The lesson here is when replacing SATA cables, make sure they go back into the same place.

Apple has released an update to Safari to address several issues with Adobe Flash.  Safari 5.1.7 brings the app up to date and in line with Mac OS X 10.7.4 and addresses the following issues with the browser:

• Improve the browser’s responsiveness when the system is low on memory
• Fix an issue that could prevent webpages from responding after using a pinch to zoom gesture
• Fix an issue that could affect websites using forms to authenticate users
• Disable versions of Adobe Flash Player that do not include the latest security updates and provide the option to get the current version from Adobe’s website.

You can download the latest update from the Software Update option under the Apple Menu.

Apple has released the latest update to Mac OS X 10.7 Lion.  The Mac OS X 10.7.4 update addresses a number of issues including:

• Resolve an issue where the “Reopen windows when logging back in” setting is always enabled
• Improve compatibility with certain British third-party USB keyboards
• Address an issue that may prevent files from being saved to a server
• Improve the reliability of copying files to an SMB server

You can download the latest update through the Software Update feature under the Apple Menu or from the Apple Support website at:

http://support.apple.com/downloads/

New screen shots of the impending Macintosh version of Eamon Deluxe version 5.0 have been posted on the Eamon Adventurers Guild Online Blog.  The screen shots show that the new software is nearly complete and seems to be operating nominally.  Although the site does not discuss any time frame for the actual release, the screen shots do make it appear that the release date will be very soon.

You can check out the new screen shots at the Eamon Adventurers Guild Online Blog

The Spy’s tools

provide this month’s entertainment, both for his consistency and their diversity. You see, his two sons recently had their birthdays, and predictably, they got tools. After all the well-equipped householder needs his drills, saws, screwdrivers, hammers, power strips, sockets, the box to organize it all, a good work bench and proper ladders. Now, no matter that one is a software engineer, and the other a high school math and history teacher–how else can they get jobs done around the house?

The Spy himself has built two houses for his family, helped construct a church, and assisted said sons and others in reno projects on various scales, particularly with electrical work. He’s also done not a little auto and tractor maintenance. So he’s acquired hand tools, power tools, air tools, and mechanic’s tools; tools for building, wrecking, and repairing, for house, car, lawn, and garden; tools for plumbing, electrical, framing, finish carpentry, drywall, siding, brick laying, floor installation, shelves, and woodwork. His parts drawers number in the hundreds, yet most projects do seem to require at least one trip to the hardware department. Buy a few extra of that oddball machine screw why not, just in case. But at that, his shop is modest, even for a hobbiest. Home made router table yes, shaper and planer no, small compressor yes, framing nail gun no, compound sliding mitre saw yes, floor mounted drill press no, portable table saw yes, but professional cabinet maker’s version no, small tractor and tiller yes, front end loader and harrower no.

Now, to the point. Why does he have seven kinds of hammer, five staple guns, four drills, a dozen or more saws in both hand and power, numerous chisels, and more screwdrivers than you can count? Because in tools, simplicity and specialization matter. A good professional’s tool does one or two jobs better than any known alternative. If you want to do something else, use another tool. You don’t use a ball peen hammer for framing, a staple gun to loosen bolts, a reciprocating saw to make fine cuts in mouldings, a quarter inch drive socket on wheel nuts, a large propane torch for soldering a circuit board, welder’s pliers to press ethernet outlets, a garden rake for grass, a chain saw on gyprock, a Robertson bit in a torx screw, or a fine knife as a screwdriver or prybar.

A hammer drill has a different problem domain than a brace and bit, an impact driver, or a wood drill. Ditto a laser level and a bullet level, a wood chisel and a cold chisel, a machine screw, gyprock screw, deck screw, and indoor wood screw, interior and exterior paint (and stain), a putty knife and a taping knife, a notched flooring mastic trowel and a bricklayer’s trowel, a finishing nail, spiral nail, ring nail and a common spike (bright or galvanized)–never mind that a half inch number eight wood screw and a number seven metric five centimetre machine screw ain’t the same wee beastie as a self drilling cap-style sheet metal screw or a set screw, and a lag bolt is a screw that isn’t even called a screw.

Yes and there are dozens of types and grits of sandpaper, nearly a hundred varieties of screwdriver bit, and more than that of sockets, the latter coming in metric and SAE for numerous bolt head measurements, four drive sizes, at least four different points, two or more lengths, and both impact and non-impact rated. Throw in articulators, hex style bits, stars, extenders, adapters, half a dozen ratchet handles and a breaker bar or two, and you’ve overflowed the largest roller chest drawer. Moreover, there are many other kinds of wrenches, not to mention pliers. In his parts drawers, the Spy must have at least thirty kinds each of roll bar, key, cotter pin, and o-ring, and half a dozen spray heads for his pressure washer.

It should be obvious that

by contrast to the simple speciality tool, bit, or part that is best at its one (sub-)job, general-purpose multi-tools are things you slip in your pocket or glove compartment for quick-and-dirty work in emergencies or going camping. They don’t rate precious space in your tool belt or box for serious projects.

Equally obvious ought to be that having multiple programming languages does serve a purpose, despite appearing like a zoo to the historian of such matters. Fortran still has a following, if for no other reason than its extensive numerical analysis, linear algebra, and other mathematical libraries. Likewise APL/J for its plethora of built in operators. Despite the diminishing problem domain, PROLOG is still useful in AI, and simple languages like Pascal, Modula-2 and Java for teaching. There may be more functioning lines of code in COBOL than any other language, and people still use JCL and RPG.

Ada failed not because it came out of the military establishment, but for the same reason as PL/1. By trying to be all things to all people, it failed the test of a focused, and therefore useful tool. C++ has a similar problem, and is today used only because of its enormous installed base and because it grew into its unmanageable complexity. Had it begun where it is now, it wouldn’t have been accepted. Even a general purpose language ought to be simple to learn, teach, and use. It should at minimum be reasonably orthogonal, reasonably context free–for the lack of which VBA earns honours as the least well-defined notation of them all.

The same is true for our computing hardware and software tools. In the long run, the Swiss-army-officer’s knife approach to computing can only be taken so far before it is doomed to failure. On the hardware side, this means that, despite some convergence and overlap, there will always be different uses for pocket devices, under the arm slates, portable computers, and larger iron desktops. Where we keep and use these different devices in part predetermines the problem domain for which they are capable of being useful.

One might tinker away at some writing on the airplane and in the hotel room, but for day after day serious writing of 10K words or more, the comfortable desk chair, ergonomic keyboard, large trackball, and the biggest, highest resolution monitor one can afford are so incomparably better they put the mobile little brother in the shade. On the other hand, web browsing shouldn’t even be done as work. Catching up on the news via a collection of RSS feeds into a reader is an ideal occupation to redeem a pot stirring, bus wait or train ride. And, a pad or pod is a perfect container for those twenty English Bible translations, Greek, Latin, and Hebrew with notes, and half a hundred references commentaries with which you dissect the sermon on the fly, instead of having to wait till you’re home and done Sunday dinner. Adding another hundred volumes weighs nothing in the briefcase, and if you’re on vacation, throw in a few dozen novels to while away the time while soaking up some rays. Who takes a desktop to either venue?

A medical professional making rounds in a hospital needs something bigger than a pod/phone, and the iPad (no other slates are worth mentioning) is the perfect replacement for the bound notebook, for it can connect to the hospital database, whose memory, unlike the human–another specialization) is at least usually more consistent, even if it may not always be correct if not updated properly by all involved.

Thus, there will also always be differences between pocket and professional operating systems and applications, and between varieties of applications for purposes that are only loosely similar. Writing letters, memos, and small documents ain’t the same problem domain as writing novels, or creating code, and its not likely that a text processor optimized for one will be comfortable for practitioners of another. It is even less likely that anyone could produce an application to do all three even passably well.

Indeed, this is why the Spy uses BBEdit for code production and web sites, NisusWriter Pro for the bulk of his general purpose documents, including this column, and Scrivener to write novels–and unless travelling to a board meeting, does all these things on a desk, not with an iDevice (yet performs much of his browsing on the latter). It goes to the heart of why he regards Excel as best in its speciality class, but cannot abide Word for its bloated and confusing attempts to be all things to all writers that render it mediocre at best for anything.

It probably explains (in part) the genius of Steve Jobs, who though he ostensibly dictated closed box one-size fits-all devices, actually differentiated his product line so that one size targeted all parts of a specific problem domain, but not every problem domain.

An iPhone isn’t an iPad isn’t a portable Mac, isn’t a desktop. Ditto apps. Converge features all you want, but there are several tools there, each with their own uses. Buy the ones useful for the kind of problems you want to solve, and leave the others on the store shelf.

The Fourth Civilization (wo)man,

is that semi-mythical someone the Spy has talked about many times before, most notably in his September 2004 column and in the article on the compleat human being at the Sheaves URL mentioned below. (Caution: the latter site contains graphic and explicit Christian language of a kind some readers may deem offensive. If in that category, rely on your memory of Heinlein’s discourse on the human being elsewhere and skip the Spy’s elaboration to the Christian Human being.)

In brief, Heinlein at some length described the Human being as a generalist, and concluded “Specialization is for insects.” The Spy offers a new version (now to be the Spy’s eleventh law) adapted for technology, whether low or high.

Intentionality is assumed in tool choice–one reason why the Spy sides with Penrose rather than Minsky of the issue of artificial intelligence (computing tools will always be just as dumb as a bag of hammers). Note also the part on education. In general, this means a Liberal Arts education so the citizen of this age is a broadly literate, informed, and capable problem solver. In the specific instance of a programmer, it means that the one-language hacker who learned his skills at Joe’s computing school (meeting Tuesday nights above his garage and machine shop) may be able to work as low-level code slingers in the industry for a time, but will never perform like, promote so easily, or even outlast the liberal arts university graduate with a broad problem solving and software engineering mindset and a degree in computing science. That’s why the Spy plies his day job as professor of computing science and mathematics at Trinity Western University. Hey folks. It’s not too late to sign up for the fall.

–The Northern Spy

Opinions expressed here are entirely the author’s own, and no endorsement is implied by any community or organization to which he may be attached. Rick Sutcliffe, (a.k.a. The Northern Spy) is professor and chair of Computing Science and Mathematics at Canada’s Trinity Western University. He has been involved as a member or consultant with the boards of several organizations, including in the corporate sector, and participated in industry standards at the national and international level. He is a long time technology author and has written two textbooks and six novels, one named best ePublished SF novel for 2003. His columns have appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers (paper and online), and he’s a regular speaker at churches, schools, academic meetings, and conferences. He and his wife Joyce have lived in the Aldergrove/Bradner area of BC since 1972.

Want to discuss this and other Northern Spy columns? Surf on over to ArjayBB.com. Participate and you could win free web hosting from the WebNameHost.net subsidiary of Arjay Web Services. Rick Sutcliffe’s fiction can be purchased in various eBook formats from Fictionwise, and in dead tree form from Amazon’s Booksurge.

URLs for Rick Sutcliffe’s Arjay Enterprises:

Arjay Books: http://www.ArjayBooks.com

The Northern Spy Home Page: http://www.TheNorthernSpy.com

opundo : http://opundo.com

Sheaves Christian Resources : http://sheaves.org

WebNameHost : http://www.WebNameHost.net

WebNameSource : http://www.WebNameSource.net

nameman : http://nameman.net

General URLs for Rick Sutcliffe’s Books:

Booksurge: http://www.booksurge.com

Fictionwise: http://www.fictionwise.com

URLs for items mentioned in this column

Heinlein and Sutcliffe: http://sheaves.org/sheavings/thecompleatchristian.html

BBEdit: http://www.bbedit.com

Scrivener: http://literatureandlatte.com

Word: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word

The 2012 rendition of the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference or WWDC sold out in less than 90 minutes this morning.  The conference which will be held from June 11th to June 15 as Muscone Center in San Francisco is an annual rite of passage for many developers.  Last year the conference sold out in twelve hours, however with the demand for information about Apple products growing at a similar rate as the demand for Apple products, the developers are all clamoring to get tickets to these Apple sponsored events.

Most developers this year will be left out though as Apple generally only accepts about 5500-6000 developers and has anywhere between 800 and 1000 Apple staff and engineers present for face to face questions about Apple’s products and their development issues.  The only way to get into the conference at this point is to garner one of the scholarships for students that Apple gives out to 150 deserving students.

XperimentalZ Games has released a second update this week on the iOS game Don’t Run With A Plasma Sword.  This latest update was released to address an issue with resolution being a bit fuzzy on the New iPad and also a bug we discovered here at A.P.P.L.E., freezing of the game if you exited during screen loading.

You can download version 1.1.4 of DRWAPS from the Apple iTunes store at:

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/dont-run-with-a-plasma-sword/id479907900?mt=8

Apple announced their quarterly profits today with their net profits up a whopping 94% over 2nd quarter 2011.   During 2nd quarter 2012, Apple sold a total of 35.1 million iPhones and 11.8 million iPads resulting in a quarterly net profit of 11.8 Billion USD during the quarter.  They also sold 7.7 million ipods during the same quarter.  The number of iOS devices is now over 365 million devices thanks to to the sales of the devices this previous quarter.

Apple’s cash on hand reached a staggering 110.2 billion USD, which is a 12.6 billion increase over the previous quarter.  Apple is planning to pay a $2.55 per share dividend at the end of 3rd quarter 2012.

David Finnigan of the Apple and Macintosh centric site, Mac Gui City has been working hard on a new users guide for the Apple ][ series computers.  the new guide with some 600 plus pages and 12 chapters will include information about 6 different Apple ][ series computers and their setup.

As for a release date on the new book, according to a recent post in CSA2, david says "The first complete draft (meaning that every section of the book was complete) was made early last week. It's currently being poured over by a team of leading Apple II experts. There are 12 chapters and nearly as many appendices. My hopeful guess is that the review will take at least 3 weeks. "

The new Apple ][ Users Guide will be the first Apple ][ series specific book published in nearly twenty years and aims to better educate this generation of Apple ][ users and hobbyists.  For more information about the book, you can check out The New Apple ][ Users Guide web page at:

http://macgui.com/newa2guide/

Dont Run With A Plasma Sword, the runner game from XperimentalZ Games has been updated to Version 1.1.3.  This version of the software was released to address a number of bugs, several of which were discovered by A.P.P.L.E. Staff in our testing of the game, including a bug which caused objectives to be auto completed in one particular level of the game.

DRWAPS is a high speed runner game that pits the user against a number of levels of play and many aliens, all with the intention of attacking the runner.  At the end of the story mode levels, the game pits an alien boss against the user, using differing attacking modes and speeds. Different rewards can be purchased with Experience Points within the game.   While the game can be totally upgraded through in-game upgrades, the challenge of accomplishing all these level-up awards is well worth the time it takes to play the game.

You can download the latest version of DRWAPS for $0.99 cents from the Apple iTunes Store at:

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/dont-run-with-a-plasma-sword/id479907900?mt=8

For users who have already purchased the program, this upgrade of DRWAPS will appear as a free download.

https://github.com/jmechner/Prince-of-Persia-Apple-II

Brian Fargo and his InXile team set a lofty goal when they started flirting with the idea of creating the followup to the game Wasteland.   With Kick Starter being the go to place for game producers these days, Brian took his ideas to the website and laid out a number of rewards for each level of support.   With a funding goal of 900,000 USD, it seemed to be a long shot according to his posts, yet it was funded and then some in the first two days of being posted on Kick Started.   Now, that level with 23 hours to go is at 2.67 Million USD and growing.  This does not include the portion that people have sent his group through Paypal which could be putting this project right at the three million USD mark according to Brian’s reports.

Wasteland for most users was a game long ago played, completed and forgotten about.  That was until about two months ago when Brian Fargo put together his video outlining his idea for the project.  Now, more than 56,000 gamers have thrown their money at the project and it will be a reality.  Sometime in late 2013, InXile will release Wasteland 2 and a lot of other goodies to those 56,000 plus supporters.  The program will be available for Windows, Linux and the Mac according to notes left by Brian at each stage of the fund raising post 2.1 Million USD being reached.

Stay tuned for more as the announcement of the funding is forth coming within the next 24 hours.  For more information about the project or to add your support to it, check out the Wasteland 2 Kickstarter page at:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/inxile/wasteland-2

Gil Osher has more information about the emulator on his website at:

http://dolfin.github.com/minivmac4android/

You can download the Sourcecode from GitHub at:

https://github.com/dolfin/minivmac4android

Apple has released the same Flashback Trojan Removal Tool that is found in the Java update for OS X 2012-003 as a standalone tool.  The new standalone version of the tool is for those users without Java installed.

You can download the Flashback malware Removal Tool from the Software Update feature under the Apple menu or from the Apple support website at:

http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1517

The bare-metal bootstrapper works in about 1/3 the time it did before.  It now shifts the serial hardware into high gear to transmit the bulk of  the code in binary rather than via text on the screen.  Much the same way as Blurry's Apple Game Server.

There's a video of Speediboot(tm) in action here:
http://youtu.be/1xworYThmMI

The OSX version of the sever has an "installer" whereby the user drags the ADTPro folder to the Applications folder.  Much the same way as lots of OSX installers, like Mozilla.

http://adtpro.sourceforge.net

1.2.1 - April 12, 2012

New functionality:

* Serial now bootstraps from bare metal in 1/3 the time it used    to take with Speediboot(tm) technology

* [Server] Mac OSX has a prettier “installer” via the DMG – just   drag/drop the ADTPro folder to Applications

Bug fixes:

* [Server] Improve serial error recovery for two different   scenarios: 1, by waiting (much) longer before timing out to  allow for problemtatic/errorful block reads, and 2, flushing
   the serial port after things like checksum errors“

Apple has released a third update to Java for both Mac OS x Lion and Mac OS X 10.6 to deal with the infections of the Flashback Trojan.  Infections reached a whopping 600,000 machines globally according to three anti-virus companies that were monitoring it (Dr. Web, the discoverer of the Trojan, Kaspersky, and Symantec) , however, that number has dropped to 270,000 in recent days.

The update on the Apple Support Website updates Java to Version 1.6.0_31.  This brings it inline with the Oracle version of Java.  You can download the latest version of Java through the Software Update feature under the Apple menu or from Apple’s Support website at :

http://support.apple.com/downloads/

If you want to check to see if your machine is one of the machines infected by the Flashback Trojan, you can download FlashbackChecker at:

https://github.com/jils/FlashbackChecker/downloads

Source: Forbes

After media reports yesterday of more than 600,000 Macs globally being infected by a Trojan taking advantage of a Known Java vulnerability, Apple has responded by releasing the second update to Java in two days.  The update, 2012-002 is available for download via the Software Update feature of the Apple Menu, or from the Apple Support website at:

http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1515

XperimentalZ Games has released an update to their popular iPad and iPhone runner game, Don’t Run With  A Plasma Sword or DRWAPS.  Version 1.1.2 adds a number of new features to the game and includes:

- Revamped the objectives system in endless to add much more variations
- Added an indicator in story mode, to let the player know when the section will finish
- Added new leaderboards
- Fixed several minor bugs

The game is a high paced runner game with high flying antics, multiple skill levels, different goals and rewards, and even character outfits.  This is one game that will keep you entertained and challenged for a long time with it’s endless levels.  The game is a $0.99 cent download in the iTunes App Store.

You can download the latest version of the game from the Apple iTunes App Store at:

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/dont-run-with-a-plasma-sword/id479907900?mt=8

Apple has released an update to Java for Mac OS X Lion.  The update 2012-001 is intended to address issues with reliability and security.  It also addresses compatibility issues for Java SE 6.  This update require Mac OS X Lion 10.7.  You can download the update through the software update option on the Apple menu or from the Apple support website at:

http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1515