Author: mike (Page 25 of 26)

MacPAD… Why didn't I think of this?

January 9, 2004 / mike / 0 Comments

MacShareware.net today released an SDK to help save Mac software developers time when releasing their applications. If you have released a piece of software before, you know it is a ton of work. I usually spend a couple of hours writing something up, and posting it to all kinds of web sites. With MacPAD, it will be a lot easier. From their site, it sounds like Windows developers already have something similar to this…

Basically, how it works is you create a PAD file with information about your application release. This has a short description, long description, release notes, etc, all contained in an XML file. You then upload this file to your website and let other websites such as VersionTracker and MacUpdate know where your PAD file is. Then, all you have to do to release a new version is to simply update the PAD file at that URL. Other servers should pick up the change in a matter of hours.

I really hope that other software sites adopt this method of updating software, as it would make my life a lot easier when releasing XRG. The project is open source and has a page on SourceForge. You can find out more information about the MacPAD SDK here.

New Apple Products

January 7, 2004 / mike / 0 Comments

I have to say that I was a little disappointed with the new hardware offerings that Apple introduced at MacWorld yesterday. I was expecting a new machine that was kind of “out there” to celebrate the 20th Anniversary of the Macintosh. A few years ago (1997 I think), Apple released the 20th Anniversary Macintosh to celebrate 20 years of being in business. It would have made more sense to call this the 20th Anniversary Apple, or something different so they would be able to ship a real 20th Anniversary Mac this year. For it’s time though, the 20th Anniversary Mac was “out there” compared to the more boring machines of it’s time. It was no speed demon, but it’s design was top notch.

Instead, we got new iPod minis and a new G5 XServe. Both of these are pretty nice products, but it just wasn’t what I was expecting.

I think the iPod minis miss their intended market slightly. Apple wanted to have competition in the high-end flash card MP3 player market. The iPod mini does do very well when you just look at it in a narrow field of high-end flash players. However, I wouldn’t buy one at the price that they set for it. $249 for a 4Gb player? Yes it’s only $50 more than Rio’s 256Mb offering, but the 15Gb iPod is only $50 more for almost 4 times the storage. Give me that amount of space for $150-200 and you have a sale.

The XServe G5 looks like a pretty nice machine. Being able to get dual G5s cooled enough to run in a 1U rack gives me hope that we’ll see a G5 Powerbook soon. Then again, they had to put 7 fans in there to do it…

Advertising in Web Server Logs

January 7, 2004 / mike / 0 Comments

Today I was checking out my web server statistics and I came across 5 or 6 lines in the referrer section that advertised sites that would never link to my web server. I really hope this isn’t a new form of “SPAM” that will be used by advertising companies in the future.

You would think that the number of people who actually look at their web server logs wouldn’t be large enough for companies to go through the trouble of faking a referrer. Also, personally, I will be a lot more pissed off if things like this throw off my log statistics than I do when I get some SPAM in my inbox. At least there are some reasonable ways to block most advertising email (I use a combination of SpamAssassin on the server and Apple’s Mail.app Client that is blocking about 99% of the SPAM I get now). Then again, spammers never cease to amaze me in the hacks they put together just so people might see their ads.

Loving and Hating Objective C

December 16, 2003 / mike / 0 Comments

Jonathan Rentzsch has an interesting blog posting listing the top 10 things he loves about Objective C and the top 15 things that he hates about Objective C. If you are at all interested in Objective C, check it out.

I would have to say that categories is my favorite Objective C feature. In case you don’t know, categories allow you to add methods to a class definition without changing the original class. This means that you can add functionality to classes that you don’t even have the code for. In the past, to accomplish something like this, I would create a subclass of the original and add my method there. Categories are much more useful because any object of the type that is being categorized automatically obtains the new functionality without any changes in code.

Yahoo's new Anti-SPAM idea

December 6, 2003 / mike / 0 Comments

While it seems that it will take a long time before something like this is implemented, Yahoo announced today that it is coming up with a new way to verify the origin of all email. While, the concept isn’t necessarily new, the implementation would be. Basically, they want to require all mail servers to have their own PGP key pair for a domain. In order to send mail, the sending server would include a small header containing a signature created by encrypting the message hash with it’s private key, and the receiving server would check to make sure that the signature decrypts with the public key to the hash that matches the message content.

This seems like a great idea to me. 90% of the SPAM that I get is from yahoo.com or aol.com addresses, but don’t originate from their servers. This would force people to send mail from their real network domain. Of course, this would cause a whole new set of problems. People would have to make sure their private keys are kept private (I can see it now…”Buy our CD of 100 million private keys for $99.95!”). There would also have to be an easy way of issuing a new key to a domain if for some reason they believe their private key has been compromised.

PhotoStickies and Tailer+

December 5, 2003 / mike / 0 Comments

In the past couple of days I have discovered 2 pretty cool Shareware/Freeware applications for MacOS X. Short descriptions follow along with a screenshot.

The first is a freeware application called PhotoStickies by Christian Grunenberg. PhotoStickies allows you to show images in borderless windows. You can open either a local image or a image hosted on the web, and the nice part is that you can set a refresh time for that image. This is perfect if you want to monitor a webcam or system monitor graphs and don’t want to fill your desktop with several web windows. Another plus to this app is that you can order the windows to be below all others, so they aren’t getting in your way all the time.

The second app is shareware ($15) and is called Tailer+ by Chris Schleifer. Tailer+ allows you to display borderless text windows and either get the text from a command, or “tail” a file on the hard drive. The unregistered version allows up to 3 windows. Registering the app will remove that limitation. This application is still fairly new, but so far it’s looking pretty good and I’ve only found a few minor bugs.

Here’s a screenshot of both programs running on my Powerbook. In the top left corner, you can see 3 PhotoStickies windows monitoring various network bandwidth graphs created by MRTG. Then in the lower left corner I have a PhotoSticky of a webcam in the CS department here at the University of Arizona. It acts as my “window” here at the office since I don’t have one otherwise. 🙂 In the lower right corner there are two Tailer+ windows (one tailing my system.log, and the other tailing my console.log), and of course I have XRG on the bottom.

Christmas Lights

December 3, 2003 / mike / 0 Comments

Well, Katrina and I finished putting up Christmas Lights on our house for the holidays. I took a picture a couple of nights ago. You can check it out here. The blue river is on top of where we have a rock river by day. Overall, we put up 3,765 lights this year. 🙂

Matt Barger's Blog

December 2, 2003 / mike / 0 Comments

Matt Barger just started his fifth attempt of having a blog. I met Matt a the O’Reilly MacOS X Conference, and his session, Give Your iBook a REST, had some excellent insight into how we currently organize our personal data and how personal data could be organized in the future. You can download his presentation file here. Anyway, check out his blog at http://www.mattbarger.com.

XRG 0.4.0 Release Summary

December 1, 2003 / mike / 0 Comments

Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving. I was going to post this sooner, but I got caught up in the holiday weekend. 🙂

Looking at the web stats, this release of XRG was pretty successful. The first two days are always the busiest, mostly because software sites like VersionTracker and MacUpdate will post new software on their front page for a two day period. Anyway, in that time frame, the web site served 3517 pages to 1650 visitors. In the first 5 days of the release, there were approximately 2200 downloads of the application (some people from the software sites above download the app directly, instead of visiting the web site) and 153 downloads of the source code. I wish some more of those people who downloaded the source code would contribute new features. 🙂

Anyway, overall, I’m pretty pleased with the release. It got posted on the MacNN and MacInTouch news sites, which was pretty cool. If anyone who uses XRG is reading this, let me know what you think in the writeback.

Anti-SPAM Act

November 25, 2003 / mike / 0 Comments

I thought this was an interesting post, originally linked to on Slashdot. If you’re curious about the effects that the Anti-SPAM Act will have, check it out. Doesn’t look like it will help much at all. Gotta love the power of marketing companies as lobbyists. The only hope (as mentioned by the second comment on the post) is that Congress will notice that it doesn’t help after it is passed and finally pass a law that will stop SPAM. At the very least, they should force spammers to include the text ADV in the email subject header such as the anti-spam laws in California do. This wouldn’t save bandwidth, but it will allow people to have an easy filter added to their mailbox to take out a huge chunk of SPAM.

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