Tech

Tech-focused ramblings. Computers, blogs, and whatever else fits.

ToySight

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ToySight Marble Factory

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.

Some slight design tweaks

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I’ve done a little light fiddling with the design here in order to clean up some details that had been bugging me.

I started by adding a light grey background to blockquote elements in order to make them a bit more distinct from my babbling. That ended up making the page feel a bit heavier than I wanted, though, as the lightest grey I could use was the same grey that made up the background color in the lower section of each post’s title bar.

After fiddling with a few different approaches, I finally decided to use a slight gradient rather than a solid grey for the title bar, starting darker on the right and fading to white towards the left. The blockquote elements still felt a bit much, though, so I ended up creating a second, lighter gradient to use for their background as well. I’m not entirely sure I’m satisfied with the end result — while I like each effect individually, I’m not as sure about how they interact with each other on the page. Still, it’ll do for now.

Left and right floating elements (such as pictures and Amazon item links) have been nudged a few pixels outward in order to better align them with the outside borders of the post title bars.

Lastly, I removed the grey background behind the post titles and replaced that with a drop shadow effect behind the title text. The one downside to this approach is that it’s currently only visible in Safari (I believe), as Safari’s currently the only browser (that I know of) that supports that particular CSS attribute. The rest of you just need to upgrade. ;)

Safari 1.1.1 (v100.1)

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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!

0 is also a number

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Does anyone know how to access and rip the hidden tracks on the X-Files Songs in the Key of X soundtrack CD on a Mac?

For those who don’t know, the CD (a collection of music featured in the X-Files television show) contains a liner note that says, “Nick Cave and the Dirty Three would like you to know that ‘0’ is also a number.” When you put the CD in a CD player and, rather than hitting ‘Play’, you hit the ‘Rewind’ button (not the ‘Skip Back’ button), you can rewind to the -9:15 mark and find two hidden tracks by Nick Cave and the Dirty Three. The first is “Time Iesum Transeuntem et non Reverendem” (Dread the Passage of Jesus for He Will Not Return), and the second is a cover of the X-Files theme.

Unfortunately, iTunes doesn’t seem to want to scan backwards past the 0:00 mark! I can’t scan backwards, nor can I put a negative value into the ‘Start Time’ option. I looked at the audio file that the Finder displays, but it only reads as 3:25, so it looks like the Finder isn’t reading the extra information either. I even checked it on my “normal” CD player (as it has an optical audio out that I could plug into my G5), but it’s new enough that it isn’t reading the extra bits either.

Has anyone found a way to pull the hidden information off on a Mac? I’d love to know (or, alternately, if anyone happens to have a 128kbps AAC rip of the two tracks, that’d be nice too…)!

Security: Mac OS X vs. Windows

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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)

Panther bug: Dragging /System to the trash

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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).

Safari bug: Amazon Associates Build-A-Link

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Safari/Amazon bug screenshot

I’ve been noticing a bug in Safari over the past few days, and finally figured it was worth writing up and seeing if this is a “just me” thing or not.

I just recently started using the Amazon Associates Build-A-Link tool to create the product boxes for certain items that I talk about (like the one for Season 7 of Deep Space Nine in this morning’s post). Unfortunately, once I find the item I want to create the product box for, when Amazon sends me the page that is supposed to give me the appropriate HTML code to copy and paste into my entry, the textarea field is blank. In order to get the code, I’ve either been using Internet Explorer (shudder) or just viewing the source code for the Amazon page and digging through until I find the code snippet in question.

The code in question is found about 80% of the way down the source code. Here’s the relevant section of what Amazon sends, with what I should be seeing in that blank box on line six:

<tr>
  <td>
    <form name="snippet_form">
      <center>
        <textarea name="snippet" rows="7" cols="35">
          <iframe marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" width="120" height="240" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?o=1&l=as1&f=ifr&t=djwudicom-20&p=8&asins=B00008KA57&IS2=1&lt1=_blank"><MAP NAME="boxmap-p8"><AREA SHAPE="RECT" COORDS="14, 200, 103, 207" HREF="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm/privacy-policy.html?o=1" ><AREA COORDS="0,0,10000,10000" HREF="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect-home/djwudicom-20" ></MAP><img src="http://rcm-images.amazon.com/images/G/01/rcm/120x240.gif" width="120" height="240" border="0" usemap="#boxmap-p8" alt="Shop at Amazon.com"></iframe>
       </textarea>
        <br />
        <input type="image" style="margin: 3px;" src=http://g-images.amazon.com/images/G/01/associates/build-links/highlight_html.gif name="highlight" onClick="javascript:this.form.snippet.focus();this.form.snippet.select(); return false;"/>
        <p style="margin: 5px;"><font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="-2">Paste all the HTML into your Web site's HTML.<br /> Note: your tracking ID, <strong>djwudicom-20</strong>, is already embedded in the HTML.</font></p>
      </center>
    </form>
  </td>
</tr>

My immediate guess is that because the code ends up looking as if it’s requesting an iframe inside a textarea, Safari is just discarding what it sees as “bad code”. Unfortunately, as placing code inside a textarea is a fairly common way to avoid issues with long text strings that muck up a page’s layout (such as, well, this very post), that behavior effectively breaks the Amazon tool.

I’ve submitted a bug through Safari’s bug reporting feature, but I figured sending a TrackBack ping to Dave of Surfin’ Safari couldn’t hurt, either. ;)

Stradivarius' secret

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While I’ve never had the opportunity to hear one in person, nearly anyone involved in the world of music is aware of the near-legendary quality of the instruments created by Italian violin maker Antonio Stradivari. It appears that scientists may have narrowed down one intriguing factor in what makes a Stradivarius sound the way it does — it’s all in the wood.

…a tree-ring dating expert at the University of Tennessee and a climatologist at Columbia University offer a new theory — the wood developed special acoustic properties as it was growing because of an extended period of long winters and cool summers.

[…]

Grissino-Mayer at Tennessee and Dr. Lloyd Burckle at Columbia suggest a “Little Ice Age” that gripped Europe from the mid-1400s until the mid-1800s slowed tree growth and yielded uncommonly dense Alpine spruce for Antonio Stradivari and other famous 17th century Italian violinmakers.

[…]

“I think it is very, very interesting, and it seems to me a valid observation,” said Helen Hayes, president of the New York-based Violin Society of America, which hired Grissino-Mayer to examine “The Messiah.”

“But on the other hand, nobody in this field … would ever say that if you put the best wood in the world in the hands of a mediocre maker that you would get a good instrument,” she said. “So it is never a complete explanation. Nor is the varnish nor any of the other things they have talked about. I would dare say there is no one piece of the puzzle.”

(via Marginal Revolution)

Get a cheap PC from AOL

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Okay — I’m no great fan of either AOL or Windows-based PCs, but I have to admit that if you’re looking for a cheap computer and are willing to settle for Windows XP Home and use AOL for your ‘net connection, this isn’t a bad deal (though not quite as good as they lead you to believe on first blush).

For \$299 plus a one-year AOL subscription at \$23.90/month (for a total cost of \$585.80), you get:

  • Desktop mini-tower PC with:
    • 1.7Ghz Intel Celeron Processor
    • 256Mb DDR RAM
    • 56k modem
    • 40Gb hard drive
    • 52x CD-ROM
    • 10/100Mb Ethernet
    • Windows XP Home
  • 17\” CRT monitor
  • Lexmark Z605 Printer

Now, admittedly, if you are willing to settle for Windows XP and AOL, you have my pity. But I do realize that in the real world, sometimes low cost and immediate availability can take precedence over actual ease of use, lack of viruses, stable operating systems, and general peace of mind, so I figured I’d pass this along. ;)

(via Things that…)