Category: Macintosh
The annual Pwn2Own competition has had it’s first day results come in. The idea behind the competition is to present some “hackers” with a series of web browsers on various machines. These machines are configured by various software manufacturers. The first hacker to generate a remote exploit on a particular machine gets to keep the machine plus $15,000. Although armed with 62 last minute patches, Safari was the first to go down. It took only five seconds. Next to go…
For the second time this week, Apple has released a new version of their iTunes software. 10.2.1 was made available for download but the documentation of the changes in the program has not been mad available on the Apple website. This is the second update this week, and with the impending release of iOS 4.3 on March 11th looming ever larger in the windshield, Apple is obviously trying to cover all the bases with a slew of updates before hand….
Rovi Corporation announced the release of their latest version of the Roxio Toast DVD burning software. Version 11.0 which is now available on the Roxio website, with the pro version 11.0 including such new features as: Adobe® PhotoShop® Elements 9 – the latest, full-featured version of the #1 selling consumer photo-editing software for the Mac. The application delivers powerful options that make it easy to create extraordinary photos, quickly share your memories in online albums and unique print creations, and…
This is largely a repeat of an article in an earlier issue of the magazine. It works across all forms of *NIX (including OS X) and in a limited way Windows as well. Most professional *NIX people don’t recommend it. The reasons escape me at the moment. One thought some network analysts had a couple of years ago as to the slow loading of web pages was due to mis-configured or slow ad servers. Visiting some pages with numerous popups…
These tips can be used with the OS X terminal, iTerm, and most Linux shells. I have also verified the history works with the Windows “DOS Prompt”. It’s nice when things work out in a consistent cross-platform way. 😉 The history feature is useful when a programmer wishes to perform similar commands over again. In the past the process used to be more complex. Now it’s as simple as using the up arrow key. The down arrow key works to…
The Mac has a unique way of setting up its $PATH variable. These are the locations the BSD portion of OS X looks at to find programs to run. In this case the list of paths can be found in the file /etc/paths. To edit it the administrator needs to sudo their favourite editor since the file itself is owned by root. For example “sudo pico /etc/paths”. This is useful for the programmer who wants to have their programs accessible…
Programmers are always looking for tools to make things easier. The Terminal program included with OS X is adequate. This alternative makes things a little less spartan. According to the documentation this is an active project where the author implements features from other shells. One thing I find useful is the use of the scrollwheel as the middle mouse button for copy and pasting selected text. It also uses PC (Linux) keybindings such as <Home> (beginning of the line) and…
Apple and the BSD folks have included two of the four editors as part of the base install packages. The first goes by two names and is accessed via the terminal (Applications –> Utilities –> Terminal). They are either pico or nano (note the lowercase). These are almost as basic as one can get and still refer to them as full screen editors. The other editor included by Apple is Textedit. This is entirely accessed by the GUI. It has…
The reason why people would want to set up one computer to store files for another computer are varied. For example I backed up my Linux box (PC) to a Mac before the power supply died. In my case the choice of a Mac comes down to two reasons. Ease of set up and stability. A common access method is to use ftp (file transfer protocol – note the lowercase letters). In OS X go to the System Preferences and…
A story on AppleInsider reports that tests using Benchmark 6.5 show the new line of MacBook Pro machines released this week by Apple, Inc. to be 13-53% faster. To read the whole story, go to http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/02/26/benchmarks_of_apples_new_macbook_pros_find_speeds_13_53_faster.html The new MacBook Pro information can be found on Apple’s website at http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/
by Sean Henriques KillDashboard : a utility to disable the Dashboard on your Mac After seeing my lovely 4GB Macbook Pro come to a halt, I checked the Activity Monitor and was horrified to see that the Dashboard was taking up more than 1GB of Real Memory! I don’t know about you but I rarely pop into the Dashboard so I wrote up a utility to Kill the Dashboard quickly and posted on buzz. A request to share it soon…
The latest version of the Google Maps Plugin for Mac OS X is now available from the Google Map Plugin site. We decided that since we use Google Maps quite often, we would download and install the package on an iBook that we had sitting around. While most packages are take a lot to install, these plugins are about as easy as it gets. Just unpack the zip file from the download. Copy the plugin files from the Google Maps…
This month’s tip is for the Macintosh and is known to work on all OS’s 7.x through 9.x. This tip will come in handy when you want to capture a screen for a document or to provide a customer with a screen shot of a program. It can also be handy for those engineers who need to see exactly what is on a customer’s screen. Get the screen you want up and then decide which you want to do; a…
The latest of the Star Wars Episode II (Attack of the Clones) trailers was recently added to the official Star Wars website at www.starwars.com. The latest trailer shows much-improved cohesiveness between the scenes and a few a different twists on the plot being shown to the public. Although the scenes are fluid and nice, the free version of Quicktime only allows a medium sized view of the clips. In order to truly experience the power of the Episode II clips,…
by Jim Flanagan The computer, if I remember my history lesson correctly in this, our baroque age of computing, was born of a need to do arithmetic computations at high speeds — speeds which are affable by contemporary measure. Today, while computers are able to fit upon our desktop, they are still far too large, while they are orders of magnitude faster, they are still too slow, and while they store compar- atively incredible amounts of data, it is not enough….
