Earlier today I was dealing with the crucible that is my inbox, and Exposé and I came to ahead again, which we often do, especially when it involves terminal windows. The thing is, I like Exposé, but ergh...
While I think they could have done better than F9, F10 and F11, and I've actually seen users hit a corner and have no clue what just happened to their windows, I also think it's a worthy innovation -- especially for a single-document-interface paradigm like OS X uses. It often helps me get things done faster, but there is one horrifyingly critical usability flaw: It uses a scrubbing interface.
posted on October 18, 2005 at 11:23 PMThere was a big security dump on OS X a bit ago, but that got picked up enough I didn't really worry about it. This one is a little odder, Secunia is reporting that mRouter, via iSync, has a buffer overflow:
The vulnerability is caused due to a boundary error in the handling of the "-v" and "-a" command line options. This can be exploited to cause a buffer overflow by supplying an overly long argument (over 4096 bytes). Successful exploitation allows execution of arbitrary code with the privileges of the mRouter application.
Mac OS 10.3.7 and under are affected, but remember that while this isn't good it's a local attack and not remote. I.E., the evildoer would need access to your system in some way. Either by sitting at the keyboard, or through a piece of malware or something else in that vein. This is the type of thing someone exploits to completely own your box once they've gotten onto your system another way.
No patch from Apple (yet) and possibly won't be for older systems, but there is a fix...
I mentioned some of the growing pains the other 'nixes are going through in terms of SMP support, and it's worth noting that Linux, the BSDs and Windows aren't alone in this. OS X is still just hitting its adolescence in terms of SMP and will hopefully be taking its own little step further into adulthood with 10.4. This might seem a little weird, as everyone has heard that OS X on a dually kicks much more ass over a single CPU.
I was reading through an Oreilly interview on the improved multiprocessing in FreeBSD, and and it sparked the memory of a conversation I had several days ago where I said: "I'm interested in Linux, but I love the BSDs".
The person was curious as to why I'd say that, and I actually had to think about it for a few seconds. I dig Linux in general, and use it. There are a whole bunch of places where I'd pick using Linux over a BSD. There just isn't quite that same... affectionate warm spot in my head.
There were several Apple-related vulnerabilities announced the other day:
- A vulnerability in Apple Remote Desktop
- Two Quicktime vulnerabilities
- A browser-related vulnerability, that, as it turns out, Safari is susceptible to.
So I screwed up this evening, and told someone I'd post some 10.4 stuff last night... which, considering I got home at 4:30am and the sheets are calling, just isn't within the realm of possibility at the moment because, well, the pink elephants are telling me its not a good idea.
However something a few people have also asked me about lately is why I dub 10.3 an "edition" release, which is well within the realm my abilities at the moment, mostly because I knew I'd summed it up ages ago which meant I could recycle old words to feed the blog. This is, as you'll recall, blog gold.
If you're not aware, an 'edition' title is generally something that's highly evolutionary. I.E., lets say Acme Co. releases a game which sells well. They'll often come out with ways to keep revenue rolling in as they keep working on the next version to keep the natives happy, usually in the form of 'expansion packs' which might include extra game art, models, or many more levels. These generally don't alter game play itself, but provide extra enjoyment and mileage from the engine.
When Acme Co. finally brings the game over to the mac 3 years later when Apples' consumer hardware can actually run their game (yea, that was low, but hey), they've pretty much ready to release their new version on the PC. But hey, they can still squeeze some more 'free' sales out of the gaming base by packaging the game and all of the expansion levels for a smaller fee, which usually gets an "edition" name. Think gold, silver, or my personal fav: platinum. The good news is that the macs generally get the "edition" version due to economic and marketing reasons.
I got most of my comp problems figured out (no, it wasn't bad RAM) by wiping every single disk. OSX voodoo. Overall, big Yay.
One of the big problems I was having with lockups during file transfers ended up being traced to some files with foreign unicode characters in them. I know they're valid characters, they would display just fine... but displaying was slow as hell, and it'd bomb the finder when copying, and then the whole machine. cp could handle it, if escaped. Why a unicode file character can take down a whole machine during a copy is beyond me.
The other was my mouse- it wasn't registering clicks correctly. I tried everything, but it seemed to come down to it registering a double-click way too fast. You'd click a url, and end up with 3 letters of it selected. The fix? Rip out MS's Intellimouse 5.0 drivers. With those gone, it works perfectly and I'm not registering double clicks half the time.
It also means most of the buttons on it are worthless, so I'm going to have to try USB Overdrive. In talking with someone I know at MS, it came out that they basically just license USB Overdrive for OSX, rip out a bunch of functionality and throw their own brand on it... they just don't update it.
Moral of the story? The mouse thing was just an annoyance, I just didn't uninstall MS's mouse drivers because I'm fairly addicted to some of the buttons in various apps. But OSX is supposed to be a kick-ass unicode beast, and more stable than jesus walking on the water, but a stupid thing like a unicode file name can send it into a tailspin. I really, really detest the OSX finder. Apple just has got to do better, I shouldn't be wishing I was using gnome or konquerer when I'm using OSX.
...because I'm still really, really pissed. I'm just not sure at who or what yet, and it's all such a blur of wasted time & productivity.
I've been trying in vain to get Evolution working on OSX on top of gnome using Apple's X11, using fink, for more than a week and I'm better now about learning when a side project has taken on a life of its own and its time to throw in the towel.
It started because I've become somewhat enamored of Ximian's Evolution on my linux boxes. Bigtime. What is Evolution? It's an integrated mail/calendar/notes client, compatible with Microsofts Exchange Server if you buy the connector. If you're using OSX, think Entourage but without any of the stability, speed, or database corruption problems. If you're using windows, think Outlook but without any of the virus/worm/exploit problems.
It's not perfect, but any squibbles I have with it would be in small areas. Nothing major, and most of those would be tied to the platform evolution runs on more than anything. The interface is standard enough that just about anyone can jump into using it without any hassles. I gotta give it mad props, and have found myself using it more and more. And even, dare I say it, slipping into trusting-it-to-work-without-thinking-about-it-mode.
Enter MacOS 10.3. In contrast to Evolution, Apple really has four base offerings:
- Apples Mail + iCal
I'm not a big fan of Apples mail client. Some are. I just had too many problems with it to slip into trust-it mode, although 10.3 is a lot better in regards to things like attachments and not being able to tell it to insert my damn cursor after the text I quote, not above it. But for a lot of users, 10.3 Mail is just fine and even good. But iCal? iCal is a blight on Apples software offerings. It's just really, really bad. Double-whammy bad, in that both the UI & the performance just suck. I can't help but imagine the project meeting: "We sorta gotta have something in this space, but we don't want to devote more than one developer more than 1 month out of the year, and we don't really have developers who use calendaring apps so you, yes you, lowly coding applescript intern, are being asked to throw together a calendar package after you spend a month learning to write cocoa apps." It's that poorly implemented. Not to bash the original coder or team, as apps this incomplete generally don't get released if the programmer has anything to say about it. - Microsofts Entourage
I actually own this one, as I own Office X, and I don't use Entourage. Trust me, considering that I paid $500 for the office suite, I'd like to if for no other reason than to maximize my investment... but it's out of the running. Which is sad, because it has the best interface & functionality out of all of them. Performance is lackluster to say the least, but that can be dealt with. The killer is their decrepit database format which is prone to corruption. Its not uncommon to want/need to be able to store all your mail/notes/calendar in a single database. Its possible to not do that and have the same functionality via different ways, but the single database can be forgiven. What can't be forgiven is that the database is extremely prone to corruption. Extremely prone to corruption. MS reps (or MVPs) on lists think its normal to have to rebuild your database every week or risk losing everything. Uncool. - 3rd party mail app + iCal
I happen to use Gyazmail (for now, although I'm getting worried about it, but I have decent chunks of time invested) for my mail on OSX, so no worries there. Others could use Eudora, etc. But again, iCal is just a POS and doesn't deserve to be used as it just encourages Apple to think they can release anything and get away with it. - 3rd party mail app + Now Up-To-Date & Contact
I just could never get into Now Up-To-Date. I didn't mind it too much under OS9, but they don't seem to have made the transition to OSX very well. I had real stability problems when I was checking it out, and the interface is extremely long in the tooth. And at $129, the damn thing better give me a bath while its telling me about my schedule. It doesn't give baths. I called and made sure.
I actually gave up on all of those, and all the staggeringly bad shareware that might fill the pinch (question: wtf about making a to-do-list or calendaring app makes it so difficult for mac shareware authors?) and am using a browser-based solution: phpgroupware. It's the best I can do for right now, even though its not really what I was looking for. It does the job, and its not too much of an ordeal to have mysql & a browser running.
So, at any rate, since my calendaring solution is a bit of a hack, I figured it wouldn't be too bad if I was forced to use X11 in order to use Evolution under OSX. Or at least I got antsy to see if it would feel doable, and considering I had fink and everything I thought that would be needed, figured I'd give it a shot. I failed, miserably, and was really looking forward to at least being able to say I had Evolution running on Darwin.
It started out alright. I'm running fink 6.2 & a fairly fresh 10.3 install. Fink is working well, I use it for pulling in some *nix games I'm partial to (you can see one of them by clicking the image at top right), as well as mysql, lynx, gnome, mozilla & some other stuff.
And just as a quick primer to anyone who cares, fink is a debian-style tool for installing/compiling *nix tools and their dependancies. If there is a binary package available of what you're after it'll download it & install it. If there's only source, it will look at what the application depends on for operation and download and compile that also. It runs in a cli terminal, but there is an add-on GUI-based controller for it.
The alternative would be trying to compile some software, and getting an error that it needs your system to also have some library. So you go get that and try to install it, and then find out it also is dependent on something else. *wash, rinse, repeat* In short, fink is hardcore-cool for this sorta thing. So I browsed fink for an Evolution package, no dice, but the source was listed as available in the unstable tree when I browsed their site. Woo hoo!
I'd only pulled one thing from fink unstable before (hfstar) and that went well, as it's generally just called unstable because the packages haven't been tested as rigorously as the stable branch... but by and large its not that big of a deal. You can pull stuff manually in from unstable, change some headers, compile them yourself, put them where they need to go, & you're good to go. It can be a bit of a drag tho for larger projects: pulling in the source via cvs, moving files around, remembering what you did for next time, etc.
Conundrum. Evolution only has source in the unstable tree, and I wasn't really looking forward to dealing with pulling in the source via CVS & such, and the unstable tree had the added appeal of being able to do a simple:
$ sudo fink update-all
...to bring everything up to date via rsync, including things like hfstar which I'd had to install manually. Butter. Add a couple of lines to fink.conf to tell it to check the unstable main & unstable crypto trees, tell it to update its listings, and I should be gold. I go for it:
$ sudo fink selfupdate
Holy hell, I should have paid attention to whatever it asked. I thought I had told it to just download the listings for the unstable trees after editing the fink.conf file to tell it where else to look. Do to the hours & hours it spent downloading, I was actually worried I'd told it to download the entire unstable tree and start building or something. After a double check, things were fine, it was just gonna take a lot longer than I expected.
Come back, and everything seems to be gold. Do check, and sure enough, hfstar is showing up as available in the experimental tree, so I decided that was a good test case. Installed fine. Butter. Time to get a bit more adventurous. I saw that there was an updated gnome in the experimental tree. I saw that there was a KDE binary, and I've never had that running on OSX. Tempting, but no, gnome is a known variable right now and plus I'd like to check out gnome-office. So what the hell, if things go really bad I can always remove it and just do a:
$ sudo fink apt-get install bundle-gnome
...or use apt-get & I'll be right back to where I was. Since I was using binaries the first time around, I had a very skewed impression of how long this was going to take. I've built gnome on an x86 box before, and I know it didn't take this damn long. I can't imagine how long it would have taken using gcc 2.95, considering Apple made some big progress on compile times in the more recent version. Kudos for that, Apple. But keep them coming. A lot of them. This just took way longer than it should have.
But wait! Problem. I get the error message to the right, warning me that I have an existing X11 installation, that I should remove it, or install one of the options in fink. Not good, considering I've never installed one and just been using Apples X11, and I thought fink 6.2 was supposed to auto-detect it. I was pretty sure #3 was safe, and would just make a pointer to Apples install, but it wasn't sitting right. I don't like making decisions without information. So I canceled out, and turned to google.
It turns out you get that message if you didn't install the X11 SDK on the developer CD. I was positive I had. More googling. Turns out, the installer can bork and doesn't put things where it should be, and sometimes needs multiple installs. I had a direction, at least.
Reinstalled the X11 SDK. Tried to build, which went a lot faster, as it didn't just restart the process, just checked its progress and tried again. Yay for that, but no luck. Reinstalled X11 SDK for a 3rd time, on a lark, even though I really didn't think it'd do it, but sure enough it starts chugging along. I then get asked a question I'm not of the answer to: what uri-pm do I want to use? Egh. A google shows I want ur-pm581 for panther. No sweat.
It worked! At this point I was sorta kicking myself for not comparing the before & after /usr/X11R6/ directories to see what had magically changed to cause fink to recognize it, but my mind just wasn't there, as I had other things going on and you kinda lose the details when jumping between mental thoughts, especially when a box is just doing a damn install. Changed my .xinitrc file to reflect the some of the new stuff in gnome, and sure enough its up and running. Lots faster, prettier fontage... butter. I'm feeling better. Accomplished, even.
My eye turns back to KDE (it's a cool desktop) but no, must remain focused. Metacity goes in smooth. The euphoria of the last two experiences is already blotting out just how annoyed I was getting earlier. I'm figuring Evolution is next up, and shouldn't be too hard, right? Do the command, jelly through the install questions... all pretty standard, wanting to know whether or not to use crypto vs plain packages, etc. Except for one of the last ones, asking about python.
That one through me, and I was back to google time, except I didn't have a net connection and wouldn't' for awhile. So it all goes to the back-burner. I'm unamused. But really, I suppose I could have searched for everything related to installing Evolution on MacOS Punter before I got started... bygones. So I just suspended the session and put things on hold until I could get online to check it out, which was a good day.
Day and some extra later, I find my answer about the python question, and everything is going good, if hazy. Might as well just set it running while I'm asleep, and check it out the next day, so I give it the go-ahead, set the terminal to unlimited buffer so I can see what's gone on, and join the bed. The next morning, I come in to see parts of this:
And yes, check out the scroll bar on the right. Craziness. It showed me the dependancies, which I should have paid much, much, much better attention to. They are large. Mozilla? What the hell? Mozilla is a huge compile by itself, let alone everything else it needs. I already have Mozilla in my /sw tree, and yes I saw that it needed Mozilla, but assumed it would reference my install. Stupid assumption, but it was really late.
I had to suspend and resume this (control-z + fg, I love you) prolly 8 times over the course of the next two days, because I had other things I needed to use my computer for, and it would be a little odd to explain that I was building some software in the background while I was giving a power point presentation.
Still, its just a huge compile, so not much you can do except wish there had been a binary and wish that gcc was faster for PPC. So, a few days after I started I woke up in the morning to find another error.
Sigh. It's a "librep"dependancy error. Never seen that one before, so I note it, and head back to google a few hours later when I had the time. Sao's excellent fink faqs helped me find the answer to this one. It said it was due to me installing Open Office, which could have some truth to it although I never remember doing such. The fix worked, tho, so I restart the build.
Again, still taking forever and a day. At this point I'm starting to wish I'd figured out a way to do it through Apple's Xcode, so I could distribute the build among my machines. Or just done it on a machine 5 times as fast, except they don't make a laptop 5 times faster. :( So I'm just gonna have to deal.
Finally, a day later and after leaving it to do its thing while I was sleeping, I wake up to this:
Failed: Problem resolving dependencies. Check for circular dependencies.
Seriously unamused by this point. I know what a circular dependancy is, but not a clue in hell as to how I'm going to set about trying to resolve it. A google shows that it may be a bug in fink, which can be worked around by building everything manually, in order.
No chance in hell am I going there. I know when I've reached the edge of the cliff on my skillset, and am starting to dangle over the edge. I do know its possible, it unfortunately just doesn't seem possible for me. I hate that. And unfortunately, 90% of the stuff above is prolly out of order due to the haze of the last week, and the fact that I wrote it all down in a rant after the fact.
Moral of the story?
There is no damn moral to the story. I'm just annoyed. And, as it stands, have no Evolution on OSX. I give up for now.
Lets say someone happened to be checking out /etc/pam.d/sudo in MacOS 10.3 in order to play around with the security server a little, and the file looked like this:
# login: auth account password session
auth sufficient pam_securityserver.so
auth sufficient pam_unix.so
auth required pam_deny.so
account required pam_permit.so
password required pam_deny.so
session required pam_permit.so
Lets then say that in their haste, instead of doing this:
# login: auth account password session
## 03.03.2004 check ss for speed
auth sufficient pam_securityserver.so
auth sufficient pam_unix.so
auth required pam_deny.so
account required pam_permit.so
password required pam_deny.so
session required pam_permit.so
They did this:
# login: auth account password session
## 03.03.2004 check ss for speed auth sufficient pam_securityserver.so
auth sufficient pam_unix.so
auth required pam_deny.so
account required pam_permit.so
password required pam_deny.so
session required pam_permit.so
If such a situation were to arise, like say, oh, say, last night, and the user found himself unable to use sudo, he would be grateful that in this case Apple has made it very easy to start an OSX machine as root, mount the main disk as read/write, and then uncomment that line.
Dave Miller has a very cool tutorial on getting GPRS running with OSX and a bluetooth phone.
Bluetooth is something I've wished Apple would pick up on in a much bigger way, and judging by the rumors that are constantly about of their "iPhone" I'm not the only one. It's not that they haven't started integrating it, or been doing some nice work on it, especially in the area of interference. Just that they've introduced virtually no catalysts for it. Yeah, their wireless mouse & keyboard, but those are lame as hell.
There are three really cool things about bluetooth:
- It's local, with a small sphere of influence
- It consumes very little power
- It's cheap as hell
So far, it's been pretty tame from Apple. It's included with their powerbooks, but not the iBooks. And as a build-to-order option with the PowerMacs, but not the iMacs or eMacs. And, if you don't BTO it on the PowerMac, you're SOL, you can't add it later. So, there hasn't been a big push.
I don't know precisely what the current cost for a bluetooth chipset is, but a few years ago it was somewhere in the $10 range. I'd have to believe it's gone down, and some quick googling shows people like Texas Instruments offering BT chipsets for under $5.
Hot. Buttered. Jesus.
Now something has started where, when I try to control-click on a bunch of files in the finder, it somehow registers as trying to open them, and even then it does it is this really weird and stupid way. Anything that is a file tries to open, anything that is a directory opens in a new finder window.
I'm probably the most pissed because I had 347 things selected when it happened.
Six complete hangs, as of 10 minutes ago. And now I have 50+ files intermingled in a directory that I can't overwrite and have to hand pick through using $sudo rm -rf because the finder thinks they're "busy".
God. Damnit.
I'm nearing the end of my rope with 10.3. I've really enjoyed the speed increases and some of the UI refinements- but it's the stability that is killing me. And I'm not the only one... a lot of developers affectionately dubbed the release "punter", inferring Apple got in sight of the goal and instead of bringing the ball in, just gave a good kick and hoped for the best...
...with some pretty damn awful results. I was lucky enough not to have been bit by the firewire bug (causing you to lose all your data on external firewire drives), nor a lot of the others.
I have a few machines- but my powerbook is my "rock". I don't mess with it- everything is very vanilla. With 10.2, by and large the worst I had to deal with it was that after 5 days or so it'd be craving a reboot. Things would get slow, etc.
But with 10.3, I've had way too many kernel panics, lock ups, etc. Most of them have been with the finder... I had a kernel panic today emptying the damn trash. Repairing permissions fixed it. As we speak I am doing two large transfers in the background, and they've both hung. iChat seems especially prone to cause them too- I've come back three times to a machine that won't respond, but a new iChat window is in the background, so it happened after someone tried to message me.
Five kernel panics or full hangs in two days.
I've done everything- reformatted, reinstalled from scratch, swapped out RAM... and just for kicks, went back to 10.2.8, where everything works fine, and I even have airport connectivity again.
This stuff is not good.
I'm not a big fan of haxies anymore, or crazy-ass UI enhancements that slow everything down. I generally know what I want to do, and in general (especially with the advent of OSX) the computer works slower than myself, so anything that causes a regression better be making it up in my productivity in a big way.
So far, that pretty much just means MenuMeters, VirtualDesktop, & DockDetox. There was an iChat haxie I was using before the advent of iChatAV so I could type more than one line (seriously, look at that and tell me that UI hasn't gotten wholly messed up at Apple), but that's about it.
VirtualDesktop is pretty much good to go, with the caveat that it really has some Expose problems going on, but they seem to be mostly cosmetic. I have some other issues with this product, which I used to be heavily involved in (um, my name is prolly still in the credits). Good people (it's one of the few shareware programs I've actually purchased), just were going in a direction where I thought it wasn't worth the effort. Pretty much everything I thought was going to happen has happened, which I'm sure they aware of. I'm not sure how they're going to handle the Expose issue, or what the technical details are. I'm hoping they'll just be able to recognize that expose has been invoked, and stop it's own window views, and if you select a window that isn't on the current Desktop it will automatically switch you over to it.
MenuMeters works, but isn't really optimized for 10.3 yet, and has to be manually started. I love this app though, especially since the code is available.
The lack of DockDetox is really getting to me. I just love this app, especially in 10.3 where there seems to be some sort of UI-priority going on that can make a dock bounce really hiccup what you're doing. Looks like it's going to be december. There are few things I hate more than a bouncing dock icon, it's just plain stupid. Why there are simply badges one can apply (stop sign for error, exclamation point for needing your attention, etc) is beyond me. I hate the fact that I have to install the whole APE haxie, but it's worth it just for this one piece of software.
Back home from Texas, which was fun, but Continental has officially made my sh*t list, which is sort of annoying as they used to be a favorite airline. I got home to 10.3.1 waiting for me, as well as the jaguar security update I'd been pining for...
...but no love for airport. Nothing, nada. I really hate having expensive laptop computers that can't use their wireless cards. It's KNOWN that there are issues with snow ABS's and 10.3, there have been even in beta... come on, fix it! It's almost as though it can't keep a DHCP lease, and it only affects 10.3 machines coming onto the network.
