MS has been condemned pretty harshly for including security fixes in big honking massive packs that have to be tested thoroughly because you never know what the hell they're going to break... as they should be. Apple's been pretty good about it, when a security exploit has been found in a BSD part of the OS they've generally issued a nice tiny lil patch to apply.
...then along comes 10.2.8, which is a fubar upgrade, royally hosing a bunch of people's machines, to the point where Apple had to pull the patch. The problem? The patch has two security fixes that are needed (ssh & sendmail)! I can only guess Apple thought they were "close" with 10.2.8, and instead of releasing the security fixes decided to "roll them in".
With all the hell MS is getting lately, and this being one of the things MS has been beaten up on pretty badly, it was just plain stupid for Apple to do this. There are still no patches available for those the exploits more than a week later (well, you can compile your own), but luckily with freeBSD the exploit can't execute code with root priveledges... will just crash sshd, which, depending on the situation, could pretty much suck.
Egh. Stupid is as stupid does.
posted on September 27, 2003 at 11:26 PMI've got a sneaking suspicion that the odd & confusing choose your color thingy on Apple's website has to do with upcoming faceplates, and they're just getting feedback on what colors people seem to pick in order to avoid another flower power or blue dalmation fiasco.
Could be wrong tho, maybe they're just bored.
Been spending more time with cocoa, specifically trying to get a good handle on NSTask and pipes to other programs for a long-term app I'm working on. Out of 10 projects or so I have in various states of learning, drunkenDig actually works. Simple wrapper for the unix dig command. No icon or frills, but it should work.
I may improve it some in the future, I want to clean up the output some and be able to spawn multiple threads (currently the UI blocks, which on a slow network could be annoying) and allow for more options, like mx lookups.
Download here, and lemme know if it works for ya.
Screenshot:
Learn something new everyday... a papaya is called a paw paw in various parts of the world, such as australia. Mmmm. Papaya's make damn good milkshakes. Werd.
I'm starting to feel marginally caught up, but gawd this has really sucked. A vicious storm came through (generating a tiny lil tornado), shearing off the poles at the major power station on the south side. 60,000 people without power, all on the south side... most of the damage was localized within a few blocks in all directions in our neighborhood... meaning our area was in the last 1,000 getting power back.
Luckily I was able to leech net access (and AC) from a friend for a few days off and on to stay marginally in touch and to handle big problems, and to upload/download work. But gawd, it was four days, and another day for net access as the storm had ripped the cable modem line from the house.
The one thing that really came to mind was laptop batteries during the whole experience... often when I'm traveling, it isn't that big of a deal to me. IE, I know when I'm on the train I'll be plugging in in a few hours. Or if I'm on a plane, I can plug in at the hotel once I've reached where I'm going... but I was really trying to eek out every ounce of juice I could in the evenings.
First of all, the "up to 5 hours" thing Apple (and others) spout about their batteries is utter & complete nonsense. I can't believe there hasn't been some sort of lawsuit about it, similar to what happened with CRT display sizes. With those, you could at least see how they were arriving at their size's they gave. With these batteries...
I had my powerbook at the second brightness notch, doing nothing but working with text files & emails. Airport turned off, along with all network connectivity (appletalk, etc). No mp3's playing, nothing. Just answering emails to be sent out later, writing up documentation in Hydra or Mi. All energy saver options at the max. That's it. Occasionally with all the lights out I even worked it down to the very lowest brightness setting, which would have been impossible if there was any other ambient light.
Even with all of that, I was only about to get 4 hours & 30 minutes. Trying to watch a DVD wasn't even an option, although I was able to rip one to the hard drive and get 2 hours worth.
What's the moral of the story? My powerboook is thin as hell. Compared to my friend's P4 laptop, it's positively dainty. I'd easily give up a quarter inch in thickness to have real, usable battery life and to not have my fan become embarrassing loud whenever the ambient temperature in the room is above 78 degrees and the computer is at more than 10% load.
