Apple

I’ve been a Mac user since 1991, so it’s inevitable that I’d have this as a category.

Daring Fireball on Dashboard and Konfabulator

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I haven’t poked my head into the Dashboard versus Konfabulator brouhaha for two reasons: firstly, I’m not a user of Konfabulator (looked at it, decided that it used far too much screen real estate for too little functionality, and that was that); and secondly, the whole thing seemed patently ridiculous to me.

However, John Gruber — who is far more qualified than I am to expound upon such things in any case — has done a masterful job of explaining why this is really a non-issue.

A sliding puzzle. A calculator. A clock. A little notepad. Tiny little applets — little pieces of software that are something less than full applications themselves, but which run alongside real apps and are easily accessed at any time.

Obviously, Apple ripped off the idea for Dashboard. Stolen wholesale, without even the decency to mention where they took the original idea.

Which, of course, would be the desk accessories from the original 1984 Macintosh — conceived by Bud Tribble and engineered (mostly) by Andy Hertzfeld.

[…]

The post-WWDC peanut gallery is atwitter with the idea that Tiger’s Dashboard is a blatant rip-off of Konfabulator. You can’t read anything about Dashboard without hearing that it’s a Konfabulator rip-off.

Bullshit. Dashboard is not a rip-off of Konfabulator. Yes, they are doing very much the same thing. But what it is that they’re doing was not an original idea to Konfabulator. The scope of a “widget” is very much the modern-day equivalent of a desk accessory.

The Mac community needs two things: more commentators like Gruber, and more people who listen to commentators like Gruber.

iTunes: “Goddess” by Soho from the album Goddess (1990, 5:13).

Apple’s getting into weblogging

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Very interesting tidbit of information about the server version of OS X 10.4/Tiger in Apple’s preview pages: they’re including a ‘weblog server’ based on the blojsom project, which in itself is based on the blosxom weblogging software.

A new Weblog server in Tiger Server makes it easy to publish, distribute and syndicate web-based content. The Weblog server provides users with calendar-based navigation and customizable themes, is fully compatible with Safari RSS and enables posting entries using built-in web-based functionality or with weblog clients that support XML-RPC or the ATOM API. The Weblog Server, based on the popular open source project “Blojsom,” works with Open Directory for user accounts and authentication.

iTunes: “Gorgeous (Suspiria)” by Gene Loves Jezebel from the album World’s Greatest Club Collection, The (1998, 4:36).

Apple Tiger banners at WWDC

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I love it when Apple gets snippy…

Redmond, start your photocopiers.

Other banners sport the slogans “Introducing Longhorn,” “This should keep Redmond busy,” and “Redmond, we have a problem.”

(via MacMinute)

iTunes: “You Suck” by Consolidated feat. Yeastie Girls, The from the album Nettwerk Decadence (1992, 4:13).

Apple announcements at WWDC 2004

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Somehow in all of the weekend’s festivities, I’d managed to completely space that this week was the 2004 WWDC (and I call myself a Mac geek?), so coming home to start finding reports of new toys from Apple was a very pleasant surprise.

First off: their line of monitors has been updated, in a big way. And I do mean big — as in a 30\” widescreen LCD monitor. I so want one of those…and I so can’t afford it.

Secondly: a preview of Mac OS X 10.4, AKA Tiger. Wow — lots of yummylicious geek-flavored goodies in there. Most interesting to me are the metadata-centric search capabilities and Safari’s built-in RSS aggregator (which looks quite impressive). I’d be more excited about iChat’s conferencing capabilities, but I’ve got so few people on my iChat list with iSights that I have no clue if I’d ever have a chance to use it.

Really looking forward to getting my hands on some new toys to play with once they’re released!

iTunes: “Hawkmoon 269” by U2 from the album Rattle and Hum (1988, 6:22).

No longer the top of the heap

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Well, it lasted longer than I thought it would, given how fast technology advances, but my dual 2.0 GHz Power Mac G5 is no longer the top-of-the-line machine from Apple.

Apple today introduced updates to their Power Mac G5 line, now featuring a full range of dual processor systems at 1.8 GHz, 2.0 GHz, or 2.5 GHz — and ~~all~~ [the 2.5 Ghz model]{.underline} features a new liquid cooling system to keep heat and fan noise down. Nice!

(via MacMinute and /.)

iTunes: “Hazy Daze” by Wax Police, The from the album Acid: Breaks and Beats (1998, 2:24).

iTunes supports AC3 and DTS?

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I was just reading this Macworld article on how AirTunes works (the new audio streaming technology built into Airport Express), when I noticed this paragraph…

If iTunes is playing back a digital multichannel file format like AC3 (Dolby Digital) or DTS, those bitstreams are wrapped in Apple’s compression and encryption, and then decoded at the other end. In those cases, AirPort Express would end up streaming the raw AC3 or DTS stream via an optical cable to your home theater receiver for decoding.

blink

iTunes can play and output AC3 and DTS? How does that work — and from what source? Are there standalone AC3/DTS audio tracks out there somewhere? I’ve generally only seen them used on DVDs, though I know that there are some audio CDs made that use DTS, and probably some that use AC3. If I had such a CD, how would I put an AC3/DTS audio track into iTunes?

I don’t have a use for this information right now, I’m just really curious. It’s news to me.

iTunes: “Sweet Surrender (Roni Size v2)” by McLachlan, Sarah from the album Plastic Compilation Vol. II (1998, 4:00).

Airport Express feat. AirTunes

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This looks very cool: Airport Express featuring AirTunes, a small wireless basestation that will connect to a stereo to allow music streaming, for only \$129.

Unfortunately, I’m 5 minutes away from the start of my shift, so I can’t explore in detail yet. Grrrrr!

(Okay, I’ve skimmed through a bit more. I want. Of course, I’d need an airport card for my G5 too…but I want. Geeklust yay!)

Descent 2 for Mac OS X: FREE!

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This rocks.

I’m not much of a gamer. Never have been, likely never will be. Most computer games bore me, requiring far too much time and mental effort to bother with (any strategy based game — StarCraft, WarCraft, WoodCraft), or just being so pointless I can’t envision devoting time to them (EverCrack). Generally, if I get into a game, it’s for a few minutes at a time, and either brainless but fun point-and-shoot (Doom) or brainless drive-around-in-circles racing games (Star Wars Pod Racer, Wipeout for Playstation).

One of the few games that ever really got my attention was Descent. At the time it came out, it was a groundbreaking game — taking the then-typical pesudo-3D first-person-shooter approach of Castle Wolfenstein, Doom, and so on, and putting it into a true three dimensional world.

Where previous “3D” games were actually two-dimensional (your only real choices of movement were on a plane — forward, backwards, left, and right turns, etc.), Descent put you in control of a small spacecraft flying through tunnels within planets and asteroids, adding the final third dimension, allowing you to pilot your craft through all three axis of movement. You could dive, barrel roll, loop-de-loop, swoop down on targets, anything.

We had some great multi-player Descent games at The Pit (my old apartment in Anchorage), and for once, I had the advantage. While I would occasionally play games, I wasn’t enough of a gamer to have very many old habits built in, so when I started playing with the controls of Descent, it didn’t take me long to get the hang of moving through a fully three-dimensional world. My roommate Jason wasn’t able to adjust as quickly, due to the ingrained habit of only thinking along two axis of movement. Many was the time when he’d end up behind me, blasting away, when suddenly I’d go round a bend in the tunnel just out of his sight, fly into a large open room, and immediately shoot straight up to hover just above the entrance. Jason would come screaming into the cavern and start trying to find me — panning left and right. Meanwhile, I’d be targeting him from above, suddenly unleashing a blistering stream of laser fire onto the top of his ship, and sending him off into blissful digital oblivion.

Of course, Jason being the jobless obsessive-compulsive that he was, he soon spent far too many hours doing nothing but play Descent, so it was only a matter of a week or two before he was flying circles around everyone else in the apartment. Still, my little reign of terror was fun while it lasted.

What got all this started running through my brain, though, was Phil tipping me off to some wonderful news — Descent 2 has been ported to run on Mac OS X, and is freely downloadable!

Schweeeeet.

It’s downloaded, just waiting for me to install it. I think I better wait ’till the weekend to do that, though, otherwise I’m likely to get nothing done from here on out.

Mac OS X vulnerability

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News broke across the ‘net over the past day or so that there is a verifiable, serious security threat under Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther) involving Safari (or any other web browser) and the Help viewer application.

What’s going on is that Mac OS X maps different “helper applications” to handle different protocols as you surf around the internet. A ‘net address that begins with http:// is handled by Safari (or your default web browser), an address that begins with ftp:// is handled by the Finder’s built-in FTP, and so on.

By default, the help:// protocol is handed off to Apple’s Help application, which (no big surprise here) is a viewer for documentation for OS X applications. Some documentation is stored locally on your hard drive, but Apple wanted to make it easy for updates to the documentation to be added, so Help also has the ability to fetch documents over the ‘net — essentially, it’s a stripped-down web browser. And that’s where the vulnerability kicks in.

While Safari has built-in controls to prevent malicious attacks, the Help viewer does not. It is able to run scripts that are fed to it, and can do so with the full user permissions of whichever user is logged in to the machine at the moment.

In this rather disturbing example of the exploit, the web page makes a help:// call, which launches the Help application. Help is then directed to an Applescript which is fed the terminal command ‘du‘ (disk usage, I believe), which presents a scrolling list of all the files on your hard drive inside a terminal window. Now, this is just an example, so it’s harmless — but if the Applescript or the terminal command had been more malicious in nature, some serious damage could have been done.

Luckily, the fix for this is quite simple:

  1. In Safari, go to Safari > Preferences…. In the “General” settings pane, uncheck “Open ‘safe’ files after downloading.”
  2. Download and install the ~~More Internet Preference Pane~~ [RCDefaultApp preference pane]{.underline}.
  3. Open your System Preferences (Apple Menu > System Preferences…) and go to the ~~More Internet~~ RCDefaultApp{.underline} preference pane (it should be at the very bottom of the System Preferences window).
  4. Scroll down the protocol list and click on the ‘help’ protocol, then ~~change that to an application other than Safari or Help — many people are recommending changing it to the Chess game application, as it’s harmless and will provide a distinct visual clue that something has happened~~ [set it to ‘\<disabled>’. Do the same for the ‘disk’ and ‘disks’ protcols]{.underline}.
  5. There is no step 5. You’re done!

(via lots and lots of people)

Update: John Gruber recommends another application for the same approach, as MoreInternet doesn’t show the disk:// and disks:// protocols that can also be used for this attack.

iTunes: “Coda” by Webley, Jason from the album Only Just Beginning (2004, 10:10).

Mac OS X Word 2004 Demo Trojan

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For the second time in just over a month, panicky news stories are alerting us about a trojan horse attack against Mac OS X. Last time the exploit was disguised as an .mp3 file, this month it’s disguised as a Microsoft Word beta installer.

And for the second time in just over a month, it’s a lot of panic over very little.

The details are simply this: one person downloaded what purported to be an installer for a public beta of Microsoft Word from the Gnutella peer-to-peer filesharing service. This “installer” — actually an AppleScript application weighing in at a hefty 108k — actually deleted the contents of their home directory when ran.

In other words, someone got stupid, got bit by a stupid (and extremely simple), if nasty, practical-joke style hack.

They then ran to MacWorld UK, who contacted Intego (the anti-virus company whose press release fanned the flames of the previous trojan scare) and Microsoft, and MacWorld UK proceeded to write two shining examples of FUD that have since started to run rampant over the ‘net.

It’s very simple, people. Don’t blindly trust every little file you run across on the ‘net, and use a little common sense.

The two best comments I’ve seen on this so far —

From Codepoet:

See, for there to be real security on a computer, a use cannot be stupid. The computer can only do half the work needed t make itself secure; the user must do the other half. The reason fo this is that a computer exists to do things we tell it to do, and if w tell it to, oh, I don’t know, run a Trojan Horse then it will run the Trojan horse. There’s nothing in the system that will say “Hey! This is a Trojan horse!” nor can there be. It’s a program, you told it to run it, and that’s that.

And from Will Parker:

I just don’t know too many people who, when they find an open soft drink bottle full of foamy yellow liquid at a bus stop, drink it to find out if there’s a new Sprite Remix flavor.

iTunes: “I Don’t Want Nobody to Give Me Nothing (Open Up the Door, I’ll Get It Myself)” by Brown, James from the album 40th Anniversary Collection (1969, 3:06).