it lets you define your own hot-keys for controlling iTunes. The default look of the menu bar controls is very minimalist and looks like something Apple would do but you can customize the look at lot. You can go from the totally understated default up by flashy and on to downright gaudy. I’ve opted for something in between as you can see from the screen shot below. This program does have one limitation though, it’s only for controlling iTunes. It does let you set hot keys for controlling volume, but this is iTunes volume, not the system volume. However, if, like me, you use iTunes as your media player this app is a real God-send. It’s yet another small simple app that does one this very well.
[tags]ByteController, ByteTastic, iTunes, OS X, Apple[/tags]