Apple

ToySight is hands down one of the coolest games for the Mac that I’ve seen yet. It’s a collection of several small mini-games and “toys” that you play by using your iSight camera as the controller!

Toysight is set of cool games and toys to play using your iSight™ or similar firewire camera. Using a system of object and motion detection to track your position, Toysight allows you to control buttons, sliders and perform gestures on the screen, putting you right in the action!

It’s a little hard to describe without seeing it, but if you’ve got an iSight (or other FireWire video camera) you’ve got to download this and check it out.

I just noticed that Safari got updated along with today’s release of the 10.3.2 upgrade for Panther. While I’m assuming that all of the recent changes mentioned recently on Surfin’ Safari, the single most exciting improvement for me (from a UI perspective) is that we finally have tooltip support for title elements!

![Safari gets tooltips!]

[Safari gets tooltips!]: https://michaelhans.com/eclecticism/2003/12/graphics/tooltips.jpg {width=”487″ height=”94″}

Update: Well, it looks like my assumption may have been wrong — after playing with some quick CSS code, we may not have gotten all of the WebCore updates (in fact, it may be that WebCore hasn’t been updated at all, and it was just the Safari UI that got the tweak). Still, much as I’d like to have the new CSS goodies, tooltips are still a good thing!

Last week, a minor firestorm erupted when PC Magazine columnist Lance Ulanoff wrote a ridiculously inflammatory article gleefully declaring that, “the Mac OS is just as vulnerable as Microsoft Windows.”

I know this is wrong, but in one respect I was happy to learn earlier this month about the discovery of a significant security hole in the Jaguar and Panther versions (10.2 and 10.3, respectively) of the Apple operating system (OS).

Richard Forno, former Chief Security Officer for Network Solutions, has responded with a comparison of Mac OS X and Windows security — and Windows doesn’t exactly come out ahead.

In a December 11 column that epitomizes the concept of yellow journalism, he’s “happy” that Mac OS X is vulnerable to a new and quite significant security vulnerability. The article was based on a security advisory by researcher Bill Carrel regarding a DHCP vulnerability in Mac OS X. Carrel reported the vulnerability to Apple in mid-October and, through responsible disclosure practices, waited for a prolonged period before releasing the exploit information publicly since Apple was slow in responding to Carrel’s report (a common problem with all big software vendors.)  Accordingly, Lance took this as a green light to launch into a snide tirade about how  “Mac OS is just as vulnerable as Microsoft Windows” while penning paragraph after paragraph saying “I told you so” and calling anyone who disagrees with him a “Mac zealot.”

You’re either with him or with the “zealots.”  Where have we heard this narrow-minded extremist view before?  

More to the point, his article is replete with factual errors. Had he done his homework instead of rushing to smear the Mac security community and fuel his Windows-based envy, he’d have known that not only did Apple tell Carrel on November 19 that a technical fix for the problem would be released in its December Mac OS X update, but that Apple released easy-to-read guidance (complete with screenshots) for users to mitigate this problem on November 26.  Somehow he missed that.

Since he’s obviously neither a technologist (despite writing for a technology magazine) nor a security expert, let’s examine a few differences between Mac and Windows to see why Macintosh systems are, despite his crowing, whining, and wishing, inherently more secure than Windows systems.

(via Damien)

It looks like Damien Barrett may have discovered a potentially disastrous bug in Panther (Mac OS X 10.3) — apparently one can drag the /System folder to the trash, which then freezes the computer. Upon reboot, since the System is now in the trash, the computer can’t boot up.

Panther apparently allows admin users to drag the folder /System to the trash, which then will immediately cause the Finder to go into a spinning pizza of death (SPOD). Your only option is to shut down the computer. And then because the System is in the trash, the computer is rendered unbootable!!!

I don’t remember being able to do this in Jaguar. Shouldn’t the OS give a warning like “You don’t have sufficient priveleges to do this.” Shouldn’t the only user capable of moving the folder System be the root user?

Now, many people are going to immediately react by wondering just what in the world would prompt anyone to even try dragging the System directory to the Trash. As stupid as that seems, one never knows what people will try, or do by accident, and the OS really should be far more intelligent about how it handles this (such as not even allowing it in the first place).

I’m having some odd issues with my G5 that I’m having trouble pinning down. I’ve just tossed a plea for help out in an Apple Discussions thread, but I wanted to put it up here also in case anyone else out there has seen similar behavior.

I’ve been having an odd issue (actually, two, but they may be related) with my G5 (Dual 2.0Ghz) that I haven’t seen anyone else mention, so I thought I’d toss it out here. Unfortunately, I’m having trouble narrowing down exactly what’s going on, so this may be a tad vague.

Issue 1: My G5 appears to be an insomniac. If I leave the computer alone, it never seems to go to sleep. The screensaver will kick in, but after a while at some (apparently) random time, the screensaver kicks off as if I’d just bumped the mouse. Because of this, the machine will only go into Sleep mode if I tell it to via the Apple menu.

Issue 2 (this is the one I’m having more problems diagnosing): At some point, I lose the ability to choose some of the commands in the Apple menu: ‘About This Mac’, ‘Force Quit…’, ‘Restart…’, ‘Shut Down…’, and ‘Log Out [username]…’ are all non-responsive. All other commands in the Apple Menu work fine. Most of the time this isn’t a major issue, but when a time comes when I do need to restart the computer (for instance, after installing a Software Update), the only way I can do it is to execute a ‘sudo shutdown -r now’ through the Terminal.

I’ve tried choosing ‘Log Out…’ occasionally after a restart to pin down when the menu commands stop responding, but am having difficulties determining just what the cause is. So far, it hasn’t seemed to be related to any particular application or sequence of events.

I have noticed that it appears to happen sometime after letting the computer go through its bout of insomnia for a while. In other words, if after restarting the machine I manually tell it to Sleep, then when I wake the computer up again, I can still access all Apple Menu commands without a problem. However, if I leave the computer alone and it fails to sleep automatically as it should, at some point after that I lose the Apple Menu functionality.

Unfortunately, at this point, I can’t get any more specific than that.

Has anyone else out there seen behavior like this, or am I alone with this particular glitch?