Category: Apple

Whither Mac anti-virus protection?

I’m starting to wonder a little about what I will do on my Mac for virus protection since Virex 7.5.x isn’t Tiger compatible. I’m apparently not alone in wondering. MrBarrett.com neatly summarizes the current Mac antivirus marketplace, and points out a few contenders I hadn’t considered, including Sophos (which is apparently only available to business customers) and ClamAV, which may be the only option to fill the gap between now and the vaporous release of Virex 7.7.

Tiger part II: iChat and Virex

Tonight we tried to talk to Lisa’s parents over iChat, and it didn’t work. I kept throttling the bandwidth of the client down, and it kept reporting “Insufficient bandwidth to maintain the connection.” I thought, huh? Then I checked online.

Thanks to the magic of Google, I found it: Virex 7.5.1, not compatible with Tiger. The good readers of Macintouch had already flagged it as an issue with iChat. I had forgotten about the reported incompatibility until an iChat reader pointed out that processor utilization was pegged by one of the vshield processes. Sure enough: killing the process freed up the CPU.

The Virex issue is troubling: it’s software that was provided by Apple, via the .Mac subscription service. Surely they would have thought to test it? Or for Apple to let Network Associates know that they ought to test it?

Tiger notes: install, Spotlight, one-time hits

My copy of Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) arrived yesterday, finally. So far? Well, the upgrade went smoothly enough. That’s about all I can report, really; I got home at 9 pm last night and had just enough time to run a backup, verify and repair some minor permissions issues on my hard drive, and kick off the installer before going to bed.

One thing that almost bit me in the butt: hard disk space. I have habitually been down to less than 2 GB free disk space for about the past month—blame digital music—and the installer told me it didn’t have enough room to install Tiger. I was able to proceed by deselecting a bunch of printer drivers. I would have deselected some language files instead, but it appears that, at least with Tiger, there is no way to opt not to upgrade a previously installed language pack. (Incidentally, it makes me nervous that by deselecting drivers from eight or so printer manufacturers, I was able to reclaim nearly 800 MB of hard disk from the install. What do they put in those things—encyclopedias?)

At any rate, in the morning I checked the install after walking the dogs and found that it had happily rebooted and was waiting for me to log in. I did so, watched it slowly proceed, decided not to wait for it, and got in the shower. When I got out the login had finished and I could play with Dashboard and Spotlight.

Spotlight is cool: it fished up a bunch of stuff I didn’t know I had, including iChat logs, when I typed in my wife’s name. However, the short results list (which appears in a dropdown menu as you type, along with the option to show all results) is going to suffer from the same search challenges as Internet search engines: given a potential universe of content, how do you decide which content to surface as most relevant?

In this case, the problem was, I think, Spotlight’s result categories. By default, Spotlight returns categorized search results. Amazon and Microsoft.com both used to do this. The problem with categorized search results is that they interfere with the relevance ranking of the actual results list. For instance, if the four most relevant results for the query “doc searls” included a chat log, an Address Book card, a mail message from him, two more chat logs, a bookmark, and another mail message, how should the search results be categorized? If your first category is “Chat,” including the first, fourth, and fifth search hits, the Address Book card and mail message appear lower in the search list than they should, making the search results appear incorrect. In my case, I searched for “lisa” and the system returned a bunch of information, including an address card. But it wasn’t Lisa’s address—it was the address card of one of her friends, on whose card I had entered “Lisa Jarrett” in the Friend field.

I have a suspicion that some of my issues with Spotlight were related to the fact that it was still indexing my hard drive. This also caused Dashboard to be less responsive than it could have been. I can definitely see the joy to come with Dashboard, though; just having one-key access to a good dictionary and to Wikipedia is a killer benefit.

I had to go to work, so I left Mail importing my 44,000+ email messages (Mail in Tiger uses a new file format to store mail messages, so there’s a one-time hit for translation and indexing). More reports tonight.

No Tiger no cry

I’m going to have to have a word of prayer with Amazon, or UPS, or both. Despite a status from the package tracking that my Tiger was “out for delivery” on Saturday morning, it never showed up. So much for next day shipping, for which I paid a nice premium.

I guess that gives me more time to get my backup house in order and to get all the application updates, but I’m still angry. I guess I’ll have to see if Amazon will step up and take responsibility and give me a discount on the shipping cost. Somehow I doubt it.

One review to rule them all

Ars Technica turns in its usually comprehensive (if not deeply propellerheadish) review on the newest Mac OS X release. Featuring more information than you ever thought you would need on metadata, imaging technologies, kernel extensions, and a little bit about actual user features, it’s by far the most comprehensive review of the OS yet for those who care not just about what their computer does but how it does it—or might be made to.

Review silence lifts on Tiger

In a few days we’ll find out whether Tiger, aka Mac OS X 10.4, is really the greatest thing since sliced bread or not. I’ll probably find out a little later than everyone else, since I ordered my copy from Amazon (so that I could take advantage of the big discounts; $50 off the family pack price is too compelling to refuse). Just looking at the review headlines gives a flavor of some of the anticipation:

Obsessive iTunes tune management

I thought my iTunes regimen was elaborate, but Glenn MacDonald’s takes the cake. Automatic rating based on playing habits, automatic image handling that marks up the cover art with “fingerprints,” even automatic payment to artists whose tracks are highly rated but unpurchased.

My setup is simple by comparison, and heavily dependent on smart playlists. Never Played is all tracks with a playcount of 0. Just Added is the last 200 most recent tracks. Less Played is any track that hasn’t been played at least twice, and whose last play was more than six months ago. Fell Out of Rotation is a track whose playcount is more than 2 and whose last played date is greater than a year ago. That plus a bunch of manually generated playlists works pretty well for me, but I’d love to take a look at Glenn’s script.

Update: Well, of course it’s a hoax. Or a satire on what you’d have to do to be able to compensate artists fairly. Or whatever.

WordPress and permalinks and Mac OS X

I’m playing around with a WordPress installation on my laptop for a project, and had a hell of a time getting permalinks to work properly. I figured that my experience might be worth documenting for anyone else who’s playing around with Mac OS X.

I should note that I had to start from the beginning for this installation—I had to install MySQL using Fink, futz around with it until I got it starting reliably and was able to create a database for WordPress, then I had to enable PHP in the Apache httpd.conf file. At that point I was able to run the WordPress installation script and start tweaking options. But permalinks weren’t working.

I started digging deeper and found out why. While on Manila a permalink consists of an anchor on a page generated dynamically by Manila’s custom HTTP server for which the content is assembled in Frontier, WordPress uses Apache’s mod_rewrite to parse the incoming URL, figure out which content is being requested, then get that out of the database and return it in the standard template. Manila’s approach allows the blogging engine to control the whole process from start to finish, while WordPress’s has a series of dependencies: on Apache, on mod_rewrite, and, it turns out, on the file system.

So here, skipping all the tried-and-failed steps, is what I had to do to get permalinks enabled:

  1. Verify that .htaccess actually exists.
  2. Chmod — change the file permissions on the .htaccess file so that WordPress can rewrite it.
  3. With help from a posting on the WordPress support site, figure out that I need to insert some specific language in the httpd.conf file, to wit, some directives for the specific directory where WordPress lives:
    • <Directory /path/to/wordpress>
    • Options Indexes MultiViews SymLinksIfOwnerMatch
    • AllowOverride Options FileInfo
    • </Directory>
  4. And, just for kicks and giggles, update the httpd.conf to add index.html.var to the DirectoryIndex line.

And some combination of those enabled mod_rewrite to work. (This posting on the old Textpattern site provided some insight as well.)

I’ve long admired the flexible navigation that WordPress provided—the ability to have monthly archive pages as well as a calendar, for instance—and it’s apparent to me now that the use of mod_rewrite is what makes that possible. I do wonder about the scalability of that solution—would it survive a Slashdotting?—but it’s interesting, having used Manila for so long, to see how another platform handles the same issues.

RIP, Jef Raskin

Sad: Jef Raskin, the philosophical father of the Macintosh, died of pancreatic cancer on Saturday.

As credit wars spread in the blogosphere over ideas like RSS and podcasting, I’d like to note that both Raskin and Steve Jobs can fairly claim credit for creating the Macintosh without taking away from either’s contribution. Jef had many of the ideas, and Steve drove the refinements and shipped the damn thing. But without either, I’d be writing this on a 30-pound Kaypro rather than my PowerBook, and for that, I thank them.

More: Metafilter, Joy of Tech, TidBITS.

The Emperor has no adware

DivisionTwo: Mac Mini: The Emperor’s New Computer. I can’t tell whether the reviewer (Jorge Lopez, MCSE) is for real or not. Some of his complaints seem to be ones that a user would have: “Oh, did I forget to mention that the Mini has no PCI slots either?  … No keyboard or mouse either. Sorry, Kayla, daddy’s got to make another trip to Best Buy before you can play with your new computer.”

But then we get to the rest of the article, which—well, let’s take it point by point:

  • ”its sleek look comes at the expense of the parallel port, serial ports, the PS/2 ports and the drive bays“… Erm, the what, what, and what? With USB and Firewire, who the hell cares? Even on the PC front, I’m pretty sure that all the peripherals in most users’ hands at least speak USB. And drive bays? There’s a very nice combo/Superdrive there. Surely you didn’t have something else in mind, Jorge?
  • “And no floppy disk drive”…Oh no you didn’t (oh snap, etc.). Surely we’ve put this particular canard to bed by now. There are these little things called USB keychains, Jorge. They’re practically giving them away with every Best Buy purchase, and they hold between 32 MB and 512 MB of stuff. You know, between about 30 and 500 floppies. And they fit in your pants pocket. You might want to look into them.
  • ”During normal operation the unit makes no sound whatsoever.  This could make it very difficult for a novice user to know whether or not the computer is on.”… There are some of us who are slowly losing midrange hearing from constantly running fans etc. that actually kind of like a silent computer, Jorge.
  • “It turns out the Mini uses a weird kind of display connector on the back that requires a special adapter if you want to plug it into a PC monitor…” Yes, it does. It uses a weird kind of display connector, called DVI, that’s also available on PCs from most major manufacturers, including Dell, HP, and on cards from ATI and Radeon.
  • “there is no Outlook Express for email, but Apple includes a program called Mail, which is like a stripped-down email client that can’t execute scripts or open attachments without user intervention.” You know, Jorge, I might call that a feature. A security feature. As an MCSE, you might want to look into that too.
  • “Essentials such as a defragmenter or a or registry cleaner are notably absent”. That could be because the Mac doesn’t have a registry that can become polluted over time with excess information, and doesn’t need a defragmenter. (Okay, the jury is still arguing about that last one.)
  • “In today’s climate of non-stop worms, trojans and viruses, releasing a computer with no virus removal software is irresponsible on the part of Apple.” Unless, of course, few to none of those viruses are targeting Apple’s platform. Not saying the Mac is immune from viruses, just pointing out that the chances of any Mac user getting infected are vanishingly small, compared to the estimated 30 seconds till infection that an unprotected Windows PC can expect when you connect it to the Internet. (Oh, and more importantly imho than a virus removal program, the Mac does come with an industrial strength configurable firewall.)
  • Applications are a whole other category, because the issues he calls out are pretty easy to refute:
    • “no Mac version of WeatherBug to check the temperature anywhere in the world”… Well, there’s Weather.com. Or there’s any one of these nifty utilities.
    • “Or any equivalent of the DealHelper software I use to keep track of my password”… It’s called Keychain and it ships with the OS. And has for about seven years.
    • “My Office 2003 CD would not install…” Um, look at Mac Office 2004, from the same company.

Then he hits the point that makes me think he was laughing up his sleeve the whole time, or else is just hopeless: “When I consider that a good deal of my time is spent running applications like Disk Defragmenter, Scandisk, Norton AV, Windows Update and Ad-Aware–none of which are available for the Mac platform”… Huh. That’s funny, Jorge. A good deal of my time is spent running Word, Excel, Mail, and my web browser. You know, actually getting work done.

There are definitely things about the Mac mini that might trip up a novice user coming over from the PC world, but this list isn’t it.

Update: Erm, based on the reaction to the article on MeFi, I might have risen to the bait of a satire post. I guess that will teach me to blog before my sixth cup of coffee of the day.

.Mac and XML-RPC

Apple has released the .Mac SDK, allowing developers to integrate their applications with Apple’s members-only suite of web-hosted applications. Interestingly, the “Using the .Mac SDK” page says that “.Mac supports network access via WebDAV, HTTP, XML-RPC, and other open standards.” The focus of the SDK however appears to be on a set of Cocoa classes that wrap an access API, and there isn’t any documentation on what XML-RPC services are exposed by .Mac.

I would imagine that doing things like membership checking and so forth require a lot more work in XML-RPC, but it would still be interesting to see what the service calls looked like. Other than the one mention in the page I cite above, there’s no further mention of XML-RPC anywhere in the docs.

Anyone got any ideas?