September 2008 Archives

Vista's built in search box on the start menu is a boon for launching applications. The general accessibility of windows applications to users of the keyboard is a huge boon to those of us who try to keep our grubby little fingers on the keyboard.
This does not seem to be quite the case on the mac. I'm probably unaware of all the keyboard accelerators that are available - after all, I've been using Windows for a lot longer. A lot of my use of the keyboard was prompted by a long use of FVWM while in Sun, where practically everything was usable without having to stray to the mouse. Mind you on laptops, the location of the touchpad is a lot better in this regard - you just drag your claw-like thumb over the tracking surface.

#!/bin/bash -p

if [ $# -eq 0 ]; then
    echo "Usage: $(basename $0) " 1>&2
    exit 1
fi

while [ -d /proc/$1 ]; do sleep 0.5; done

If I implemented it using inotify, I presume I can get rid of the sleep, but that entails compiled code.

I really hope that it doesn't mean that they're keeping the security code on file - after all that's a violation of the PCI

apparently it could have something to do with the theme, but this morning I noticed that the GrowlHelperApp was using about 200MB of wired down memory.
Restarting it seems to have restored it to a reasonable size, but I shall set up a dtrace script to keep an eye on it.

You know what you're supposed to do so let it rip - aaaarrrr!

I like supporting Irish websites, so I tend to use url.ie for links. the algorithm for generating the link seems to be sequential, so I was happy yesterday when my link for the perfect coffee went to http://url.ie/pdc, or as Dale Cooper would (hopefully) say - perfect damn coffee.

Lets see; it's a download manager and it launches by default 'at start'. It is listening for external network connections (what, is it peer to peer over my 3g datamodem?). Apparently, this is to support 'updates or patches' to the software I've purchased.
And then, to emphasize how important it is (apparently it is vital for my life and the functioning of the world) it puts an icon on the desktop (low resolution, not befitting Vista) loudly declaring what it.
pricks. You are not that important. Really. Get over yourselves.

I have to laugh when I see the great data recovery 'challenge'. Lets be honest here folks, businesses are in it to make some level of profit from their efforts. To that extent they have facilities in place to recover data from damaged drives due to a variety of problems from simple surface level damage all the way through to failed drive electronics (swapping out logic boards).
The price quoted is generally based on the amount of effort that needs to be gone thorough. Accidental erasure is probably the cheapest. Simple disk-level damage (e.g. a few dodgy sectors) can be resolved using tools like Steve Gibson's Spinrite; which is pretty much a good example of what these companies would be doing. Drive electronics failures would cost more - for example they may need to disassemble the drive in a protected atmosphere to replace something. Large scale physical damage to the drive may entail extracting it from the original housing and essentially replicating the internals of the drive in order to read the data from it. This would be very expensive, but would succeed in the face of quite significant damage.
The intentional erasure of the data using utilities like dd are pretty much a non-starter. For the first part, you need insanely expensive specialist equipment, the rate of data recovery is slow (we're probably talking in the order of bits per second) and the chances of actually recovering anything useful on a typical hard drive is nil.
For any typical person trying to wipe their data any of the secure erasure utilities available for purchase or for free are more than adequate to prevent the data being recovered by any agencies.

This is the list of typefaces available in Adobe's new Buzzword. It is really, really pretty; implemented in Flash, but when it comes to using it we discover that the two main fonts are missing - Times & Helvetica (or Times New Roman & Arial for 'softies).
All the online offerings from the Adobe Beta are pretty nice, and cover the most fundamental of things, and some of the more useful features - like change tracking in Buzzword. It's all flash; so I have the fear that it will crash my browser.
It's yet to happen me on the mac, though; even though I keep losing the browser on Linux

It's a bit funny to mention this, but the mobileme calendar badge has the correct date. Just like the calendar date on the macosx desktop and the iphone/touch (which took a while to get right.
Yes, I know; completely trivial

Aargh! google chrome comes with it's own 'updater' which runs in the background checking for updates to the browser (along with the updater for google gears, I presume).
Add in the Java updater (oh, lets check once a month for updates but run 24-7)
The apple software updater
Liveupdate (probably 3)
Each of them is probably doing the same thing.

• Wait until some time on the clock
• Check for a network connection
• Check if there's new code to download
• Display an obnoxious dialog saying 'Update available' with an Ok or possibly Maybe next time pair of buttons
• Download the update
• Install the update
• Require a reboot because it's changing a file that's in use
• repeat until you head explodes

Ok. Time fricking out here people! There has got to be a better way. If only there was a single update mechanism that all these tools could use... Unfortunately, it's the built in update mechanism from Microsoft/Apple and it's closed to outside developers
As it is, most applications on the Mac perform an automated check for updates when they're launched. It's relatively painless, and works most of the time. Mind you the notification dialogs leave a lot to be desired (version n+1 is available, download here!) as opposed to a list of version n+1 changes - especially security updates.
Hopefully, they're secure and have built in mechanisms to make sure that they're not taking in a corrupted/malicious application.

All the popular kids seem to be doing it. IE8 has the feature. Chrome seems nippy too.