Oeh er is een nieuwe update voor Apple’s Mac OS X besturingssyteem. De update brengt je OS naar versie 10.5.4. Voornamelijk security updates en een aantal feature enhancements en bug fixes. So is iCal grondig aangepakt op gebied van meeting-requests, cancellations en delegations. Het is goed dat ze de release notes erbij doen want de gemiddelde gebruiker merkt weinig verschil: je gaat van een rock-solid OS naar een rock-solid OS…
There is some nice documentation released for all people who want to ‘harden’ their Mac OS X installation. Apple released its own document to make Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) more secure. You can find the guide from Apple here. A few days earlier the center for internet security released its own guide. It contains detailed instructions for implementing the steps necessary for CIS Level-I & 2 security on Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard). The guide from CIS can be downloaded through here (crappy registration required).
Here’s a remarkable report on a bug that has been living in BSD for over 25 years. At one time, BSD-hero, Kirk McKusick implemented the dir* library in BSD to prevent applications from having to implement the directory oriented functions themselves. Afterwards he changed 22 programs that were using direct directory handling to using the operating system functions. The bug could prolong itself for 25 years because it manifests itself in a particular (rare) case:
This code will not work as expected when seeking to the second entry of a block where the first has been deleted: seekdir() calls readdir() which happily skips the first entry (it has inode set to zero), and advance to the second entry. When the user now calls readdir() to read the directory entry to which he just seekdir()ed, he does not get the second entry but the third.
Even OSX has the same problem since it has BSD under the hood. The good news is that BSD now even got better and a small consolation for all coders out there: even Kirk McKusick slips one in every now and then. Happy coding.
I have a fairly strict power management and security settings on my Mac. This will cause the screen to dim when the laptop is not used for a few moments. Furthermore the screensaver will kick-in after a couple of minutes and requires my password to unlock. Now this can be annoying when you are watching a movie on YouTube or something that don’t require interactivity with your Mac. The screen will dim and after a few minutes the screensaver will hide the movie. Sure, you can change your power management and security settings but that is also annoying. So just put your Mac on caffeine. It puts a tiny icon in your menu bar and allows you to (temporarily) disable the screen dimmer and the screensaver. You can even trigger it on a timeout so you will never forget to ‘restore’ the settings. After the specified timeout Cafeine will turn on the dimmer and the screensaver again.
There’s a new version of VMware Fusion for your Mac released. Version 1.1.2 (87978). I have a license for verion 1.1.1 and the updater accepted that license and installed version 1.1.2 under the same license. So updating is free. There are some issues resolved. One of the issues was a bug that prevented running virtual machines being backed up using TimeMachine. This was fixed in Mac OS X 10.5.2 and TimeMachine backups are now enabled in VMware Fusion. Update now!
Now this is nice. IBM piloted using Macs in the IBM office. Currently IBM uses Microsoft Windows. The users are very positive (no surprise here). Not all users were that happy. One of the Mac pilot users visited customers offsite. His remark: “When presenting at customer or external meetings, I have been greeted with the ‘wow factor.’ ‘Where’s the ThinkPad, IBM uses Apples now?’”. Most pilot users (19 out of 22) wanted to keep the Mac for their daily business. This was despite some software that they needed but didn’t work on their Macs:
This article has some nice quotes from the pilot users. Way to go IBM! Give it a positive swing: “Mac OS X the best alternative for OS/2″.
Finally after many years of hard work ethereal, meanwhile renamed to wireshark, has finally hit version 1.0.0. There is now even an experimental OS X implementation. Mac OS X users could already use wireshark using the MacPorts BSD ports collection but a native tool is always much nicer. No this is not an April fools joke since it was published on the 31th of march. You can read the release notes or download the new software.
Many thanks and congratulations to the development team members of ethereal & wireshark for this great piece of software. Kudos.
Buizerd heeft een interessant artikel geschreven over de prijsverlaging die Microsoft heeft doorgevoerd op haar Vista operating systeem. Frank neemt de moeite om Vista te vergelijken met Leopard (apple fanboy waarschuwing) en daarbij de prijs van beide producten in ogenschouw te nemen. Welk OS wint? Lees het artikel.
Last time I wrote a small article about using encrypted disk images in Mac OS X to protect sensitive data in case your laptop gets stolen. I now use these images a couple of weeks and I’m very satisfied except one little thing (it’s always the little things). I want the volume to be unmounted when I close the lid of the laptop (sleep mode). When the laptop is stolen in sleep mode only my system password has to be compromized in order to get to the sensitive data. There’s no standard functionality to do this so we need to get creative…
update: better script added (thanks Karel!)
It was years ago when friends (co-workers) got me hooked on StarCraft. On Saturdays we met at someone’s place to play StarCraft. Many hours of fun trying to wipe each other of the map, literally. StarCraft is all about building your army, defending your base and trying to wreak havoc on someone else’s base. All in all nothing but good memories. Well except for the fact that we had to wait for hours on Patrick to get his system up and running… sigh…
Blizzard supplies a PC version as well as a Mac version on the CDs. On one of the Game-a-lot meetings Randolf showed up with a Mac notebook (OS 9) running StarCraft. So I thought let’s try to install StarCraft on my MacBook Pro on Mac OS X. On the Blizzard support site I found a native OS X installer so you don’t have to cope with the Mac OS 9 backwards compatibility issues. So I downloaded the installer and started it. It allowed me to install StarCraft as well as the expansion pack Brood War from the original CDs. Worked like a charm…
Today, once again, I was very delighted with my MacBook Pro. Because I use this laptop professionally I have data on there that belongs to my clients. Since I take the data with me I better encrypt it. Until now I used a default feature called FileFault that encrypts your whole home-directory. That is not really what I want but I could live with that until I started using TimeMachine (Apple’s great backup solution that allows you to easily recover old data). Mutations on your FileVaulted home directory are only stored when you log out and not every hour like other data on your system.
So I went looking for other solutions. In Linux I was able to create crypted filesystems and mount them anywhere I wanted. So I started searching on the internet for a similar solution for OS X. I shouldn’t have searched that far from home since this functionality is right here, in OS X itself. The Disk Utility program offers everything I was looking for.
I cherish the day I got my MacBook Pro. It came preinstalled with Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5). Since Leopard X11 is part of the default install so you can run X11 programs out of the box. Surely I got exited and installed Macports (the BSD collection of tools for Mac OS X). It has loads of tools I need on a daily basis. One of the things I need is Wireshark (the artist formerly known as “Ethereal”). Installation was a breeze. Just sit back and watch how ports compiles the stuff that is needed to get Wireshark up and running.
After a while wireshark was good to go so I gave it a spin. The all familiar windows popped up and I started gathering some information from the network. After a while Wireshark crashed with an X11 error message. Same story with my favorite image editing tool “The Gimp”. Same X11 error message:
Hours, even days when precision required it, my computer was calculating fractals while I was sleeping or went to school. I used fractint to generate beautiful fractal images using DOS, windows & X11. For Mac OS X there is Fractal Domains (both PowerPC & Intel). But time moves on and so does technology. Fractals are turned into art. Now take a look at the winners of the 2007 Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest. In fact all contest entries are worthwhile to inspect. Here’s one example of the winners to wet your appetite.
Suppose you are eager while setting up your Mac OS X Leopard on booting your brand new apple computer for the first time. Chances are that you forget to adjust the ’shortname’ during setup. The ’shortname’ is the actual Unix username that is created for your primary account. By default the Leopard setup program concatenates your first and last name. In my case it created the user ‘eddieniese’ where I really would like to have the user ‘eddie’.