Microsoft says that Apple's Safari web browser on Windows introduces severe security issues.
I read some news reports today that indicate XP SP3 comes with an insecure version of Adobe's Flash Player.
This isn't exactly apples to apples, nor is it apples to oranges. Apple needs to fix its bugs, and Microsoft needs to fix its bugs that allow Apple's bugs. Adobe says use the newest version.
Update your software and back up your data, people.
Imagine my surprise when I discovered that the latest Ubuntu CD (8.04 Hardy Heron x86) will merrily boot a latest-and-greatest MacBook Pro with no hassle.
Of course, I'm not sure why I'd want to shell out two grand to do so, but it's nice to have the option and know that the Ubuntu team are on top of things.
I have the PowerPC build of the distro, but I haven't tested it.
A few bits of handy knowledge that might save someone time in the future. Obviously, the software is Mac-, Leopard 10.5.2- and iTunes-centric, but the underlying knowledge can easily be transferred.
Whenever you plan to do a lot of automated processing, I find it helpful to make sure that you've got good data to begin with. You've heard the expression "Garbage In, Garbage Out?" It comes from computer science, baby: you give a system nonsense, and you'll get bad results. You can't magically expect a computer to read your mind, no matter how nice it would be.
So, little tip one: I want to delete empty directories in my source music data. Very important to not delete anything that a program's expecting. I found a recent instance of Photoshop crashing and burning — silently, natch — if the /tmp folder was missing. (Repair Permissions fixed this for me.) In Finder, hit Command-F to bring up a find Finder window. First, make a search option for "Kind" is "Folders", then add a second option. Pull down the first choice to "Other..." and pick "Number of Items", then "equals", then type 0. Bam, empty folders for deletion. There's a staggering number of options to use in a query, including an image's F-stop setting, which makes for some interesting implications.
I do have a pretty high Geek factor, but I still sometimes find myself embarrassingly behind the curve; Adding cover art to digital music is a wonderful idea. There's a fellow who's written a handy Dashboard widget to grab album art from Amazon called, imaginatively enough, the Amazon Art Widget. If you don't have tons of music, Fetch Art will go through a grab any needed art as a batch operation. It's not quite set-it-and-forget-it, but it's a good step to take.
Speaking of craaaazy filesystem eccentricities, the Mac OS filesystem is not case-sensitive; it's case-PRESERVING. So it doesn't know the difference between "FRiED WeaSELS" and "frieD WeaseLs" but it will make sure to remember that you typed it funny. This is a problem when you're copying over from Linux ext3. Solution? Format your Mac drive as HFS, case-sensitive. NB: Sloppy programming will make your life hell, so don't do this for a non-data-only drive.
Some ripping programs use something called VBR (Variable bit rate) to rip music- instead of sampling the entire track at a single rate, you vary it- a smaller bitrate for the simple parts of the track, a higher bitrate for the complex bits. This is all well and good, but some programs get confused and wind up reporting a wildly inaccurate time- I'm talking songs that appeared to be twenty or thirty minutes long, when they actually were only three or four minutes long. As I understand it, this came about after a series of Ogg Vorbis tracks were converted to MP3 without re-ripping. iTunes evidently freaks out with some of the VBR tracks and reports the incorrect length. The solution? A (ironically Window-only) program called Vbrfix. It works, but takes time.
If you're wanting to do a large amount of tagging and organizing, Mediarage has more than a dozen little mini-tools that are up your alley. Definitely a tool for the power user.
Finally, Musicbrainz is saving me a lot of time. It identifies music via an audio fingerprint of sorts- regardless of source or bitrate, it actually identifies music by how it sounds. Definitely very neat when it magically works to get rid of that "unknown artist, unknown track." I'm using software called Jaikoz to query and hit their database.
Yikes, I almost missed my daily post.
I don't like to drive, and my mind tends to wander quite a bit. I tend to view almost all travel as a waste of mental effort- where the hell are my flying cars? I've got better things to do.
Yesterday, I wanted to remind myself to do something, and I didn't want to dig out my cheapie 99-cent pocket notebook out while driving and try to write. I thought about leaving myself a message and tried to find the voice memo feature buried somewhere in my phone.
Lifehacker mentioned a service called Jott, one of these hip new not-perfectly-named Web 2.0 kinds of beta services. The practical upshot is that you call the 800 number, talk, and both human and automatic transcription turns your message into an email or a text message. I found out that you also get the source audio, too.
Seems like there's some nifty potentials here: talk a text message to a group of contacts seems very handy these days, as well as possibly just voicing a blog post: Call Jott, Jott transcribes and sends to Blogger, Blogger autoposts. I'll give that a try soon, I think.
In other news, I obtained a copy of Leopard (gotta back up!) and had buffalo steak and garlic potatoes for dinner. Yummo!
Not quite a heavyweight battle for supremacy, more like a compare-and-contrast essay. Slashdot brought us the latest article in a series comparing the new Microsoft Vista and the newest incarnation of Apple's OS X, Leopard. I spent at least an hour reading the author's various articles- There's a lot of pro-Apple information to the point of evangelism, so be advised if you don't want to read some drum-beating.
Yesterday I bought a modem for my MacBook at the Apple Store over in the mall. Wha-huh? A modem? Why? Well, we're traveling to California for the holidays and none of Cat's family has high-speed internet. I'll have to rough it for a few days and go back to dial-up. My awesome boss back at Tulane once told me that he used going back to dial-up as his standard threat to his wife and daughters. Last year, none of their neighbors were giving away wireless, but I'm hoping that this has changed. We'll see. After all, when McDonald's, Chick-Fil-A, and even the smegging Dairy Queen has free wireless, perhaps someone else in the city will jump on the bandwagon.
The gold and silver beamsplitters for Khet (née Deflexion, BGG, BUY ME!) are now available! Major kudos to the guys at Innovention Toys for supporting the early adopters of their game. Shop Louisiana! I had an opportunity to teach this to someone recently- even though I trounced him twice, I still had fun with the lasers and the mirrors.
In other news, my car is back from the shop after I skid on a puddle, hit a curb, and managed to really hose my suspension.
I found out today that Fire, seven years old and my multi-protocol IM client of choice, is "effectively dead." My other options are Adium for free or Proteus for pay.
Grumble. Soon I'll have to migrate.
Huzzah! MacBook is safely back from a non-routine Apple checkup. I've got to scoot, so I won't get to play with it and get everything back in place until later today or the weekend.
I'm amazed at the fast turnaround time; it went out Tuesday afternoon and I got it back this morning, Priority Overnight.
Huzzah! My laptop has arrived safely at Apple for repairs.
This means that I will be without laptop for a few days, at least. I've appropriated a loaner laptop, bringing a second Windows machine into my home.
Current standings of powered systems:
Windows XP gaming machine ("trogdor")
Windows XP loaner laptop ("elvis")
Cat's Ubuntu all-purpose machine ("rubicon")
Red Hat 7 mail/web server ("deathstar")
Gentoo multipurpose server ("monolith")
Unpowered machines include:
Gentoo (?) music box ("toonz")
Debian mail/web server ("stevemartin")
Red Hat 7 fax server ("faxbox")
Unknown Linux phone server ("redline")
Dumpster-dived IBM luggable (unnamed stepstool of a box)
FrankenMac's offsite with Josh indefinitely, so those pesky Windows computers are number two.
1984 Prime exists as an Apple Pages file, and now that my only reasonable means of editing said document is now out of the house, my brain has helpfully decided to turn up the heat on the ol' back burner. Maybe this is a good thing; I can take loaner to a venue where I can work and start from scratch. Hell, maybe I'll just bring paper and pen.
You may or may not have heard that some of the new white MacBooks experience extreme discoloration after a few weeks or months of regular use. It seems as though the nice textured plastic likes to pick up small particles from users' hands, turning the normally white plastic a dirty yellowish color that resists all attempts at cleansing. I've been using a black ShaggyMac microfabric screen protector and my white MacBook turned green. A similar thing happened to this guy, so it's good to know I'm not alone. ShaggyMac has since discontinued that shade of product.
The good news is that Apple's acknowledged this defect. The bad news is that I have to ship my machine off for service, and will be without laptop for too many business days; like five to seven.
Have you backed up your data recently?
I caught some grief the other day at work for being a Mac user. This riled me a little, but not much. I continue to maintain that I am platform-agnostic. Every platform has a web browser, an email client, a text editor, a way to view images and PDFs. This agnosticism extends even to IM networks: I'm on ICQ, AOLIM, Yahoo!'s IM, MSN Messenger, and Jabber (Gtalk runs over this). For some, it's all about the applications: people learn a way of doing things and they stick with it. Look at Adobe's products, look at Lotus 1-2-3, look at all the Mac high-end editing software. Me, I transcend the application. I worry about my data. I've worried about the problem of electronic data in various uncooperative formats since at least high school. We had a Smith Corona word processor that only could save to its own proprietary discs- nothing else could read 'em. I knew about WordStar not playing nicely with WordPerfect. Now I know (and this is a few years back)that we're losing telemetry data from the space age because the tapes are physically deteriorating.
Lost data is a problem, people. We're making more of it every year. Here's a data point for you to help put things in perspective. According to a Berkeley study, we produced five exabytes of information (print, film, magnetic, and optical media) in 2002. What the hell is an exabyte? Kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes, terabytes, petabytes, exabytes. Then there's zettabytes and yottabytes. I'm not making this up. Five exabytes is about five billion hours of television, or some 37,000 Libraries of Congress, or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. And we're typically putting all of this on hard drives with one-year warranties.
An email from a friend led me to find my first ever Usenet post. Yes, that date is correct. November 1994. For those of you who know what Usenet is, I'm always reminded of the 1992 quote by Gene Spafford: "Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea -- massive, difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it." For those of you who don't know about Usenet and the previous quote sheds no light, start with the Wikipedia. Yes, I realize that I'm part of the September that never ended.
Rant off. Thanks for playing.
Back in the real world, we filled up Lita the Ford today with her lead substitute additive, I replaced my wiper blades on Blueberry the Saturn, I had a Boca meatless burger for the first time as far as I know, I recieved my "Got wood for sheep?" shirt, and tomorrow is a day of agave didj crafting! (Thanks, Steve!) Pictures and posting to follow!
Support the Non-Waterlogged Blog. Buy stuff from Amazon.
Are you still using Microsoft's Internet Explorer? Why, for all that's good in the world, why? Get with the program and get Firefox.
DriveSavers have saved my bacon (and data) at least twice. If you need data recovery, I highly recommend them.
You can always buy me stuff from my ThinkGeek wishlist or my Funagain wishlist.
Like games? Shop at Funagain. I get a kickback in store credit, you get a deal.
