Macintosh

Aaron Swartz has posted a very interesting analysis of how iTMS & FairPlay works.

this tip from Mac OS X Hint solved my Safari slowdown & I’m back to using Safari without the sluggishness.

If you go to ~/Library/Safari and delete the contents of the Icons folder, you’ll find that Safari no longer spins the cursor for several seconds every time you load a page. If you lock that folder, icons won’t be accumulated and it won’t slow down in the future. Of course you lose the site favicons, but that’s a small price to pay for the improved performance.

I find that Safari has become unacceptably slow. Every time I load a page, it gives the spinning cursor for several seconds when I try to scroll that page. I finally got fed up and switched to Camino as my default browser. That slowdown seems to be limited to Safari; I don’t see the spinning cursor in Camino or Mozilla.

One annoyance I find that even though Camino uses the keychain, it doesn’t share the same passwords for the same websites with Safari. It would be nice if keychain items are specific to a website, no matter which application accesses it rather than specific to each application.

I never liked Apple’s mail server, since it stores mail in a proprietary database rather than standard MBOX files, so I built and installed UW IMAPD.

It’s very easy: just download the source (currently at ftp://ftp.cac.washington.edu/imap/imap-2004.RC.tar.Z), unzip it, and build. I built it without SSL since it’s only accessible on my local network. If you want to do that, edit Makefile, look for the line ‘SSLTYPE=nopwd’ and change it to ‘SSLTYPE=unix’. It will warn you that it doesn’t meet the security standard, but you can tell it to go ahead. To build it, just type ‘make osx’.

After I moved the binaries to /usr/local/libexec, I went to server settings and disabled AppleMail, and then enabled imapd in /etc/inetd.conf.

I’m using it to archive all of my email on a local server instead of on my powerbook, as I was doing previously. I have it configured to use a Mail folder in my home directory, which I can back up easily.

My Last Two Hours Enduring Mac OS 9 (Apple-X.net)

I’ve been spending a lot of time in Mac OS 9 for the last few weeks, since I’m now porting a product backwards from Mac OS X to 9. My PowerBook G4 won’t boot 9, but my G4 minitower still does. I haven’t used Mac OS 9 since 10.1 was released a few years ago, so when I go back now it feels so alien. Developing software under 9 is not pleasant – I spend most of my time crashing & rebooting.

Rosyna points out this issue with OSX’s prebinding at unsanity.org:
Prebinding could be a security risk. Not in of itself, but indirectly. You cannot use the checksum of an executable to determine if it has been modified by another or not on OS X. Incidental, yes. Not very important, indeed. But it is one wall that is not there.

Try it:

md5 /bin/mv
MD5 (/bin/mv) = efeb7727e40c597fa33953e551c9979d

Looks fine, no? Well, let us redo the prebinding:

sudo redo_prebinding /bin/mv
md5 /bin/mv
MD5 (/bin/mv) = fe7369c88c3a9220ad803ba3e56bbe06

The checksum has changed. While I am sure that there are better ways to get a checksum none are the answer. And AFAIK, dyld doesn’t store the executable’s actual checksum anywehere.

My D-Link DI-624 router has been freezing at random or spontaneously rebooting for a while. I finally got disgusted with it and bought a Netgear WGR614 yesterday. It has almost the same features but is about half the size. So far it seems to be working nicely.

Not satisfied with repeatedly predicting the death of Apple, the clueless Rob Enderle is now predicting the death of Bluetooth [via Slashdot]

At the Intel Developer Forum on Wednesday Intel announced the company was giving up on the deadlocked Ultrawideband IEEE task group and going it alone with a derivative offering they are calling Wireless USB. This initiative, for them, does everything that Bluetooth does and, effectively means that for PCs Bluetooth is all but dead.

Intel’s history with Bluetooth, up until now, was solid. It was one of the major backers but the technology took years longer then expected to come to market. It’s really never been accepted as a PC standard. Even Microsoft was slow to adopt it due to concerns about the standard. The company’s Bluetooth keyboard and mouse were a disaster.

Bluetooth, which has been expanding in the cell phone market strongly, has been appearing on an increasing number of headsets, aftermarket automotive solutions, and recently became a dealer installed cradle option for some cars. Unfortunately, for the PC market, it may have simply taken too long to come to market. And now, based on this new product direction from Intel, it’s all but dead.

The winning themes at Unsanity’s contest are just plain ugly. I can’t believe nobody could come up with anything better. I like subtle themes like Aqua Extreme or Smooth Strips from maxthemes, but these are too annoying for regular use.