• The Author – Bart Busschots

  

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I’ve just switched to Thunderbird 1.5 and I’m impressed. There is no real noticeable difference in the overall look of the app but there are some changes that really make it worth upgrading from 1.0. The most noticeable difference is that it now checks your spelling as you type rather than only doing it when you click send. This will save a lot of time and effort and gives Thunderbird the only thing that apple’s mail client had over it IMO. The other thing they have finally addressed is the interface for setting up multiple SMTP servers. Each account now has a simple dropdown menu for specifying what server to use which is a big improvement to the hoops you used to have to jump through in version 1.0.

Basically, if you haven’t upgraded yet, get cracking and if you are still using something ghastly like Outlook Express or Eurdora get switching now, you won’t regret it!

Tagged with: OS X • review • software • Windows • open source • Linux • email

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: OS X • software • podcasting • tutorial

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: OS X • tutorial • operating system

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

If you manage a server or a network nmap is one of those tools that you’d just be lost without. However, remembering the syntax for all the cool stuff it can do is a right PITA. Hence this nice simple OS X GUI to nmap is a real time and energy saver.

I can’t stress enough that NMAP is a tool that must be used responsibly. If you go around randomly scanning random people it is only a matter of time till you get into trouble, remember, it is a crime to scan machines that are not yours!

You can download NmapFE OS X from here: http://faktory.org/m/software/nmap/

It’s not particularly fancy and doesn’t have many bells and whistles but it does it’s job excellently. It gives you all your options neatly laid out in the main dialoge and then a separate window for the results of each scan (you can run many at the same time). The app even has a sense of humor, click the "script kiddie" checkbox and watch the output go all 1337!

The screenshots below show the main window and a sample output window (with the sensitive data blacked out) showing the results of a scan on one of my servers.

Tagged with: OS X • review • software • NMAP

This is a step-by-step guide to installing Tomcat 5.0.x onto OS X 1.4.x. Note that this is the Tomcat branch for the 1.4 JDK and not for the 1.5 JDK. I know the latest versions of OS X now have Java 5 as part of the OS but my work is not yet ready to migrate to Java 5 so I’m staying with Tomcat 5.0 for now. The chances are that these instructions with only tiny and obvious alterations will work for Tomcat 5.5 with Java 5 but I’m not making any promises. Read more

Tagged with: tutorial • OS X • open source • Java • web server • Apache Tomcat

Something which has annoyed me for quite some time about OS X is how little control you get over SMB sharing (unless you run OS X server). I am generally a fan of Apple’s "keep it simple" approach but in this case they’ve gone too far and made it so simple as to deny ordinary users access to many features the underlying OS has. Well, the problem is now solved by some nice DonationWare utils form HownWare (www.hornware.com).

OS X contains a complete Samba Server and a complete Samba server and client but
unless you have OS X Server you only get very limited GUI access to these features. You can fully share your entire home dir to your username
and password and you can have a fully public folder called "Public" in
your home directory that everyone can see and that’s it. IMO that is
not good enough! If you are not afraid of the command line you can of
course set up your own shares manually, as I have done on some of my
Macs, but that is beyond the realms of the Ordinary user.

This is where HornWare come in with a nice set of utils. The best one IMO is SharePoints which gives you both a standalone app for managing all your SMB shares as well as a pane you can add to the system preferences app (OS X’s version of Windows’ Control Panel). This gives you all the control you could hope for and at first glance seems a nice app. Another very useful app is SharePoints Auto Mounter which allows you to set up finder to automatically connect to remote shares when you log in, ideal in a work situation where you want access to files on departmental shares etc..

Screenshot of SharePoints System Preferences Pane:

Tagged with: OS X • review • software • utility

After much hassle (see here) I finally got SimCity4 installed on my Mac today and I am unbelievably disappointed. The game is so buggy and unstable that I’ve seen pre-alpha releases of software perform better. Both my Macs are dramatically above the minimum spec but the game does not work on either. On my Mac Mini it crashes each time you try to load any city and on my better half’s G5 iMac it just freezes every few minutes and forces you to do a hard reset of the machine. The only way I can describe this game is un-playable. If you’re tempted to buy it, don’t! It is so bad I’ve just emailed to the shop that sold me the game asking for a re-fund because the product they sold me is sub-standard. TBH I am tempted to take them to small-claims if they don’t comply because I genuinely feel defrauded here.

Tagged with: gaming • OS X • review • software

Well, it’s taken them long enough but Google Earth for the Mac is now available all be it in Beta form. Had a bit of a play with it and so far I’m impressed, seems stable and looks bloody shinny with all that Mac graphics goodness at it’s disposal!

Tagged with: OS X • review • software

In general I really like the Dock and prefer it to the Windows Start Menu. It’s great for the apps you use a lot but not so great for getting at apps you don’t use often. Well, with Himmel Bar that problem goes away!

[tags]OS X, Himmel Bar[/tags]

Read more

Tagged with: OS X • review • software • utility

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