Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
Things that catch my geeky interests that don’t fall into a more specific tag.
Hot damn — someone figured out [how to hack :hover support into Internet Explorer]! If I get some time this weekend, I’ll muck around with it until I can get it working on my site — one more step towards a consistent, cross-platform, standards compliant design.
(via Eric Meyer)
This week is the Macworld expo in San Francisco, and Jim has a good roundup of the current rumors posted. As Lane pointed out, I’ll certainly be keeping up with the news during tomorrow’s keynote, hopefully by watching the webcast in the morning before work. Expect lots of Macgeekery here tomorrow!
Has anyone else seen this particular NetNewsWire bug? Every so often when working my way through my feeds, I get a weird display glitch where a section of one post will be repeated over and over in the viewport, with each repetition getting slightly more blurred. A quick click in the display port clears up the display, but eventually this will pop up again. So far, I haven’t been able to pin down any one thing that triggers the glitch — sometimes it won’t happen for a while, other times it happens just about every time I use the space bar to move to the next article. Very odd.
This is under NetNewsWire 1.0.7 (it happened with 1.0.6 too), using the “combined” view and the spacebar to move among unread posts, on a stock dual 2.0Ghz G5.
It appears that I’m not the only one seeing this…I’ve added my own bug report too.
eWeek’s Steve Gilmore just posted his round up of the Best and Worst of Messaging & Collaboration in ’03. Apple or Mac-dependent software got no less than three mentions in the “best of” category:
iSight/iChatAV — Apple finally does IP videoconferencing right. Cleverly embedded inside the Mac’s new Panther OS X operating system and its iChat instant messaging client, iChatAV leverages your AOL Buddy list for point-to-point videoconferences around the world. The secret sauce: sophisticated noise-canceling algorithms that erase distracting echoes and eliminate the need for headphones.
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Hydra — An OS X open-source project that allows networked sharing of document creation and editing. Another Mac technology that leverages the powerful Rendezvous system service, Hydra was used to great effect at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference to generate real-time transcripts of conference sessions.
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NetNewsWire — My RSS weapon of choice on my platform of choice, the Mac. Once you try it, you’ll fall in love with it. And I’ll stay married to it as long as author Brent Simmons continues to add information router features — persistent storage, embedded browser rendering, enclosures, a plug-in API for services from Technorati, search engines and rich media renderers.
The “worst of” list, while fairly solid, didn’t catch my eye quite as much until I got down to item number seven…
Microsoft firing of contract blogger — This poor soul made the mistake of posting a picture that suggested something other than an official Microsoft policy position. Someone should have fired his boss for putting the lie to the warm and cuddly notion that the “new” Microsoft is listening — watching — Big Brother style — is more like it.
I had to laugh. I’m never, ever, ever going to live this down!
Forget about all this selling your soul to the devil crap — he’s so incompetent, he couldn’t even get a wish to be “famous” right, and I ended up with “infamous” instead. Can I get a refund on this deal?
(via Scoble)
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!
[Longhorn], according to Microsoft chief architect Bill Gates, will cost more to develop than it did the US government to put a man on the moon.
(via A Welsh View)
Ever wonder about the people responsible for cramming your inboxes full of offers that you neither want or need? Here’s one of them — a “graying grandmother in a ‘What Would Jesus Do?’ T-shirt.”
Typically a marketer is tipped to Fox’s business by word of mouth and a deal is done on the telephone. Fox then taps into her list of 40 million e-mail addresses — 1,500 times more names than Slidell has people — for possible targets. She is paid based on how many prospective buyers she delivers to the marketer. Until recently she made a good living spamming, she says, pulling in $4,000 in a good week, $2,000 in a slow week. Some weeks produce no income.
(via /.)
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).