Apple

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

Hot Tunes

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Goofy idea that I don’t have the programming chops to create:

A plugin for iTunes (originally I was thinking of a separate program, but I think that this could probably all be done through Applescript) that, when activated, polls the weather services on the ‘net for the current temperature and then randomly selects a song from the year that matches the current temperature. A sunny summer day of 85° would produce synthpop from 1985, a cool fall afternoon of 63° would play the rock and roll of 1963.

Options that should be included:

  • Some form of fahrenheit/celsius recognition.
    • Switch between the two systems (85°F/1985 is 29°C/1929).
    • Converting between the two (85°F plays 1929, 29°C plays 1985).
  • Choosing songs from the decade, rather than the year (85° plays songs from 1980-1989, 72° plays from ’70-’79).
  • Applying some alteration (plus or minus X, other transformations) to affect the temperature to year conversion (otherwise, most places would get a lot of songs from the 70’s through the summertime, and many people don’t have a huge collection of 20’s and 30’s tunes to listen to during the winter months).

It’s the kind of silly little one-trick pony that could only be released as freeware, and likely wouldn’t get a ton of usage. It amused me when the idea crossed my mind, however.

(Incidentally, the song I’m listening to at the moment — which will be noted at the bottom of this post — was released in 1979, because according to my ‘puter, it’s 79°F outside. At 11:20pm. Ick. Yes, I’m whining. Yes, Colorado, Arizona, and many other places are hotter than it is here in Seattle. I’m still whining. Candles shouldn’t melt when they’re not lit.)

iTunes “I Hope That Somethin’ Better Comes Along” by Kermit the Frog/Rolf the Dog from the album Muppet Movie, The (1979, 3:58).

State of the Computer

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Well, the computer lives — though we’re definitely dealing with a near-total case of amnesia.

On the bright side, a new hard drive has been purchased and installed (and I love how easy it is to install a hard drive into a PowerMac G5 [.pdf link]), the OS is installed, and I’m going through the (slow, laborious) process of downloading and reinstalling all the various programs I use on a day-to-day-basis. Also, as I’ve been using Gmail as my primary e-mail address for some time now, most of my recent e-mail still exists (on Google’s servers), which is allowing me to rebuild my address book and contact lists.

So, there’s progress.

The downside, of course, is that so far I’ve been unable to coax the dead drive into doing much of anything. I haven’t given up completely, though. Using some instructions from Apple I used fsck on the problem drive and got the following:

Quicksilver:/ djwudi$ sudo fsck_hfs -l /dev/disk1s9
Password:
** /dev/rdisk1s9 (NO WRITE)
** Checking HFS Plus volume.
   Invalid B-tree node size
(4, 0)
** The volume   needs to be repaired.

A quick Google for ‘mac os x invalid b-tree node size‘ led me to this Macworld Forums discussion which indicates that either DiskWarrior or TechTool Pro should be able to at least recover my data, if not actually repair and resurrect the drive. So I think that acquiring one of those will be my next step, though that will have to wait for a week or three until I’ve got a paycheck not already claimed for little things like rent, bills, and food. With luck, though, those will allow me to pull the old data off once I get to that point.

And if that doesn’t work, then I can always try the freezing trick that’s been mentioned by Nitallica and Josh. Seems a little bizarre, but hey, if it might help….

In the meantime, rebuilding goes slowly, but I’m making progress. I also picked up an external enclosure for an old 80Gb drive I had been meaning to liberate from my old Blue and White G3, slapped the pieces together, and now have an external drive that I’ll be using as a backup repository using SuperDuper!, which I found though a rundown of OS X backup software pointed out to me by Marcus. Once that’s up and running, than even if this happens again somewhere down the line, I won’t have lost the data.

I know: backup, backup, backup! You always think it won’t happen to you…and then it does. Ah, well. So it goes.

Thanks to everyone for the support and suggestions!

FBiPod?

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Who knew the government was this in tune with today’s marketplace?

The government funded research in microdrive storage, electrochemistry and signal compression. They did so for one reason: It turned out that those were the key ingredients for the development of the iPod.

— Pres. George W. Bush, during a speech at Tuskegee University

(via The Cult of Mac and Engadget)

Googling a Dead Horse

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There’s a certain irony in Google‘s new Google Calendar supporting the iCal standard for calendar sharing and distribution (named, unsurprisingly, for Apple’s iCal calendar application) when — as usual — they don’t yet support the standard Mac web browser.

Google Calendar in Safari

Sigh.

I don’t know why I even bother checking, really — this has been the pattern every time Google’s unveiled something new and shiny.

iTunes “James Brown Is Dead (Take Outs)” by L.A. Style from the album James Brown Is Dead (1991, 0:55).

Boot Camp

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As part of an effort to streamline things while I’m in school, I’ve been working here and there on paring down the number of newsfeeds I subscribe to. One of the steps I took a couple weeks ago was removing the majority of my mac-specific site feeds (Macintouch, MacFixit, and various others), figuring that if any big news broke, chances are good that I’d hear about it from plenty of other places.

Boy was I right on that assumption. I can’t count the number of different places I’ve seen mention Boot Camp, and I’m only up to around noon yesterday in my newsreading. Crazy.

Boot Camp, on the off chance it hasn’t crossed your radar yet (not likely, but possible), is Apple’s just-released official methodology for setting your new Intel-based Mac up as a dual-boot Mac OS X/Windows XP system.

You’ve got to love the language they chose to use in their promo materials (emphasis mine)…

Developers can learn all about the sixth major release of Mac OS X this century at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference, to be held August 7-11 in San Francisco.

Macs use an ultra-modern industry standard technology called EFI to handle booting. Sadly, Windows XP, and even the upcoming Vista, are stuck in the 1980s with old-fashioned BIOS. But with Boot Camp, the Mac can operate smoothly in both centuries.

Windows running on a Mac is like Windows running on a PC. That means it’ll be subject to the same attacks that plague the Windows world. So be sure to keep it updated with the latest Microsoft Windows security fixes.

Heh. No, no snark there. None at all.

Of course, since this is an option only available for Intel-based Macs, it’s something I’m not able to take advantage off — my first generation dual 2.0Ghz G5 PowerMac just won’t cut it. Not that (still) being unable to run Windows natively on my Mac is really a crushing blow to me…as long as I can run my math class software under Virtual PC, I’m good to go.

In the meantime, PC world has a ‘first look’ at running Windows natively on Mactel hardware.

It works. Impressively well. With games, even. That’s our first impression of Windows XP running under Apple’s Boot Camp on our 20-inch iMac.

[…] Back in Windows, I got right down to business and installed a few games to put the graphics and sound support to the test. The quick and dirty verdict on performance? Most impressive. Doom 3 and Far Cry both ran smoothly with high-end graphics options turned on.

In both cases, I had to tweak visual settings manually, since the games automatically set themselves to very low settings. Far Cry, for example, autodetected very low settings, but it ran without a hitch when I bumped the resolution up to 1280 by 720, with all visual quality options set to “High.”

Our 20-inch iMac came with a 2.0-GHz Core Duo processor, 1GB of RAM, and an ATI Radeon X1600 graphics card with 128MB of GDDR3 memory. That’s roughly equivalent to a high-end laptop machine, and anecdotally the performance I obtained was about what I’d have expected from that type of PC.

iTunes “Roadblock, The” by Ridgway, Stan from the album Earphoria (1991, 4:40).

Calico (AutoStitch for Mac OS X)

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Panoramic photography is something I’ve been playing with for years — long enough that Prairie was amused to see that I was taking multi-shot panoramics back when I visited Europe during my high school years, long before I had any way to assemble them together with anything more sophisticated than scissors and tape.

Unfortunately, the state of panoramic software on the Mac has been less than I’d like for quite some time now. Apple’s excellent Quicktime VR Authoring Studio is long out of date, without any sign of it being updated for OS X (in fact, searching for it on Apple’s site only returns references to it, with no official product page listed). Canon’s Photostitch is used fairly frequently, but I’ve never been that thrilled with it. Functional, but it doesn’t really “feel” like a true OS X application, and it doesn’t allow for much tweaking or fine-tuning. Other Mac OS X panoramic tools are either commercial and expensive, or command-line ports that I’ve never taken the time to investigate fully (such as Panorama Tools). For a time when I had a working PC I used The Panorama Factory and was quite happy with its range of options, but since my PC finally gave up the ghost, TPF’s performance under Virtual PC wasn’t good enough for me to continue using it.

For the past year or so, though, I’ve been keeping an eye out on AutoStitch. It looked to be the “holy grail” of panoramic creation software: originally created as a research project at the University of British Columbia, it produces truly automatic panoramic photos, stitched from multiple photos that don’t even have to be aligned or all taken with the same exposure (a 57-shot example is shown on the AutoStitch page). The problem, of course, was that AutoStitch is PC-only. Still, I kept seeing incredible panoramas that AutoStitch had produced, so I’d occasionally check in to see if a Mac OS X port had popped up yet.

This morning, my persistence paid off. I’m not sure when it first appeared, but Kekus Digital has produced a pseudo-port of AutoStitch for Mac OS X (licensing the AutoStitch technology in a Mac OS X package) called Calico.

Read more

Mac OS X turns Five

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Isn’t that about time to start kindergarten?

John Siracusa has a nice look at five years of OS X on Ars Technica today.

A side-by-side test-drive of Mac OS X 10.0 and 10.4 is shocking. The eternal debate is whether this gap exists because 10.4 is so good, or because 10.0 was so, so bad. That said, Apple’s ability to plan and execute its OS strategy is not open for debate. In five short years, Apple has essentially created an entirely new platform. Oh, I know, it’s really just the foundation of NeXT combined with the wreckage of classic Mac OS, but I think that makes it even more impressive. Two failing, marginalized platforms have combined to become the platform for the alpha geeks in the new century.

Today’s Mac users span a much wider range than those of the past. Mac OS X’s Unix-like core reached out to the beard-and-suspenders crowd (and the newer source-code-and-a-dream crowd) while the luscious Aqua user interface pulled all the touchy-feely aesthetes from the other direction. In the middle were the refugees from the Mac-That-Was, but they aren’t the story here. Mac OS X is about new blood and new ideas—some good, some bad, but all vibrant. The Mac is alive again!

After spending half my life watching smart, talented people ignore the Mac for reasons of circumstance or prejudice, it’s incredibly gratifying to live in a post-Mac OS X world. When I encounter a tech-world luminary or up-and-coming geek today, I just assume that he or she uses a Mac. Most of the time, I’m right. Even those with a conflicting affiliation (e.g., Linux enthusiasts) often use Apple laptops, if not the OS.

iTunes “Related Vortex” by X-Dream from the album Spirit Zone Vol. 2 (1996, 8:48).

BSG on the iTMS followup

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Just a quick followup to my post comparing Battlestar Galactica downloads via Bittorrent and via the iTMS: according to MacRumors, recent BSG episodes are appearing in an uncropped widescreen ratio.

Of course, the resolution is still aimed solely at iPods, but I’m running out of ways to rationalize snagging the free-but-technically-illegal Bittorrent downloads rather than the cheap-and-legal iTMS downloads. This is a good thing (except for my bank account)!

iTunes “Music Reach (1/2/3/4)” by Prodigy, The from the album Prodigy Experience, The (1992, 4:12).

First Confirmed OS X Malware

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Word has recently broken about the first confirmed piece of malware for OS X, a file that was originally distributed via a post to Mac Rumors, and has been disassembled by Ambrosia Software‘s Andrew Welch.

Key points: this is not a virus, rather, it’s a trojan horse; it’s buggy (doesn’t perform all the intended actions); and for most people, activating the payload involves entering their password, which should tip most people off that something’s not right.

Here’s Andrew’s summary of the situation:

A file called “latestpics.tgz” was posted on a Mac rumors web site http://www.macrumors.com/, claiming to be pictures of “MacOS X Leopard” (an upcoming version of MacOS X, aka “MacOS X 10.5”). It is actually a Trojan (or arguably, a very non-virulent virus). We’ll call it “Oompa-Loompa” (aka “OSX/Oomp-A“) for reasons that will become obvious.

Unless you work for an anti-virus company, please don’t email/message me asking for a copy of this trojan. It’s not going to happen.

You cannot be infected by this unless you do all of the following:

  1. Are somehow sent (via email, iChat, etc.) or download the “latestpics.tgz” file

  2. Double-click on the file to decompress it

  3. Double-click on the resulting file to “open” it

…and then for most users, you must also enter your Admin password.

You cannot simply “catch” the virus. Even if someone does send you the “latestpics.tgz” file, you cannot be infected unless you unarchive the file, and then open it.

A few important points:

  • This should probably be classified as a Trojan, not a virus, because it doesn’t self-propagate externally (though it could arguably be called a very non-virulent virus)

  • It does not exploit any security holes; rather it uses “social engineering” to get the user to launch it on their system

  • It requires the admin password if you’re not running as an admin user

  • It doesn’t actually do anything other than attempt to propagate itself via iChat

  • It has a bug in the code that prevents it from working as intended, which has the side-effect of preventing infected applications from launching

  • It’s not particularly sophisticated

To be on the safe side…

DO NOT DOWNLOAD OR RUN THIS FILE

When unarchived (it is a gzip-compressed tar file), which can be done by simply double-clicking on the file, it appears to be a JPEG file because someone pasted the image of a JPEG file onto the file.

After it’s been unzipped, tar will tell you there are two files in the archive:

._latestpics
latestpics

…the ._latestpics is just the resource fork of the file, which contains the pasted in custom icon meant to fool people into double-clicking on it to (in theory) open the JPEG file for viewing. In actuality, double-clicking on it will launch an executable file.

The file “latestpics” is actually a PowerPC-compiled executable program, with routines such as:

_infect:
_infectApps:
_installHooks:
_copySelf:

The rest of Andrew’s post goes on to detail the exact methods used by the attack.

Again: this is not going to be a concern for most people. Not only is this a relatively low-impact attack, but it’s been identified quickly. Admittedly, it’s a shame that neither Slashdot nor The Register are mentioning this fact, preferring to use the Chicken Little approach to news reporting (at least The Register correctly identifies it as a trojan).

However, even given that this is a fairly low risk trojan, it is the first confirmed OS X trojan. Too many people have fallen into the trap of believing that OS X is immune to viruses or trojans. It’s not — there just haven’t been any until now, and due to the architecture of OS X, any attack is limited in the amount of damage it can do. But as OSX/Oomp-A (or Lamp-A, as Sophos named it) shows, we’re certainly not immune.

iTunes “Been Up Long (Falsedawn)” by Prodigy, The from the album Always Outsiders Never Outdone (2004, 4:28).

iTunes Essentials: Goth

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The iTunes Music Store‘s Essentials series has weighed in on the ‘essentials’ of goth.

It’s an interesting collection of tracks. Not a bad selection, either — I’m mostly just impressed that they have this many non-pop artists available now.

(If the above link to the Goth Essentials doesn’t work, try this one. Pity that while I can come up with iTMS Affiliate links for the iTMS and the Essentials program as a whole, I’m finding out if there is a way for me to link to the Goth Essentials set through the iTMS Affiliate program. Meh. Not that complaining about their affiliate program is a new thing for me.)