OK, technically it’s a Trojan but I think the term “virus” is better to get attention. The Unofficial Apple Weblog states:

In the wake of the ARDAgent vulnerability discovered yesterday, we all have something new to look out for: OSX.Trojan.PokerStealer is the official name of a trojan horse masquerading as a poker game. The trojan is distributed in a 65K .zip archive.

According to security company Intego, running the trojan activates SSH, and transmits the username, password hash, and IP address of the computer to a server. It asks for an administrator's password after displaying a message about a corrupt preference file that needs to be repaired.

The "PokerGame" application is 159,843 bytes, and includes the text "Copyright 2008 Andrew" in the version information (visible in Get Info).

Don’t be a fool. Don’t download stuff from non-reputable sites and don’t open attachments you don’t know what they are.

RapidWeaver 4.0 was released last week. I got in on the private betas right at the end and was a little concerned but it looks like Realmac has fixed the publishing code. Often times when I would publish with the old version, rapidweaver would fail somewhere in the middle. I had to export the site and manually copy the entire site via the finder.

The two times I have published the site so far it has published sucessfully. This means more blogging (hopefully).

Here’s what else is new:

Version 4.0 - May 29th 2008

• Application Updates
• Brand New User Interface.
• New open file format (RWSW).
• Pretty URL's (i.e. Cruftless links).
• Easy theme management:
• Folder support.
• New Hi-Resolution Theme Previews.
• Theme Searching.
• WebClip icon support.
• One-click Publishing.
• Google Analytics Support.
• RapidWeaver News Centre.
• Picture Taker Support.
• Styled Text Editing Toolbar.
• 4 Completely new themes.
• Custom Link Attributes in the Add Page Sheet.
• Improved and expanded Plugin Architecture.
• Site logo now has width and height attributes set in the source.
• Publishing can now be cancelled.
• Numerous other fixes and enhancements.

I use in the back up strategy of having one local backup and one remote backup. If your house burns down, I still have a copy of your data thats not in my home. In Febuaray I signed up for a paid Mozy account, an internet back-up provider to take care of the offline backup. I had been trying the free version of their beta software for several months and was happy with the way the software performed. Also, they were the only ones to offer a Mac version.

My goal was to back up just my home folder. The total size of the folder is about 80 GB, with my itunes folder taking up about 30 gigs and my photos folder taking up about 40 gigs. Knowing that Mozy has bandwidth limitations I’ve let it back up in sections. I first let it back up my Documents folder then enabled the Music folder and now I’ve enabled the Photos folder.

It’s taken about 3 months to back up my itunes folder. Thats a long time and the biggest limitation is the upload speed and the amout of data that can be uploaded in a day. Both of which are imposed by Mozy (I will add the specifics when I can find them). I can uplodad an unlimited amout of data.

I have used the restore function a few times for small amounts of data, but if I need to restore the entire data set I can request they send me it via snail mail via physical media for small fee.

They charge $5 a month but I signed up for 2 years at $99. Seems like a good price compared to trying to set up my own server in a remote location.

The software I use for home automation set up has had a major update to 3.0. I've been beta testing it when it was known as 2.5 and there have been quite a few significant features added. There is now support for the Insteon thermostat adapter, which I've been using. There is also support for scenes and links, which allows the control of multiple Insteon devices at once with a single powerline command.

The Unoffical Apple Weblog has a quick write up on it as well as a CooconTech thread.

About 5 years ago Intel was giving PC to employees. I got one of those PCs, a HP Vectra VL420 MT. As a Mac guy I did use it for a few things, games mostly. This thing has no built in video and I upgraded the video card to a ATI Radeon 9800 All In Wonder. With the video card I am driving a Apple 21" Monitor via DVI.

A side effect of this new video card is apparently the BIOS cannot display through it. While the HP logo and start up text is suppose to display I get a black screen with the Apple monitor flashing it's LED. I don't get a display until the Windows login screen shows up, which displays normally and in full resolution.

I haven't had this thing powered up for several years. It's still a very capable computer and I want to run an alternative OS on it (that's for another exciting blog post). I need to access the BIOS. Any of my dozen or so readers have any ideas?

I was thinking about the 30% cut Apple gets from applications. It seems like a lot but is probably less or the same than what PalmGear charges for Palm apps. Besides the fact that there are no hosting or credit card charges, how will it help to keep piracy down?

If you buy the application from the itunes store and there's no registrations to share, it should make it harder to pirate. What would stop some one from copying an application from one iPhone to another? Does the application become hard coded to the phone?

I have a love/hate relationship with Quicken. I love it's features and capabilities, I hate it's bugs and UI and poor quality from Intuit. Looks like they are addressing these issues. ArsTechnica visited the Intuit booth at Macworld and found a whole new Quicken like application called "Quicken Financial Life for Mac".

The 1.0 release will focus on core features: cashflow, downloading, taxes, budgeting. It will not work well with investments, being limited to tracking your holdings. As an example, I own 1000 shares of Apple (I wish), and that's worth $180,000 or whatever it is at the end of the day after downloading security info. Why the feature retrograde? Because QFLM is a whole new application—Cocoa from the ground up. It's a Universal Binary that takes advantage of Leopard... though I forget to ask if it is Leopard only. I'll update on on that. Intuit is currently looking for beta testers, so now is a good time to sign up... somewhere. You can do it here. It's your fault for not being here.

They say it's not feature comparable to the current version of Quicken, but it seems to have the features I'm interested in. I would sign up to be a beta tester if I could figure out where. I've signed up many years before but they have yet to ask me.

I've found little use for Dashboard. I use the stock and weather widgets and that's about it. Package Tracker is a extremely handy widget for tracking packages. It works well as a widget since it's something I simply want to check out once or twice a day. It also supports Growl, so if I'm sitting at my computer I get a instant notification of the status. The interface is well thought out and it's free, as far as I can tell.

The 4.0 beta is out with a lot of improvements. check it out at Mike Piontek's website.

Back in April of 2007, I complained about Acquisition's product registration. The issue is that Acquisition activation failed. The developer, Dave Watanabe, responded to my email saying that my activation code was pirated and offered no recourse. The problem with Acquisition's product activation scheme is it relied completely on a email address to activate. If a email address is public, it doesn't take much to guess by just trying out random emails of known mac users.

Dave may have not offered any further response to my emails, but he did eventually address the issue. In October I received the following email (yes, a little late):

Acquisition 2, a major new release of Acquisition, is due for release in the coming days. Along with this major release, new activation codes are being created for license verification. Since you qualify for complimentary upgrades to major releases, your code is included below.

Included was a new code that did not rely on my email address. Once again I can use Acquisition. Still, the whole ordeal put a sour taste in my mouth. I use Tranmission for my bittorrent needs and don't have much use for Acquisition unless there's something very obscure I'm looking for.

Perceptive Automation has released Indigo 2.5 Beta 11 which now includes the long awaited Insteon Link Management. Links are a way to create scenes or groups with a single command sent through the power line. It also allows the setting of individual ramp rates and brightness levels.

I'm not completely familiar with Insteon PC software, but I don't think there's a software package that allows both link management and control of triggers and scripting in a single package. Yes, I'm a Indigo fanboy, but for good reason.

Here's some screen shots of the new features:

Manage Insteon Device Links

Edit Action Group

If you view subscribe to this site's RSS feed and click on a link to one of my pages only to find a "not found" page, its all thanks to idisk. The problems first start with RapidWeaver, which still insists to publish the whole site instead of just new pages. During the course of publishing 1200+ pages my idisk will disconnect for no apparent reason.

Tiger had some problems like this but Leopard is a whole lot worse. Since the rss feed page is one of the first files to get uploaded, it shows up right away. The rest of the pages can take hours or days to be uploaded. If there's something you want to read, come back in a day or so and see if it finally was uploaded.

The pipe was pretty simple to make. I use my RSS feed as the source, filter based on the item.category XML item and use the output as the new rss feed. I have published this pipe and can be viewed at this link: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=ZuZMORNV3BG_9SduLe2fWQ.

CompUSA is going out of business. I'm not sure what it is, too much competition, high prices, they can't figure out what it is they sell? Back in the day (early 1990's), they were one of the few places one could find Apple computers and accessories. My second Mac, a Centris 610, was purchased from a CompUSA in Arizona. I recall writing on a AMUG BBS about this computer's 20MHz 68LC040 being "blazing fast".

The actual purchase of the computer was not so blazing fast. I went to the salesman and said I want to buy that computer. The salesman goes to his little WYSE dumb terminal type machine and comes back with paperwork for me to fill out. I fill out the rather long form then wait like an hour to actually get the computer brought to me. Then i take it up front to pay for it.

Once in New Mexico, CompUSA was the only computer store to sell Apple products. Despite it being on the other side of town, sometimes taking a hour to get there, I used to visit frequently. I actually bought Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" there when it came out since there was no Apple store in town at the time. It's probably been a good year since I've been there, prices are too high and their selection was poor.

Leopard 10.5's "Alex" voice singing Depeche Mode's Just Can't Get Enough". Comedy gold people, comedy gold.

MacOSaiX lets you build mosaic images from various photo libraries, including your, google images or videos. It's been in alpha state for ages, but glad to see it's finally updated and Leopard compatable.

Version: 2.0
Released: Nov. 19, 2007
New features:
Now compatible with Leopard.
Newly found images now "zoom" into place.
Image sources can now be designated as "filler".
Saving mosaics as very large images is now handled more gracefully.
Handling of EPS images is improved.
Bugs Fixed:
Folder image sources no longer reset when a mosaic project is re-opened.
Symbolic links are now handled correctly by Folder image sources.
Searching for flickr photos that match all of the given tags now works correctly.
Google images sources are working again when running on Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther).
Google images sources now load correctly when a mosaic project is re-opened.
QuickTime image sources now behave better.
No longer crashing when using red-, green- or bluescale colors with a Glyphs image source.
No longer crashing when getting the count of matching photos from flickr.
No longer crashing when an invalid image is chosen as the original.
No longer crashing when double-clicking the hand-picked image source.
No longer crashing at some point after editing an image source.
No longer crashing on quit when there is an unsaved Glyphs image source.
No longer crashing when clicking in the menu bar when no windows are open.
Many memory leaks were fixed.
Known issues:
Hiding the status bar is not working.
Zooming the window causes it to jump around.

Unlike the previous program I posted about, that didn't work, this one does. Leopaque makes your menu bar opaque. It's essentially a terminal command that changes a setting in Mac OS X 10.5 wrapped in a windowed interface.

It works perfectly.

Eternal Storms Software has a utility to make the menu bar in Leopard, Mac OS X 10.5, opaque.

[Update 11/11/07] According to the developers weblog, it's not working as expected for everyone.

Intego is warning Mac users of a Trojan Horse on Mac OS X. Named OSX.RSPlug.A, it masquerades as a quicktime plugin that needs to be downloaded when watching porn. It then changes the DNS address on the users computer which points to more porn. MacOSXHints as a quick tutorial on removing the Trojan Horse.

Intego has warned about other malware on the Mac, only to be accused of overblowing the situation. The other warnings were more about theoretical attacks, this appears to be real. It's only showing up on porn sites now, but it could be a prototype for use in wider distribution later.

Look what CD I found in my stash. MacAdvocate 2 from the Fall of 1997, 10 years old. I also have a Mac OS 8 and Mac OS 9.2 CD. Ahh... Good times...

The FedEx guy arrived at about 9am on Friday to deliver my copy of Leopard. I've read different things that suggest that Apple requested FedEx to deliver copies of Leopard as soon as possible or to get them as close to 6PM. I doubt either is true. In any case there was no T-Shirt in the box. I would have loved to go the Albuquerque Uptown Apple Store, but what a pain in the ass it is to get to that side of town. Thanks Mom, for going to the San Tan Apple Store in Az and getting one for me!

The first thing I did once getting it installed was to hook up an external hard drive and get Time Machine running. I haven't yet been able to allow it to copy the entire drive yet. I really like that Time Machine quits gracefully and without complaints when I disconnect the drive.

Spaces is the other feature that I have been using heavily. How i did I ever live without it? I love uncluttering my desktop with windows by moving them to separate windows.

UI wise, I don't have a lot of complaints. Chris Pirillo has a long list of issues, which I agree with. They don't bother me that much however. I don't like the transparent menu bar. It's very distracting and I will use the first hack to disable it. I used NextStep in the 1990's for a programming class pretty heavily. This is the most NextOS looking UI yet. It's interesting to see the core ideas of the early Mac OS (and much of that was in the NextOS) start to show themselves after so many years.

I'm looking forward to using iChat's screen sharing to fix people computers, as soon as they all get Leopard installed. Using Apple Remote Desktop was a pain.

Leopard will be released on Friday, 26 October.

There was a interesting comment on a MacOSXHints entry about Filevault that I found interesting (check out the one by wastemytime).

While early versions of FileVault may have been susceptible to the corruption you fear, you should be aware that Apple quietly introduced a new version of it in Mac OS X 10.4.7 last year.
In earlier versions, the sparseimage's headers were written at the end of the file (they should've been called trailers then), so, if there was a problem writing or compressing the image, it could easily be corrupted.
With the 10.4.7 update, they introduced a new version of sparse disk images so the headers are at the beginning (appropriately enough), making them much more resistant to failure.
The catch is, if you created your FileVault with an earlier version, it continues to use the old, more fragile format. The solution is to just turn FileVault off, then turn it on again (probably using the secure erase option). The new FileVault will use the new format.

I whined and bitched about my dam crappy MacBook Pro and how it wouldn't operate on battery. I always had to keep it plugged in. Multiple calls and visits to Apple resulted in them saying my out of warrantee laptop would need a expensive motherboard replacement.

I installed Battery Update 1.3, rebooted and unplugged my power connector. I expected an immediate power off, that's what usually happens. Nope, the computer stayed powered on.

I only left unplugged for a minute but it never ran on battery that long before. A longer term test will be next.

Update 10/07/07 12:09PM: I've been using it on and off battery power for several days and it's been working just like a laptop should. I noticed it wont charge to 100% a few times. I've reset the SMC to see if that will help. I'm happy but perplexed. Perplexed that it was fixed in this manner.

The following is in Sony's FAQ on why they are closing their Connect online music store

Why is the store closing?
We are moving to the open Windows Media® platform in North America. In line with hat, Sony will phase out the CONNECT™ Music Service in the U.S. and Canada. Specific timing will depend on market demand, but will not be before March 2008. To be clear, the CONNECT eBook service for the Sony Reader will not be affected.

Uh what? Windows Media is open? I don't think so. It may be very much more popular than ATRAC (Sony's music format) and licensed by a lot more companies, but it isn't open.

Rapid Weaver 3.6 has some great features. Enough to make me switch. I soon found out it had so bugs, specifically it would publish the enitre site instead of just the changes, even when I select "publish changes." 3.6.1 & 3.6.2 were suppose to address this, I think. For me no dice. 3.6.2 was worse, it would crash while trying to publish anything.

Rapid Weaver 3.6.3 Beta seemed to finally fix both of these issues. I used it for a while and now it started crashing again. What the hell

I submitted bug reports and I hope they help, but I've had to switch back to 3.6.0.

Grrrrrrr...

The one thing I liked about the old iMovie is that it was pretty obvious how to use it. This new version is far more complicated to figure out.

All I wanted from the old iMovie interface was a finder style movie clip interface so I could sort items by date. This whole rewrite was unnecessary.

On the other hand, iPhoto '08 is a great improvement.

I think iLife'08 was suppose to come out earlier, but since Leopard was delayed, they had to fix it to work on Tiger.

A massive update to the iPhone is coming. The iPhone update will have 3rd party application support, better syncing, a notes application, etc. They will all require technologies in Leopard that Apple doesn't want to give away.

The AppleTV will also have some major updates. Once such update could be Safari and the ability to browse the web on your TV (good by WebTV). One such feature will eliminate the need for a keyboard since you will manage and sync bookmarks from Safari on your computer. It also illustrates the need to have Safari on Windows

Apple is scrambling trying to get band-aid fixes in place so people don't loose interest for the next few months. What do you think, am I way of base?

The new Web Gallery iPhoto/.mac integration is a big step. It's still no flickr. Hopefully Apple doesn't wait several more years to innovate further.

Check out my first gallery here: http://gallery.mac.com/gregjsmith#100020

Good to see this sort of thing coming out on the Mac

This application (and included userspace driver) implements portions of the INSTEON command set and allows users to build a list of devices that can be controlled remotely. This application (and driver) is currently under development and will be extended and completed as time permits. The long-term goal for Shion is to package it as a reusable framework for other MacOS X developers.

Shion

Update 08/05/07 9:45 PM RapidWeaver 3.6.2 was worse than 3.6.1 which was worse than 3.6.0. Couldn't even publish without crashing before finishing. Here's hoping for a better result from the next version

RapidWeaver 3.6.2 is released today. I will find out if it fixes on major issue that I have had. When publishing RW would regenerate all 1000+ entries which can take a good hour.

Version 3.6.2 - August 2nd 2007

• Application Updates
• iMedia Browser now supports Aperture
• iPhone theme added
• Preview/Edit mode now animates when switching to code view
• Sidebar now supports add/remove link feature
• Sidebar now supports image manipulation via the Image Inspector
• Master Styles can now be set and managed from the Page Inspector
• Apply to all pages option no longer renames all pages index.html
• Snippets now saved correctly
• The link panel now supports linking to photos in user-created photo albums
• The link panel now supports linking to tags and categories
• Long plugin descriptions now render correctly
• Preference window now uses the unified look
• Scroll arrows now work in the Header/CSS/JavaScript/Prefix tab text fields
• Show/Hide Snippets menu item now sets itself correctly
• Show/Hide iMedia Browser menu item now sets itself correctly
• Get info button now toggles Page Inspector
• Adding/removing Quicktime movies no longer result in a crash
• Theme colour tags no longer cause exceptions when exporting
• Editing of fields in media inspector now marks page as changed
• Fixed up some issues with colour tags not being applied to certain pages
• .Mac publishing now uses Smart Publishing again
• Base URL is now checked for .mac address if publishing via FTP
• Various Theme rendering issues fixed
• Various other fixes and enhancements
• Blog Updates
• Users can now specify a custom RSS link for site such as Feedburner
• Now has an option to make the sidbar a php include (Reduces upload time!)
• Users can now customze separator between Comments and Trackbacks
• Now generates the correct file names in the RSS feed
• Theme developers can now style comments and trackbak links
• Various other minor fixes
• Contact Form Updates
• Now works correctly when info strings are empty
• iFrame Updates
• Now displays the correct page in Preview when the document is first loaded
• Movie Album Updates
• Generating thumbnails for movies that have a greater height than width now works properly
• Photo Album Updates
• Fixed an issue with the flickr RSS feed support for Flash Slideshows
• Images are now rotated correctly, if they have been edited in Preview.app
• "Select All" and "Select None" buttons now only affect the current selection
• Fixed sizing issue where images were sometimes 1pixel to large
• Now converts unicode characters correctly

iTunes 7.3.1 is suppose to fix this issue.

Apple's message board indicates that many people on Mac OS X and Windows are having the problem. I see a few people who have a large library and have the library on a external hard drive as I do, but it's not clear that this is the cause. What seems to be the cause is some sort of permissions issue. Possibly. Hopefully Apple gets this one fixed soon.

Update 07/01/07 10:54 AM: There's suggestions to use this Apple tech note to recreate your library. The only problem with this tech note is it will delete any customizations in the library, like ratings and playcounts. I'm going to revert my install to iTunes 7.2 until Apple comes out a fix.

Update 07/02/07 12:29 PM: MaxFixIt is covering the iTunes error now. They have several suggestions including checking for iTunes add ons, Disabling APE for iTunes and restarting in safe mode. I tired all the suggestions and none of them worked. I'm going to play with Tiger Cache Cleaner and see if it will clean up anything.

Update 08/02/07 5:55 PM: Fixed! I removed most of my podcasts, most of them were video podcasts. Once of them must have been screwed up in the iTunes database.

Update 07/06/07 3:49 PM: I re subscribed to some of the podcasts, video and audio, since deleting them all. So far there's been no problem with any of them. They are syncing with my AppleTV and my iPod. I didn't add them all though. There maybe some that I didn't add that maybe causing the problem.

If you don't like the idea of deleting all of your podcasts, try deleting a few at a time. Starting with the video podcasts. Be sure you delete the whole podcast, not just the individual episodes.

Cover Flow in the finder seems to be getting a overwhelming "meh" from those that have seen it. I think it's a great idea since it provides the same visual sorting of documents that I use for sorting my mail and other physical paper documents to the finder. It moves through documents quickly and focuses on one document at a time (unlike the icon view). I'm not saying it should replace search functions, but its another way to find something when the search function doesn't cut it because I don't know the name of the document.

I'm holding off on ordering for the moment, hoping in will find a better deal. In the past Amazon has had cheaper prices on the OS, but I've seen some local stores match it.

Both the single and family versions are #1 on Amazon's best sellers list

The solution is to download the Windows Install Cleanup program from Microsoft. I had to remove Apple Software Update, Itunes and Quicktime. Since I don't use iTunes on my Windows machine, I didn't worry about backing it up. But if i did use it, would have backed it up.

I went back and reinstalled all the Apple programs without any problems

Categories and Tags work basically the same way. You can enter a list of categories or tags on each of their lines for each entry, RapidWeaver will generate a page for each individual category or tag. My previous blog only had categories, I never tagged anything. I'm finding categories so easy to enter that I'm creating a lot of them.

I'm thinking that many of the things I'm entering as categories should be tags and I should reduce my categories to just a few. But what few categories should I use? Or maybe I should just not categorize anything and just tag it all?

Where's the official internet blogging "categories and tagging" guide?

Update 06/07/07 10:26 AM Thanks to EdBrenner on the RapidWeaver forums I read this article on categories and tags. Based on that, i've decided to start tagging entries along with categories. I've started tagging some older stuff, but with a 1000 entries, it's going to take a while

My MacBook Pro isn't able to go to sleep. As soon as I put it to sleep and pull the plug the system completely turns off. This is due to the battery problems I have. SafeSleep helps.

Normally when you close the lid the system suspends-to-ram. This halts processing and other energy draining procedures but it still takes up battery life.

With SafeSleep the system will suspend-to-disk. Eating up as much power as if it were completely shut down. The upshot is in battery savings, the downside is it takes longer to suspend/resume from disk than to ram.

Saving to disk is normally considered hibernation. So far I have to say my MacBook Pro wakes better from hibernation than it does regular sleep.

Via O'Grady's PowerPage

Rapid Weaver 3.6 was released today with some significant improvements. One of which is multiple categories in the blogging module. I won't go into the whole list here so check out the MacUpdate page.

I've been watching the development of RW for a while and I think it's good enough to use as my Blogging platform. Unfortunately there's no way for me to import the 1300+ entries I had my Blosxom blog. It's also missing a few other things that Blosxom can do, but does a lot of things it can't.

A link to the old site is here until I can figure out a way to import the entires. The RSS feed should remain the same.

The FBI still has their "mega contract" with Microsoft. They have infinite Microsoft resources to help them figure out how to get to your stuff if you've used a Microsoft encryption solution.

The FBI has particular trouble with Apple's Filevault encryption if the passphrase is of "excellent" quality. That tells me they have thousands of monkeys doing brute-force attempts on filevault sparseimage files. Interesting.

FBI: Encryption Really Pisses Us Off.

I've been looking for a way to organize all the receipts I get, espcially the ones from Home Depot and Lowes. There's a few programs out there for the Mac but they require you scan them in with another program. They seemed more work than they are worth.

Neat Receipts attempts to solve this problem. They have a program for managing recipts that works directly with a scanner.

Just scan your receipts into the NeatReceipts software. The program will automatically crop, rotate and resize the receipt image, then apply patented Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and character analysis technology to read and understand the text on the receipt.

The killer feature here is that it uses OCR to extract the information from the recipt, eliminating the need to manually enter the information. It also has some sort of IRS certification so that you can keep the scanned doucments for tax purposes, so you can throw out the paper version.

Currently, Neat Receipts on works on Windows XP (a Vista beta is available). They are working on a Mac version for release in 2008, in which I've signed up to be notified. The Neat Receipts scanner and softare are $229.

Nomen Nescio from RailHead Design. For when you absolutely need to keep your emails private.

What it is:

In short, Nomen Nescio is a simple and easy to use application that allows you to send anonymous email via anonymous Cypherpunk Type I remail servers. With the help of MacGPG, Nomen Nescio encrypts the email message you enter (into Nomen Nescio) with the PGP key of an anonymous remailer of your choice, then the encrypted data is passed to your default email client, ready to send.

Features include:

• Simple, clean, and clear interface.
• No more Terminal or command-line work necessary.
• The entire encryption process is handled within Nomen Nescio — all you have to do is enter your message, then click "Send" like any other email.
• Updates remailers and PGP keys at every launch.
• Displays remailer uptime and latency.
• Compose your message directly in Nomen Nescio.
• Built-in version checking.
• 100% FREE!

What it costs:

Nomen Nescio is 100% FREE!

The Fish Bowl blog has a entry about David Watanabe's production activation issue with the Newsfire RSS reader. After reinstalling MacOS X on his MacBook, product activation said his email address was no longer valid and Watanabe suggested it was used for piracy.

Sounds familiar. In Febuary I reinstalled MacOS and tried to reactivate Acquisition (also made by Dave Watanabe), and I got the same kind of message. I could not activate the product with my email. I emailed Dave and he asked for my paypal trasaction ID. He then came back with this response.

Your license has been pretty clearly used by software pirates. David.

It's Not clear to me! I purchased Acquisition in 2003, only ever used it on two computers and I never shared my email with anyone. I replied and said this isn't possible and must be a mistake, but I didn't get any more responses from Dave. A little research (various comments at MacUpdate) indicates that I'm not the only one that has had the activation problem with Acquisition.

Clearly, legitimate users are getting lost in the noise of piracy. Dave's product activation scheme is flawed. People interested in pirating his software only need a email address to activate a item. It doesn't take nearly as much effort to target users who have said they use his software, or just guess vs. issuing a serial number. Instead Dave chooses to insult his customers by calling them pirates.

Update 18 April 2007: Look at Dave Watanabe has a blog entry yesterday and attempts to justify his activation scheme.

simple cooperation and open dialog are usually enough to fix those situations... Are anti-piracy mechanisms bad for the user? Of course not. The honest user should never have an issue and the dishonest users are kept from ruining a project.

Bullhockey on both of those points. I am a honest user and Dave wasn't willing to talk to me.

Bloxsom uses individual text files as entries and it uses the date of those files as the date for the rendered blog. Bloxsom actually uses the modified date of the file to set the date (this seems dumb, but apparently there's a good reason for it). This results in a undesirable effect if you make a change to a entry, the publish date changes to the current date.

The entries_index plug in solves this problem by caching the dates of the files. There's still a problem with the dates of the files not matching the entries_index cache. This Applescript will read the entries_index cache and set the entries (text files) dates back to the dates as defined in the cache.

Download Fix Dates From entries_index.scpt

Age Of Empires III for Mac has been out for several months now, and I've enjoyed playing it. It's a follow up to the aptly named Age Of Empries II, which I also enjoyed playing. It's a control freak like type game, where you control your empire. Production, buildings, miltary and the destruction of other empires if you wish.

The Demo is now available at MacGamefiles. It's one of the first Intel native games released. The other requirements are: G4/G5 or Intel processor running at 1.4GHz or faster, Mac OS X v10.3.9 or higher, 512MB RAM, 64 MB Video Card (with support for hardware T & L). 56K dial-up Internet access or LAN for online play.

Lifehacker compares Vista's BitLocker vs. FileVault. They like BitLocker better.

OS Encryption Showdown: Vista's BitLocker vs. Mac's FileVault - Lifehacker

FileVault encrypts the users's home directory and all the files in it. As you read and write files to your home directory, in the background, FileVault encrypts and decrypts those files on the fly. Only the user's login password can decrypt and mount this drive image, so at login the home directory becomes available as usual - its icon, however, looks like a lock. To other users on the same Mac, however, all files in the user's home directory cannot be accessed.

BitLocker doesn't just encrypt the user's files, it encryptes the entire operating system partition, including Windows files, all your software applications as well as all the users' data stored on the drive. You create a USB key with the password on it and plug it into your PC in order to start it (like a key for your car.) BitLocker uses a small boot partition to check for the right password, and only boots up if it's present. If not, the hard drive is completely inaccessible.

When I went through all these problems with my sparseimage and hard drive corruption, I ended up with some orphaned emlx files. emlx files are the individual email messages that Mail.app uses. A Macworld 911 article reminded me that Mail.app will import mboxes, but will not import these individual emlx files.

To get those emlx files back into Mail.app, you can use emlx to mbox Converter and then import the mbox files. Hopefully Apple will fix this obvious "feature" in a future version of Mail.app.

I wrote about the Fire 1.0 release nearly 3 years ago. Today, TUAW notes that the open source program is being discontinued.

Pre-dating even iChat, Fire was the first multi-protocol client on the platform, and has long had a dedicated user base. The loss of multiple key members of the development team and a reliance on legacy frameworks which were no longer being updated caused key members of the development team to reconsider their future plans and cease active development.

I had tried Fire, but found iChat to have more features. Especially with Chax. They suggest Adium as a replacement, it is also a multi-instant messaging chat program.

MarsEdit, the blog editing software I use for this site, has been Acquired by Red Sweater Software. Can I hear a AMEN? MarsEdit development has ceased since Brent Simmons sold it to NewsGator. In fact, I'd stay it stopped before that.

When my hard drive crashed, I had to reinstall all my applications. I couldn't find the serial number for MarsEdit, and my NewsGator support hadn't got back to me in several days. Today i left a message on the Red Sweater support forums and got a answer via email within 30 minutes. Now that support!

I wrote about the sparseimage of my File Vault user account getting corrupt back in January. I figured this was a sign of a hard drive that was going to die, and sure enough it did. I started my MacBook Pro to find a flashing question mark on a folder. It's as if the entire file system disappeared. The only utility I could get to read the drive was CopyCatX, but it would get stuck at a certain part of the hard drive.

Thankfully I was expecting this, so I had backups of all my important stuff. Except one thing, the entries to this blog. I only backed up my user account and the blog entries are kept in the /Library/WebServer/Documents directory (haven't got Blosxom to render the site when I move them to my user directory).

I came up with a applescript that generates the entries from the static-ly rendered pages on my .mac account. It will extract the file name, entry title, entry content and it sets the date of the file from the contents of the HTML page by using unique text around those items. It also recreates the directory structure. It also generates a log file for files that fail.

It's not a pretty script, didn't put much effort into making it pretty since I'm only (hopefully) using it once. It worked good in a pinch.

I've been trying to find a way to move my iBlog entries over to my Blosxom site for, well the two years since I switched over to Bloxsom. I finally figured out to use Agitprop to convert the entries to the MovableType Export format. I then used the following Applescript to parse the entries to individual files.

I offer this script to anyone that might find it useful. Since it was pretty much a one time use script, I didn't put a lot of effort into making it neat. Use at your own risk. You will probably need to modify for your own use.

Finally there's a few things you need to use this. You need the developer tools installed (it uses setfile to change the dates) and the MT Export file need to be in plain ASCII format, MacRoman formatted with Mac line breaks. Other formats might work but it's easier to pre-format the files with TextWrangler first.

You can download this script here: MT Export File to Bloxsom.zip

Tangerine is a Mac application for analyzing each song in your iTunes music library for BPS, or Beats Per Seconds. The purpose of doing so would be to generate playlists with high BPS for a workout, or low BPS for that night of getting-it-on with the chick you picked up at that party. Tangerine can also generate playlist for you.

It seems that I've tried at least one other program like this, but it was unremarkable because I don't recall it's name. Tangerine is remarkable because of it does what it says it does and that's it. And it does so in a easy to use interface. When generating a playlist it gives a option on the order of high to low BPS songs, so if you can have slower at the beginning, higher in the middle, and lower at the end to match your work out.

The only complaint I have is that it should give an option to choose which where your source songs come from when generating a playlist. You can use a rules list from the preferences, but this is cumbersome. There should be a popup list in the playlist generation dialog. Tangerine is still in beta so it's possible they will add this feature later.

You can download Tangerine here.

Delusions of Grandeur has a preview of of Shiira 2.0, the Japanese open source WebKit based web browser. This next version is the next generation Safari that Safari probably will never be by adding many of the features that the iLife applications have.

With my move to a Intel based Mac, I've enjoyed the performance of all the iLife apps. Especially iMovie. Unfortunately all the add ons and plug-ins are not functional unless they are also Intel native. In the case of iMovie, there's not a lot of choices.

Here's who I've found to be compatible:

• GeeThree - Has recenetly updated all their plug-ins to be Intel compatible.
• ImageIP - says all of their plug-ins are Intel compatible

These don't appear to be compatible.

• cf/x - Not updated since 10.2
• stupendous software - No update on their since isnce Feb 2004, also didn't respond to my emails. Update: They say their plug-ins will be Intel compatible in August.
• eZedia - Their plug-ins appear to be iMovie HD 6 compatible not Intel compatible.
• Virtix - Doesn't appear to be updated since iMovie 4.

I think I got them all covered, except for freeware plugins. GeeThree has the best selection but they are pretty expensive. Their Slick 10 costs as much as iLife itself, which prices me out.

I'm interested to see how well they can do this.

Elgato Systems has announced plans to add a Full Screen menu to its EyeTV software when the 2.3 version is released, hopefully later this month. The Full Screen Menu helps to integrate EyeTV-enabled Macs with Front Row, Apple%u2019s remote control media playing software.

One of my favorite Mac programs is a Mosaic generating MacOsaix. The latest 2.0 beta has been released with some significant features. Not only is it Intel native it includes Flickr image search. I ran it over night and found it to be much more stable than the previous versions. Oh, and it's still FREE!

Here's a list of all the improvements:

• Improved user interface.
• MacOSaiX is now universal and will run on Intel-based Macs.
• Yahoo's flickr photo-sharing service can now be searched for images.
• Mosaics can now be viewed full screen.
• A new kiosk mode is available.
• Added display options for the background of mosaics.
• Brought back and improved the puzzle piece tile shapes.
• The image crop limit can now be disabled.
• Autosaving can now be disabled.
• Mosaics can now be saved as PNG files.
• The resolution can now be set when saving as an JPEG, PNG or TIFF file.
• Mosaics can now be saved as web pages:
• A pop-up window follows the mouse and shows image detail. Live links to flickr images.
• The size of the Google and flickr disk caches can now be customized.

While I was waiting for my truck to be ready at MBS, I was on my computer and decided to look for some wireless networks. Although there is a small office building near the shop I seriously doubt there is a FBI Piracy Division located there. I also seriously doubt they would name their wireless network "FBI PIRACY DIVISION", more likely this is security-by-misleading. I suspect the result will be that it just attracts more hackers.

I've got my copy of iLife now. I've been playing around with iWeb for a few hours and I can say that I'm impressed. The ease of creating a web pages in the WYSIWYG editor is done in only the way that Apple can do. The resulting pages look just like what was in the editor. It's a great solution for a newbie or experienced user alike, except that it's lacking several features that a experienced blogger would miss.

When you create a new page for your site it brings up a window that lets you pick a template and the type of page you want to make. It's nice that you can mix and match templates inside your site. The template styles all have the same looks as the templates with the other iLife apps. With a choice of twelve templates, your not likely to have a original site. There doesn't seem to be anyway to make new templates or modify the existing ones. Hopefully someone figure out the format or apple will release a spec or template editor. The templates are individual files located in the package contents of the application so it seems they were designed to be modular.

There are three basic type of pages, the static page (welcome, about me and movie pages), the blog style pages (blog and podcast) and the photo pages. All of them are easy to edit. The text areas, pictures and other elements are all resizable end editable. Just like you would expect with a WYSIWYG type editor and in the typical "monkey could do it" Apple way. It's easy to make these pages. A interesting item to note is text which is made with non standard font is turned into a graphic image.

Nothing fancy about the static pages. The photo pages have a high degree of integration with iPhoto, like no other application I know of. When you want to add photos you simply drag them in and publish. The blog portion is what interested me the most. I'm looking for a great blogging application with a high level of integration with .mac. Unfortunately iWeb is not that application. Although it has the great WYSIWYG editor, it's missing the important elements of a blog. No comments, no side bars and no template editing. You get a front page that lists the entries (no control over the number of entries), a entry page and a archives page. The archives page simply lists all entries by date but has no other navigation such as calendar. A newbie may like the simplicity but a experienced blogger, such as myself, will be frustrated with the lack of typical blog layout options.

24 things you can do with your laptop, some which relate to computing.

"My IBM laptop makes a great veggie squeezer!"

I just noticed this, in Safari's RSS. A multi page interface. I've been using Safari's RSS since Safari came out and this is for sure the first time I've seen this.

Is it something that I just turned on by accident or is it part of the nightly WebKit builds using NightShift?

Brushed Metal: No? iTunes 5 is still on? Then why the fuck am I not there?

John Gruber's blog is annoying, but sometimes he comes up with some good stuff. Like this post on Apples not following it's own Human Interface Guidelines and the demise of the Metal interface in iTunes 5.

Macosxhints posts this handy script that will search your Apple Address Book and add any contacts with Gmail email addresses to your iChat jabber buddy list. I've reproduced the script here for easier reading.

--Open this script in a new Script Editor window.

tell application "Address Book"
    -- much faster with large Address books if you make a smart list called "Gmail'ers" in Address Book that has people who have "gmail.com" in their email addresses, and then use the following line instead of the one after that
    -- set contacts to (every person in group "Gmail'ers")