• 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

  

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]

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: Apple • OS X • iOS • news

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]

Just a little follow on form my earlier bit of un-planned down time. The reason for the downtime was that I ran into three problems while upgrading the php5-cgi port. In this post I’m going to detail the solutions, mainly so I have easy access to them next time I upgrade PHP5 on a FreeBSD machine, but also because this may be of some use to someone somewhere some time.

[tags]FreeBSD, PHP5[/tags]

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Tagged with: FreeBSD • Unix • PHP

Passwords are an annoying fact of life in our modern electronic world. If you’re any sort of regular computer user you’re going to start building up quite a collection. You could use the same user name and password for everything, but that’s very insecure. Also, you often don’t have a choice of user name, or you can run into very restrictive password policies, either way it’s unlikely you’ll manage to get the same user name and password everywhere even if you tried! Remembering the details for things you log in to every day is never the problem. It’s the passwords for the things you only use a few times a month or even a year that cause the problems. Saving passwords in browsers can help a bit but it makes things even worse when you try to use another computer and of course your browser isn’t going to be any help when it comes to remembering your domain password at work or your FTP password for that website you only update every few months. On top of all your passwords you also have software registration codes to keep track of and your browser certainly isn’t going to help you with that. Inevitably you end up getting locked out of sites or services and having to re-buy software you’ve bought before because you can’t find your registration key.

[tags]PasswordVault, PasswordVault2Go, Lava Software[/tags]

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Tagged with: review • software • Windows • Linux • password manager • OS X

I get asked this a lot. Outside of Apple I don’t think anyone knows. Just this week I’ve seen two conflicting reports citing ‘industry sources’, one predicting Leopard will ship in Mid April, the other predicting October. The only official line we have is ‘Spring 2007’. Depending on who’s definition of Spring you use that means any time before June 21^st. That really is all we know. Any predictions you hear are just that, predictions. My regular readers have probably noticed that I like making Apple related predictions on my blog so that should I ever be right some day I can point back to the post and say ‘look – I told you so’. Sure, it’s childish but hey, I’m a bloke, and we don’t grow up, we just grow old …. so … lets do some predicting 🙂

Considering just how much Apple made fun of Microsoft for delaying Vista I really don’t think they want to let the ‘Spring’ date slide. However, from what I’ve been reading on various technology blogs it seems the latest developer build is still far from a final product so it appears Apple still have work to do. This makes it likely we’ll see Leopard right at the end of Spring. Apple moved their developer’s conference (WWDC) forward a few months to June 11-15. I think they did this for a reason and I think that reason is Leopard. My prediction is that Leopard will be announced at WWDC and will ship a few weeks after that.

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

Tagged with: Apple • OS X

Like just about everything in IT the computer security landscape is constantly changing. As the computer industry strengthens our defenses, and as old avenues of attack are closed off, the attackers change their strategies, targets and techniques. It’s a never-ending game of cat-and-mouse and the rules are always changing. However, there is one element that remains constant, uneducated and innocent users are always the prime target. Hence, the best defense is education, if you don’t understand the attacks you haven’t a hope of defending yourself. This is the first part of a two-part series to try to give people an introduction to this complex and dynamic field. Reading these articles won’t bring you even close to being an expert but they should give you a basic overview of the computer security landscape. In this first part we’ll have a look at what the bad guys are trying to do to your computer and why, as well as some of the simple things you can do to protect yourself. In the second part we’ll look in more detail at how your computer may be attacked and how I see the attacks evolving over the next few years.

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Although I was very happy with the Blue Zinfandel Squared theme as it was out of the box there were one or two things about it that annoyed me so I spent this evening fixing them. I have to say I was very pleasantly surprised when I dove into the code, it was clear, simple and well documented! All my changes were minor, no more than a few lines of code each but they make things pretty much exactly as I want them. Anyhow, in case you care these are the tweaks I made:

• I moved the search box up to the top of the side bar
• Fixed the way the categories were shown – it wasn’t playing nice with nested categories
• Added the full date to the information at the top of posts
• Added an “edit” button to each post that only shows up when I’m logged in
• Tweaked the way lists are rendered in posts
• Tweaked the page header and footers a very small bit

And that’s it. That’s all the changes the theme needed. I really can’t give it high enough praise!

Tagged with: site news • web site • Wordpress

I did a review of the pre-beta preview release of NetNewsWire 3 for Allison on the NosillaCast. Check it out in Episode 85.

[tags]NosillaCast, NetNewsWire[/tags]

Tagged with: OS X • review • software • RSS Reader

With the pending court cases around Europe and Steve Jobs’ recent open letter ‘Thoughts on Music’ there’s a lot of talk about DRM at the moment, so, I thought now might be a good time to have a closer look at what it’s all about. In this article I’ll start by having a look at what DRM is, what effects it has on us, the consumers, and why I feel it will never work. I’ll end by having a look at how DRM is counter-productive for the content producers and at some alternatives.

[tags]DRM, Piracy[/tags]

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