HP no longer in the iPod business

It was bound to happen. HP and Apple both confirm the end of HP's iPod reseller deal. Yet again, Rob Enderle must be feeling pretty stupid.

Tri-booting Intel-Macs

Read it while you can: How to install OS X, Win XP and Linux on an Intel-Mac. Probably won't be long before they receive an Apple "Cease & Desist" letter! Via MacSlash.

Update - 8 hours later: Apple has had a quiet word with the author resulting in him removing the article. Unfortunately, as is ALWAYS the case, the rabbit is out of the bag and there ain't no puttin' it back. Don't these companies ever learn? It is impossible to suppress anything on the internet, and trying to do so gives you a lousy reputation. Apple is, sadly, particularly obnoxious in this regard.

OS X anti virus

Although there are famously no viruses on OS X other than artificial "proof-of-concept" examples, OS X Guide have posted a tutorial on how to use the open-source Clam anti-virus. Apparently the main reason is so that you don't inadvertently pass on Windows viruses. All very well-intentioned, but surely by the same rationale we should be scanning for OS 9, Symbian, Windows Mobile and Linux viruses...

Shoulders of giants

Great quote from a Slashdot comment today:

"If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on the shoulders of giants."

- Isaac Newton

"If I have not seen as far as others, it is because giants were standing on my shoulders."

- Hal Abelson

"In computer science, we stand on each other's feet."

- Brian Reid

Password assistant

I've used Keychain Access for quite a while now, both to store logins and passwords for websites and for personal information such as banking and identification details. So it was a bit of a surprise when I finally clicked that key-shaped button next to the password field: Pretty nifty, especially in this day and age when ordinary people have to come up with more and more non-trivial passwords.

Every pub should have one

Via Gizmodo.

NASA TV online

NASA have announced that live coverage will henceforth be broadcast on the internet! This is great news - and given NASA's purpose seems eminently appropriate.

Free Tube Map for UIQ phones

In the wake of the London bombings, Visual IT have released a free version of their Tube 2 London software. This version reflects the temporary alterations to the London tube network which have been in place since the bombings.

Developers' Intel-Macs much faster than expected

AppleInsider published a fascinating article yesterday, which contained some great information about the speed of the $999 for-developers-only Intel-based Macs. My favorite part:

"It's fast," said one developer source of Mac OS X running on Intel's Pentium processors. "Faster than [Mac OS X] on my Dual 2GHz Power Mac G5." In addition to booting Windows XP at blazing speeds, the included version of Mac OS X for Intel takes "as little as 10 seconds" to boot to the Desktop from when the Apple logo first displays on screen.

SlashDot discussion here.

Why Apple Really switched to Intel

David K Every posts a response to a recent Ars Technica article. I read the Ars article when it appeared a few days ago and had ambivalent feelings, but after reading Every's insightful report I'm convinced he's right. Well worth a read!

One angry young man

Had an interesting comment on this site today, from someone identifying himself as 'El Mexicano' with the email address of chico@chipala.com. This fellow posted this comment from the 207.248.240.119 IP address, which resolves to a Mexican IP address governed by LACNIC, the Latin American and Caribbean IP address Regional Registry. The address is dynamic, but I have noted the IP address, the date and time in case I need to report him.

"Why report him?", I hear you say. Well, that's a long story. It began about ten hours earlier when this character started an automated script to flood this site with trackbacks advertising online poker. The first hit was at six o'clock this morning :
There is then a lull for several hours, then a new wave of attacks started. Notice the identical IP and the constantly changing User Agent and entry IDs:
At about two o'clock in the afternoon this angry young fella started to probe this site, apparently looking for an administrator login screen. He tried to access directories at /upload/, /test/ and /tim/admin/. At least he's read enough of this site to find out my name! :)

He then returns to the automated script attack (does he not get the hint?):
But wait! He's not done. Mr Angry now starts trying from several different IP addresses. If I was using MTBlackList this might be a problem. But I'm not, I'm using something else so he's outta luck:
Here's another IP: And another: And another: And another: And another: And another: And here's anoth... no, wait - he's already tried this IP: I've gotta hand it to him for persistence: This continues for another 15 minutes or so. In total Mr Spamtastic makes 74 attempts.

Here is the moment when he finally gives up, and posts his comment manually: I have since deleted his comment, but here's a sample:

Do you think he's a little annoyed? :D The poor fella took the time to post 77,148 (yes, seventy seven thousand) smilies!

Interestingly enough, this evening I received 7 unsolicited emails asking me to confirm my subscription to random mailing lists. Obviously I deleted them rather than confirm anything, but I'd bet my last dollar that this is the work of the same angry young man. He really must be peeved off about his inability to spam this site to go to all this effort! Bless his cotton socks. :)

Flickr badge and XHTML validation

After recently implementing a Flickr sidebar linking to my favorite photos, I today noticed that those pages with the sidebar no longer validated as XHTML 1.0 Strict. Manually fixing the code resulted near-success, with the exception of an <iframe> tag. In frustration I eventually started trawling Google, and found this page. Bingo! Commenting out the javascript will fix it!

To summarise what is needed:

1. Move the Flickr <style> ... </style> code so that it is within your page's <head> block.

2. Change one instance of <br> to <br />

3. Replace <script type="text/javascript"> with <script type="text/javascript"><--

4. Replace </script> with --></script>

That's it. The badge should now validate.

Batch audio conversions, new contender

Given my previous travails batch converting mp3s to low-bitrate oggs, I was interested to read about the latest update to Sound Grinder. However, it is priced at a hefty $39 ... I'll try the demo and see how it goes.

Drastically reduce mailbox disk usage

Thanks to this hint on MacOSXHints today, I have just reduced my Mail.app mailbox from 860MB down to 460MB in about 10 seconds. Apparently this only applies if you imported your pre-Tiger mailbox. Still, this is the kind of hint I love

More WebKit and SVG news

Some news about the future of SVG in Safari. I made a few notes about this a few days ago.

Sasser virus author sentenced, informants collect $250K

A teenager creates two of the bigger viruses of recent times, Sasser and NetSky, and gets off with 21 months probation, 30 hours community service, and a job. Meanwhile two of his mates collect $250,000 from Microsoft for turning him in. Does anyone else think that these three friends have done pretty well out of this?

Intel hedging bets

Intel appear to be hedging their bets by investing an unspecified amount of money into ClickStar, a 'new' startup planning to distribute movies over the internet before they come out on DVD. The company was founded in 1996, but appears to have done little since then, and clickstar.com is nothing more than a link farm. Strangely enough, Morgan Freeman is one of ClickStar's founders.

No word on how ClickStar plans on getting cooperation from the movie studios so it looks like an effort by Intel to cover their bases. Any chance Apple's unexpected success with the iTunes Music Store is the prime motivation here? It seems likely.

Tiger Notes, vol. 4

Finally, Mail.appetizer has been updated to work with Tiger! There is a new compatible beta available for download! Cue angels bursting into song...

The last major (for me) item is still DoubleCommand.

Google toolbar for Mac Firefox

Although this unofficial hack already exists, this unconfirmed mailing list post states that Google are about to release an official Google Toolbar for Firefox.

Dock icon visual feedback

The OS X Dock has been the subject of a love-hate relationship from many Mac users since the launch of OS X. The 'magnification' effect has been dismissed by many who, claiming it does nothing to make the Dock more usable, dismiss it as marketing-department eye candy designed to wow would-be customers at Apple Stores. I must admit that despite initially loving the magnification effect, I have long since disabled it after getting fed up of dock icons magnifying themselves out of my way while I was trying to drop a document on them.

Another widely condemned "feature" is the Dock's cute bouncing behaviour when a program is launching or a background program needs your attention. While both behaviours do serve a limited purpose, there needs to be some configurability for those who desire it. I know that I for one would appreciate a setting to stop an attention-seeking background application's icon bouncing after a certain number of bounces. Toast 6, when it is hidden, commits this bouncing sin at the end of a disc burn and is a prime example of a situation where this setting would be a blessing.

Finally, there is the 'puff of smoke animation when removing Dock icons'. The less said about that the better.

"So", I hear you say, "is there anything good about the Dock?" The answer is yes! As amply demonstrated by the rotating 3-D cube of the CPU monitor X3, the Dock is capable of significant graphical gymnastics and is not limited to manipulation of the original program icon. The image to the left doesn't do X3 justice, the cube (X3 comes with a variety of icons) rotates through several dimensions and the speed of rotation correlates to CPU activity.

While X3 with its significant CPU drain may be overkill (somewhere around 10% on a 667MHz G4), the majority of Dock icons could still do with some sort of visual feedback, showing relevant information whenever an application is hidden. Irrespective of any other failings the OS might have, some Windows programs do this very well by displaying relevant information in the taskbar button when minimised. The amazing wish-there-was-a-Mac-version DVDShrink is a great example, showing elapsed and remaining time in its button.

Having said that, a few select OS X applications do make good use of the Dock's abilities. Prime amongst these is Apple's own Activity Monitor app, which has no less than 5 different animated Dock icons for displaying CPU, hard disk, and network activity. These icons display several different items of information each in the form of charts, but at a cost of measurable CPU drain. A further drawback is that the more frequently updated charts, for instance the CPU history meter, the Disk activity meter and Network activity meter, can be visually distracting.


Less intrusive but still useful is the 'display a single variable' approach used by Apple's Mail, and Ranchero's NetNewsWire. Both use their Dock icons to show unread material in the form of a number displayed on the icon. This approach is more than adequate for these types of programs, although some sort of font size control (particularly in Mail), would be nice.


A different approach is to use the Dock icon to display a progress bar, as seen in Toast and DVD2OneX. This is in my opinion the best use of Dock icon feedback and should really be mandatory behaviour for any program which has lengthy delays when processing data. MacTheRipper will apparently have a similar Dock icon progress bar in its next revision, but interestingly the DVD2OneX readme includes thanks to the MacTheRipper author for the progress bar code!


Finally we have Dock icons which merely display whether a certain state is true or false, for instance Virtual PC's Dock icon shows an OS X style spinning wheel on the PC monitor when saving a session, while Transmit's Dock icon shows a small arrow to indicate if it is uploading or downloading. In both cases a progress bar would make so much more sense, but I guess any feedback is better than none at all and I should be happy the authors have at least made an effort!


And that is, to the best of my knowledge, all of them. It seems like such a paltry selection given the thousands of OS X applications out there. Can anyone add any other programs to this list?

Update: I forgot about the fantastic BluePhoneElite. I usually have the Dock icon disabled so I had forgotten the feedback it gives (I use the menubar feedback instead). The Dock icon shows a signal meter and a battery meter consisting of graduated blocks similar to Nokia phones.


Update: I also forgot iCal! The Apple calendar program's Dock icon is deceptively sophisticated and displays an image of a paper desktop calendar which shows the correct month and date. Luckily most of us don't need a calendar to know what month it currently is - the month on the iCal icon can be very difficult to read.

Scalable Vector Graphics on a Mac

I was browsing around today (using Safari 2.0 on Tiger) when I came across this entry on Jacques Distler's Musings blog which produced a 'missing plugin' message:


A quick google told me that "image/svg+xml" was the MIME type for Scalable Vector Graphics, developed by Adobe and Macromedia back when they were separate entities (Adobe offers standalone SVG viewers an SVG plugin for download here). Further searches revealed that WebKit does not support SVG, so getting it to work in Safari wasn't likely.

I then fired up a few more browsers to see which, if any, of them worked. The WebKit-based Shiira 1.0 unsurprisingly did not show anything. However both Opera 8.0.1 and Firefox 1.0 do support SVG and displayed the image. Control-clicking the SVG brings up the zoom menu.


The image at normal size



The image zoomed in

Update: thanks to Jacques's comment below, I have now installed the Adobe plugin mentioned above. This is what the image looks like now:

iPhone with 512MB RAM?

A recent post on fscklog (English translation here) offers some evidence that the iPhone will have 512MB of RAM. Not enough, if you ask me.