Author: Tim Jarrett

Moving to Mac OS X: What’s taking so long?

MacDevCenter: Jaguar: Time to Stop Pussyfooting Around. Derrick Story takes on a touchy point: the masses of Mac OS 9 (and 8???) users who still haven’t upgraded to Mac OS X. My dad is one of those users; he has a first generation beige G3 and less than 128 MB of RAM. While I would love to spend the time implementing one of the hacks that would allow him to run OS X, I can’t recommend it unless he ups the RAM at least.

Derrick says, “If you would have told me a year ago that we would have an OS as good as 10.1, plus all of these vital applications, and only a 20 percent conversion rate, I would have told you that you just don’t know the Mac community.”

Unfortunately we don’t know the whole story. How much of the remaining 80% is like my dad–stuck on old hardware without the discretionary cash to move to something more powerful? And it’s not just retirees, either; think about how underfunded your local school district is. Do you think their Macs are able to run OS X?

I want my family’s Macs to run OS X, because then I can write software for them. (By choice, all my Mac development has required features only available starting in OS X 10.1, such as XML-RPC and SOAP calls.) But I don’t have the discretionary income to upgrade all their hardware.
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Speaking of which (again)…

…someone’s playing tricks with my referers. I have an entry with no link, consisting of XXXX: followed by 160 plus characters (+). It pushed the right column of the table out past the page border and made me think there was something wrong with my site (which, in fact, there may be). Is something like this supposed to be able to appear on the referer page?

Update: Now this is interesting. There are a few discussions at places like DECAFBAD and philringnalda.com around this topic. There’s no consensus. The cause is either

  • someone faking the referers manually
  • a tool like Outpost is blocking the referral

It’s a little surprising that it hasn’t happened before now, I suppose.
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Speaking of which….

…what are the Userland folks doing to ensure the security of root updates for Radio and Frontier? Seems to me it would be possible, as long as those updates aren’t signed, to masquerade as the update server and download some bogus stuff. I don’t know enough about the products or the scripting language to figure it out, though. Anyone?
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Be careful: trojaned OpenSSH package found

Slashdot: OpenSSH Package Trojaned. OpenSSH, for the Windows audience out there, is a secure connection package that allows encrypted connections over which users can use a shell on a remote machine or transfer files. (Grossly simplified, but that’s what I use it for.) It’s pretty essential, to the point that it’s become the default remote login daemon on Mac OS X.

Apparently someone hacked the package available for download from ftp.openbsd.org (and its mirrors) and inserted a line in the makefile to call a script that attempts to contact a server during the build process. So the trojan doesn’t appear to be much more than a proof of concept.

It’s pretty damn scary all the same. But there are is one simple thing that people can do to mitigate their risks: Check the checksums. According to the mailing list message that announced the problem, the two packages have different checksums:

This is the md5 checksum of the openssh-3.4p1.tar.gz in the FreeBSD
ports system:
MD5 (openssh-3.4p1.tar.gz) = 459c1d0262e939d6432f193c7a4ba8a8

This is the md5 checksum of the trojaned openssh-3.4p1.tar.gz:
MD5 (openssh-3.4p1.tar.gz) = 3ac9bc346d736b4a51d676faa2a08a57

This is why Apple started digitally signing its software update packages. Without an infrastructure to verify identity and validity of downloaded packages, people will continue to be at risk.

Now the OpenSSH project will have to look at its server and its processes to figure out how they got tainted.
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Whither Massachusetts health care?

George Chang: Taxachusetts… legislating companies out of business. Mass governor Jane Swift just signed a bill legislating cutting the Medicare reimbursement rate to 2% less than the wholesale cost of drugs. George argues this is a pretty quick way to cause a meltdown:

Let’s think about this: First, regulate the reimbursement rate of a product below the wholesale cost. Second, sue/force businesses to continue to sell this product at a loss. Does this make any sense?

…large pharmacies such as CVS have the option to pull out of unprofitable markets and continue to operate in profitable ones. However, about 20% of the 1000 pharmacies in Massachusetts are independently owned. These neighborhood mom and pop shops that are already scraping along will most likely be forced out of business.

Not to mention that decreasing sales volumes can only raise the cost of drugs overall. Have we learned nothing?
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Pay day is yay day!!

Thank God for payday. Context: I started work on July 8 and got paid for the first time today. Not normally a big deal, but a bit of a stretch if you’ve bought a house and had work done to it, bought a car, and moved across country (not necessarily in that order). I’m not normally a guy who freaks out about money, but today is good.

To quote Beck (whose discography and lyrics section is currently down in his own website; shame):

We like to ride on executive planes

We like to sit around and get real paid

Word to your moms.
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IBM: Saving us from Monday:

NY Times: IBM to Purchase Consulting Group for $3.5 billion. I think that’s a little more realistic than the $18 billion PwC would have gone for in 2000, had HP bought them.

A drought in the services industry is an interesting time to go shopping for additional consulting capacity. On the one hand, the capacity is cheap, and may come with a decent roster of clients to tap for more business. On the other hand, it’s an almost certain signal of layoffs at both the purchased and the purchaser as the org structures get rationalized.

Still, I’m glad IBM picked up PwC. It saves me the trouble of suing them when they change their name to Monday:. After all, this weblog has been Jarrett House North: for quite a while, marking prior art in the innovative use of the colon in branding and titling. (Okay, so it’s just because I’m too lazy to add another title to this page of links, since each post is titled. But bear with me, OK?)
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Feedback on Ziff Davis

A few people have followed up on my Ziff Davis article from yesterday since Doc linked to it. Brian Buck argues that many of us who are playing armchair pundit on the apparent impending bankruptcy are missing the point: Ziff Davis had weak fundamentals to begin with, including massive debt loads and questionable judgement toward gifts to insiders (including slashing strike prices for exec stock options by $10 in September 1999).

But I think Brian’s objection about ZD’s health bears out my point. The Business Week article that he points to confirms that even during the boom years, computer magazines were in an ad slump. Ziff Davis is the canary in the coal mine: weakened from heavy debt loads dating back to its LBO, it is now ready to keel over. Is Ziff Davis in bad shape only because of its ad-based revenue model? No. But it hasn’t been able to pull out from under its debt load precisely because its ad revenue stream has been drying up.
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God help me

So… Is my Blog HOT or NOT?

(he asked, knowing full well that if you have to ask, you already know the answer)

Update: So I feel so bad over having posted that, I’m going to have a stab at justifying HotOrNot. It’s…a distributed polling system. Oooh, oooh! Better! It’s a distributed reputation evaluation system that is destined to do what startups like OpenRatings once promised: give instant notification of the credentials of the ratee, thus restoring trust to the Internet experience!

Can I go shower now, please? I feel unclean. 🙂
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George vs. Mung

In the spirit of publicizing grass roots word creation: George vs. mung.

2 casts and about 10 pounds of mung later, I called it quits. I am still trying to find a definition of Mung, but it seems to be what locals call the weeds out in the water on the Cape.

Of course the OED thinks “mung” is “mong” (“A mingling, mixture”) or “moong” (“Either of two legumes, native to India, the seeds of which are an important food”). Which means that George and the Cape locals should get credit for a new usage of the word: “bay scum that tangles your lines and ruins your fishing.”
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A new framework for tech strategy

Doc Searls pulls it all together in this presentation for the O’Reilly Open Source Conference. Some really sound points about the fundamentally open nature of infrastructure, and why Hollywood doesn’t understand it. The payoff slides start here, situating the proprietary-open vs. public-private matrix on the boundary between commerce and infrastructure. This is a valuable extension of some serious technology strategy thoughts. Doc ought to collaborate with Rebecca Henderson on a publication.

Update: Doc points out in an email that Craig Burton should share credit for these slides. Apparently there may be a book in the works…
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The death of advertising?

New York Times: Ziff Davis is said to plan a bankruptcy. The once powerful media giant, whose magazines I (and every other computer user my age) once avidly, avariciously consumed, is about ready to pull a Worldcom.

It’s been a tough year in the ad business. A lot of corporations, spanked by the downturn or their own problems, just don’t have the money to spend on advertising. As a result, a lot of businesses that depend on it get wobbly. Some go under. It’s happened to quite a few places on the Web–places that decided that they would give away products or content and “monetize eyeballs.”

Yeah, we all laughed when people said this back in the .com era. But what about players like Ziff Davis? Hey, monetizing eyeballs was all they ever did. Computer magazines–just a convenient, foldable billboard for advertisers.

There’s something particularly ironic about the Ziff Davis case. As Ziff Davis was busy puffing new hardware and software offerings, and writing little lightweight pieces about web sites that contained free software you could download for your new hardware, something much more powerful was coming from that web. Companies were figuring out how to expose their content to users more directly than through ads.

And the users? They were figuring out that a lot of this new stuff was being made up on the fly. Some of them got savvy enough to help make it up themselves.

In other words, Ziff Davis got disintermediated. By the Internet.

That’s a hell of a thing. The very thing that all the .coms claimed to be doing has started to happen–after they all crashed.

And it’s not just publishing. Look at the assholery being spouted by Jamie Kellner of TNN. Would he say that if TV commercials weren’t being choked into irrelevance? If TV ads served any useful purpose to TV watchers, there would be no need for him to proclaim any “contract” that TV watchers were “violating” by skipping commercials. No, the TV audience, known more familiarly as you and me, are also Internet users. And they’ve shown all the guys dreaming up “synergy” business plans between the Internet and TV where the real synergies are. It’s in the minds of the users.

See, the TV audience, who are also Internet users, have learned things from the Internet. They’ve always known TV commercials are, in the parlance of the Net, damage. Now they’ve learned from the Internet how to route around that damage.

Who mourns for advertising?

Update: Doc kindly pointed back to this article.
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