The FuzzyStuff: OSX

Feedster Adds Sherlock Support and it Rocks !!!

Tue, 15 Jul 2003 14:04:20 GMT

Feedster Adds Sherlock Support and it Rocks !!!

Wow! I'm totally seeing the benefit of working with a real apple developer -- my partner Francois. He just implemented Feedster sherlock searching and it just plain rocks. As a mostly PC guy, I doubt I'd have even thought about supporting this but Francois is a tried and true Apple guy and just took it on himself to do this. Wow. Sherlock is an extensible user interface structure where different apps can have different "search channels" so if you use a Mac and you like Feedster then just go here:

sherlock://http://www.feedster.com/soap/Feedster/SherlockChannel.xml?action=add

(Note that this link might get mangled by Radio / IE and you might have to copy and paste it). Cool stuff.

Preliminary Thoughts on the iSight

Mon, 14 Jul 2003 14:33:10 GMT

Preliminary Thoughts on the iSight

Here is an unorganized jumble of thoughts about the iSight:

Its the 1st webcam worth owning. Period the end. The device is just plain wonderful.
If you have any errors making it work then you should just re-install OSX. I couldn't have made this work without Francois' patience and support. Thx man.
iChatAV is quite good. Apple did a nice job.
www.evological.com makes it a real uploading webcam. Thanks to the person who recommended this to me (and I can't remember your blog; sorry).
Performance on iChat AV can pull down the entire machine. I actually recommend dumping video often and just using the audio portion. That works well.
iChat AV needs a peer to peer option so it doesn't go over the AIM network
iChat AV needs a secure option for encrypted communications (remember -- iChat AV isn't free; you have to buy Panther when its available to get it)
There needs to be a simple command & keystroke for "Save a Jpeg Right Now So I can email it to a friend". If there is I can't find it. And don't even mention to me the abortion that is grab.
Full screen mode is cool.
Limit your bandwidth to 500K.
iSight makes a classic webcam app like Yahoo IM look like a Model T
I need to work out better lighting to use the camera well. So will you I bet.
Sleep mode on a laptop is just plain lame when you use iChat and you're not giving the system regular keyboard input
Working shirtless in the summer is inappropriate with iChat. Keep a light shirt handy for those off the cuff conferences.

Overall? Highly recommended. Francois and I are using this more and more instead of the phone.

iSight Not Working? Just Reinstall OSX

Sat, 12 Jul 2003 19:54:33 GMT

iSight Not Working? Just Reinstall OSX

Yep that's what it took but it works! Whoo Freaking Hoo! I'm available via my feedster2003 account using iChat AV.

iSight: The first webcam worth owning.

Sigh. iSight Problems => iBook Problems

Sat, 12 Jul 2003 17:57:26 GMT

Sigh. iSight Problems => iBook Problems

I'm in the middle of an OSX full reinstall -- I went to the Apple store, the camera was fine but my iBook (which HAD been fine) refused to boot. So its back to the CDs and off to the races. Sigh.

Oh and while others may be able to make their iSights work on a PC, I find that mine reboots the PC when I plug it into my fireware daisy chain. Cool !

So You Want to Support Safari But You Don't Have a Mac.... Use Linux!

Wed, 02 Jul 2003 20:23:06 GMT

So You Want to Support Safari But You Don't Have a Mac.... Use Linux!

I redid the user interface for the Feedster Preferences page yesterday (no its not live yet) and all of a sudden Francois said something like "Dude. What are you thinking ????". Now I was testing it on Firebird and IE and all was happy DIV Goodness. But on Safari it was DIV Hell. So I tried it in Konquerer under Linux and got EXACTLY the same error.

How'd I solve it? I cheated. I put a Smarty if statement around the DIV tags that made it work i.e.

{if $browser eq "safari"}
HTML JUNK TO MAKE IT LOOK RIGHT (it breaks my blog template)
{/if}

For some reason that makes the DIV stuff work on Safari. No clue why. And the thought of manually counting DIV tags to make sure they are all balanced makes my skin crawl. So I'm back to browser specific hard coding. This looked perfect on IE PC / IE Mac / Mozilla Mac / Firebird Linux / Firebird PC but not on Safari and Konquerer (Safari uses the Konquerer rendering engine). So all I can say is:

THANK YOU SO MUCH APPLE FOR NOT USING THE GECKO RENDERING ENGINE

But it does say a lot though about how Apple has come back that I took the time to make it work on Safari, doesn't it?

NetNewsWire Sale

Mon, 30 Jun 2003 20:18:32 GMT

NetNewsWire Sale

Brent is selling NetNewsWire (expires today) for only $29.95.

Apple, Panther and Paying Again for an OS Upgrade

Tue, 24 Jun 2003 02:15:09 GMT

Apple, Panther and Paying Again for an OS Upgrade

Given my propensity for that style of writing commonly known as "The Rant", you might be expecting me to trash Apple for charging all of us again for an OS upgrade. Actually I had my keyboard poised to write just that rant but I stopped. I thought "Before making an ass out of yourself, make sure. Do your research." So I jaunted off to the official Panther web site and took a look. And I actually read pretty much all of it.

You know what? I'm still honked at paying again for this so quickly but I actually think its a fair deal. Apple has done a good job on Panther and if they want to charge, so be it. I'm not sure if I'll actually upgrade since my Mac usage is more on the order of "Does X website work correctly under OSX?" than day to day desktop usage. My guess is just the improved Mail client alone is almost worth the full cost.

I honestly think they've done a damn good job. Thanks Apple.

Mac OSX Help Requested !

Wed, 07 May 2003 12:38:30 GMT

Mac OSX Help Requested !

I've moved to an iBook as a my primary laptop now and I've entered "the land where batteries don't work". I have an iBook 12.1" model # A1005 and my original battery now gives me less than 30 minutes of service. So I trot my little self off to the apple store and buy another right before php-con. The result? Maybe 45 minutes of service. I return it and get another. The same. I run the Apple system software update and the same.

Now from sixapart I find that there are real issues but I just don't know what to do. Get a new battery from the apple store? Pray for the energizer bunny's spirit to infect my iBook. Break it in two and go back to a ThinkPad running Windows XP (yeah right).

Help ! I'm going to Gnomedex in July as well as SuperNova and I don't want to be the only person with an extension cord dragging behind them.

Some Random Bits to Round Out the Night

Tue, 29 Apr 2003 01:28:05 GMT

Some Random Bits to Round Out the Night

Like a lot of bloggers, I blog stuff often because I know that **I** want it again. So here's a bunch of that for the night:

Picture of the day: Duck Walk (go see, its cool)
Good MacOSX freeware to install including a good ASCII editor (mi), an Outliner (MyMind) and more
Pictures from PHP-Con: Day 1, Day 2. My what a geeky bunch we are ... (Tip on how to spot the vendors at a conference, they never look as geeky as the attendees).
John Coggeshall's php-con trip report. Interestingly he seems to be as favorable on Sams as I am. Watch out O'Reilly !
Marco's php-con trip report.
I think its time to register for OSCon. *grumble* Its in Portland this year! Ack.
Don Park has some cool thoughts on News Aggregators. Don if you want to tie this into Feedster, let me know....
Adam's pissed at Slashdot and I suspect I'm violating their TOS also. Sigh.
New charges in the Mike Hawash case. And even so his friends are sticking by him -- Good For Them !
Details from news.com on the new Apple audio system. It seems to be NOT MP3 files which means that I'll never bother with it -- who needs another crappy format ?
Via Keith: Tim Bray on Unicode. Nice !
Adam on Google's RSS feeds. Not so nice.
Preview of Longhorn. Picture.
Free MP3 audio books.
Ranting about Corporate Stupidity from Derek. All too true.

I've been blogging like this for a while but not always getting back to it. Now that I have Feedster, I can just drill down on my own blog to find anything I've linked to. Example.

PHP-CON: The Return Home aka "The Trip Report"

Sun, 27 Apr 2003 22:41:39 GMT

PHP-CON: The Return Home aka "The Trip Report"

Wow! What a really great conference. I just had an outstanding time. Here were some of the highlights:

My Presentations

Getting a good reaction to my "Getting Started with PHP" class. Attendance was small but everyone seemed to leave with a good idea of how to work with PHP. Its the 1st time in a long time that I've taught a beginning programming class so that was very gratifying. (the last one was a class on Awk of all things).
My presentation on PHP Subtleties was very well received. The audience was both appreciative and quite sharp -- they correctly caught a few issues. Most notably I had not specified deprecated behavior with respect to references). I'll post both presentations on my site once I review and fix this.

Other Presentations

George Schlossnagle did a great job on his Performance Tutorial.
Jeremy Zawodny did his usual outstanding work on "How can we make this wacky MySQL database work even faster". He also covered the new i variants of the mysql calls in MySQL 4.1 which were new to me.
Rasmus re-affirmed his committment that PHP5 would be fast, fast, fast for non-oop code. Good news for the non-object devotees among us.
Rasmus' Tips and Tricks presentation was, as always, quite good. And this is the coolest slide of them all.
I didn't hit a lot of the other presentations due to a) slide twiddling or "can I obsess a bit more..." b) networking with other folks c) general exhaustion

Miscellaneous

Bryan, Monica, Tiffany and all the others involved did a fantastic job pulling everything together. The only real issue I had was that the rooms didn't have wifi access -- but the conference halls did.
The hotel, the Park Grand Central, treated a number of attendees shabbily at best and I strongly wouldn't recommend this hotel to anyone who travels in Manhattan. A pox upon them.
Gallagher's is an outstanding New York steak house. Think "Large pieces of outstandingly good cow" and you'll be dead on.
I hung out quite a bit with the Sams Publishing folk since I'm talking to them about tech reviewing / editing work and I was really impressed with the attention that they give their authors. I've written for both Wiley and O'Reilly as well as lots of magazines and I haven't ever seen such good "handholding" of authors. Now I know that's not exactly the correct term but I'm not sure what to use in its place. Suffice it to say that Sams takes damn good care of their authors. If I was a tech book author looking for a publisher then I'd definitely be talking to Sams.
There were great opportunities to network and that was definitely one of the best aspects of the conference.
Much to my disappointment I missed my only chance to meet up with The Nosuch. Next time I guess.

Travelling with an iBook

I have mixed feelings about traveling with an iBook.
Positive:

Found the wifi automatically and without issue
Small, light (relatively, 12.1" iBook)
iTerm is a much better terminal emulator

Cons

New battery I bought from Apple pre trip gave me a grand total of 25 minute of battery life ! No lie.
No battery backed clock in an iBook so everytime the battery failed, I had to reset the time from 1969 forward. That's a lot of damn mouse clicks.
I forgot the proprietary Apple iBook => VGA adapter and had to hunt one down in Manhattan. Yeah I got one but I so don't understand why Apple just doesn't say to themselves "Gee ... Proprietary cables are just plain pathetically stupid and we'll not do them anymore". If only.

Disclaimer: I'm a paid teacher and speaker for php-con so keep that in mind.

Any Sherlock Users Out There ?

Sun, 16 Mar 2003 14:24:36 GMT

Any Sherlock Users Out There ?

Yesterday I got a request to support Apple's Sherlock recommended comments for hyperlinked search results as illustrated here at the request of Ben Meadowcroft. I did so and I think its alright -- so does he. But I'd still like some confirmation.

More on Ben's very cool work tomorrow or shortly (as soon as I know its ok to post it).

Thanks Ben! Excellent suggestion.

From the "Anti-Apple"

Wed, 08 Jan 2003 13:43:38 GMT

From the Anti-Apple or "Is it Better than Getting Laid?"

Now here's an interesting perspective on Apple's new computer:

You know, I gotta hand it to Steve Jobs. He's the only one who can make a six-point-eight-pound $3300 laptop seem like it's better than getting laid. Any wonders why Apple has only 3% of the market share? On the PC side of the fence there are more powerful laptops (with USB 2.0 ports, even) for about $2000. Hey, some people call it getting laid, others call it... [_Go_]

And there's another post in the same vein as well. I wasn't there so I'm reserving judgement but Scoble has an interesting point.

Two Different Opinions on Apple Upgrade Fees

Mon, 06 Jan 2003 13:18:17 GMT

Two Different Opinions on Apple Upgrade Fees

Two of the people I really respect with regard to Apple have directly opposing views on the potential new upgrade fees from Apple for upgrades to iApps.

John / Inluminent:

Again, it's just an idea, but the whole 'pay for upgrades' thing will go over like a lead weight, in my opinion. (We pay more for Apple computer's because the value is there in the built in free applications, not just because they're better computers... It's really hard to compete with some of the $200 Windows and Lindows based PCs that are out there - especially when anyone can install Linux on them or learn to use Windows if they have to). [_Go_]

Andy:

I applaud Apple for having the huevos to charge for good software - but make it worth my money. One of the huge attractions of Apple is the all-in-one package. They sell great computers that come equipped with everything you need to appear like a media genius. If they want to charge me for their software - that's fine. [_Go_]

Since I'm not really a daily user of Mac stuff I'm not really tremendously qualified to comment. But ... (and you knew I'd toss my .02 in there, didn't you?) I suspect that Mac owners will suck it up and pay. Mac folk seem to always accept what Apple dishes out. Me? I'm still pissed over having to shell out for Jaguar which came out only 2 months after I bought an iBook. The upgrade feel amounted to like 10% of the hardware cost which really hurt. So I think that people will pay it but that it won't help customer loyalty at all.

Good OSX Development Tool

Mon, 06 Jan 2003 13:07:22 GMT

Good OSX Development Tool

This sounds cool:

Small Screen is a little app for OS X that overlays various screen dimensions on your monitor for development purposes. [_Go_]

From Studio ID. I keep a set of jpgs around for this and I know that others use Bookmarklets for this but this sounds pretty good too.

Note: I haven't tried this.

More iMac Frustrations

Tue, 17 Dec 2002 11:09:58 GMT

JoeUser is having More iMac Frustrations. It seems like us PC folk always have Mac issues. I can easily see this: "Me: Hi I'm Scott, a recovering Windows addict and I just can't figure out iTunes. Support Group: It'll be ok" [_Go_]

19+ Hours to Incomplete iPod Synchronization

Mon, 09 Dec 2002 16:45:45 GMT

19+ Hours to Incomplete iPod Synchronization

[Sorry for the delays in getting this out. Just a bad, bad, bad day so far. Has anything good ever happened to anyone in the history of the universe on a Monday? I mean sheesh. Oh and did I say it was bad?].

I'm writing this with more than a bit of trepidation -- I know no matter how I write this I'm going to take some flack. So let's start with a disclaimer:

NOTE: The iPod is a work of great beauty. I bloody well love the little beastie. I mean it's the size of a pack of cigarettes and it can hold 20 gigabytes of music. I really do love it. I wouldn't have spent the @)(#*@ 19+ hours, now would I, if I didn't love it?

But .... (And, dear reader, you new a but was coming, didn't you?) The iPod on the PC isn't the effortless thing that Mac folk like to maintain. So here comes my tale of woe.

My iPod arrived Friday afternoon thanks to the wonders of Amazon. Having tasks to accomplish I actually managed to put it aside until Saturday morning, believe it or not. Now that's not to say that I didn't take it out of the box and both ooh and ah at it. Even to say that I "fondled" the lovely lines and delicate curves that are the iPod would not be extreme. Like most modern Apple products, the term "work of art" is not out of the question.
Saturday morning arrived and, despite much important work, I attacked the iPod with the enthusiam of a vandal sacking rome. Installation was pretty much a snap consisting of one CD and connecting it to the Firewire interface I've been using for months now.
Now, as a blog reader and someone who's boring enough to do his homework, I know that the MusicMatch iPod software has been pretty widely "dissed" in favor of Ephpod. Ephpod is from a 3rd party developer and closer to iTunes than is MusicMatch. Since I've never been a MusicMatch fan anyway I figured that I should give it a whirl. And now the force left me and a dark cloud entered the room.
Ephpod downloaded in a jiffy, is totally free and looks just plain beautiful. From an interface perspective it made me feel like I was using an iMac -- and that's cool. I clicked on the Add Directory button and told it my MP3 root directory (astonishingly enought -- MP3, can ya believe it?).
It started chugging though my MP3 files. And it quickly found that my MP3 ID tags were not in order. An MP3 ID tag is a bit of metadata stored in the MP3 file which has information like Title, Artist, Genre. If the ID tags aren't present then you pretty much can't even select a file to play. Kind of hard to select the Doors "Light my Fire" when it's artist field is blank or has "Artist" in it.
Now I have 5500 odd MP3 files. So you know here this is going, don't you ....
That's right -- I needed to clean up all my MP3 ID tags -- say 50% of 5500 files times at least three fields (Artist, Title, Genre) -- that's a lot of metadata. Thankfully ephpod just prompts you as it goes and remembers what you last entered. This made cleaning up many of my MP3 files relatively painless. But note that I said "many"....
At the roughly 50% stage (49% to be exact), ephpod crashed. [_Go_] Ok then. I reloaded it and tried to add some more files. Crashed. Sigh. I tried deleting some of the files I had added to ephpod thinking I had reached some kind of capacity limit and that if I deleted them I could add more. Crash.
I continued to play with ephpod for a bit since it's approach to fixing the MP3 ID tags was damn good. I've used other MP3 tagging tools and they pretty much uniformly aren't good.
When ephpod failed to accept any more files, I decided to give it a shot for synching my iPod. That too caused a crash but some music did get to my iPod. That was cool since I could then at least listen to something while I figured out how to deal with my MP3 files and their ID tags.
I surfed over to download.com and looked over the different MP3 tools. I did focus solely on the free tools while ignoring the different $20 to $30 / copy utilities. Most of them weren't very good but MP3 Tag Tools [_Go_] wasn't bad. Actually I'd say that most of them were pretty horrible; fine to edit one or two files and lousy for large scale changes. But MP3 Tag Tools wasn't too horrible and I used that to edit a lot of tags. I mean a lot of tags (I don't know what you did Saturday night but I really can't recommend as a hot date "Tag Editing" or 'But Honey, it'll be fun....'). The cats did their best to keep my company but as Daddy did nothing but stare at a screen and mutter about "ID tags" and "Stupid UI choice / Idiot developer" they lost interest.
After I did as much with MP3 Tag Tools, I moved over to MusicMatch, the software which was officially bundled with the iPod. I've never been a big MusicMatch fan preferring the simplicity of WinAmp over MusicMatch but it works. Generally. Now you do realize that problems are coming when I say something like that, don't you ?
So I started to import my MP3 directory into MusicMatch and, of course, this exposed the different files where I still hadn't gotten the ID tags quite right. Thus began "Tag Session 2" which extended from Saturday night into much of Sunday.
Well I finally got everything ready to go. I had edited all my tags and it was time to do a full synch. Coolness was in the air, wasn't it ?
Well I started to synch and it took a long ass time. I mean multiple hours. And then it got to about 3700 files when this charming little error occurred. [_Go_].
Yup. Division by zero. Which effectively ended my synch process. It did get 3700 odd music files onto my iPod but definitely not all of them.

Total time spent? Approximately 19 hours and all of my music still isn't on the iPod. Now the vast bulk of that wasn't spent actually doing the synch -- the bulk of it was spent normalizing the ID tags in my MP3 files. My guess as to the final Ephpod and MusicMatch functioning / synch problems is that they simply can't handle a music archive of 5500 songs. Given the size of hard discs now a days that's just as dumb as a small collection of brown toads. So I guess that I'll fork my archive into things I'd actually listen to when mobile (rock, punk, new wave, comedy, jazz, new age) and leave things like classical behind since I rarely listen to it. I also clearly have some duplicate files which I can remove to cut down the total number of files.

So why were my ID tags so wrong? Well a lot of my CDs were ripped literally years ago when CDDB wasn't as prevalent. I also have a fair amount of ecclectic CDs (Vince Guaraldi Trio, BachBusters) which just don't show up in CDDB. So a lot of music was just stored in MP3artistcd and I'd play the music via filename never really caring much about the ID tags until they actually mattered. Of course, like most of us, I probably have a few files acquired via some kind of peer to peer distribution and those also had messed up ID tags.

Oh and if you wonder why I tried a lot (5 +) of different tools but wasn't happy, I can only say that when you have files to modify measured in the thousands, a lot of UI assumptions just don't work anymore. Example: To select the genre of a music piece in MP3 Tag Tools, you have to select it from a combo box. That isn't sorted. Try doing that 1,000 times. Heck even doing it 100 times sucks rocks. So most of my music isn't categorized by Genre. MusicMatch allows you to paste in the Genre which is better but lacks a sortable editing grid like MP3 Tag Tools which means I can't just set all the options quickly directory by directory.

Do I regret my purchase? Actually no. Not in the slightest. I seem to have been seduced by Apple's charms in this respect like most other Mac lovers. After all, the MP3 tag normalization would have had to be done no matter what. And since they didn't write the PC software I really can't blame them, can I? (Sure I could but I won't; after all I have been seduced). I do find it astonishing that just trying to synch 20 gigs of music cause the errors that I found.

I'd connect the iPod to my iBook and try and do the synch that way but since my iPod now has as big a hard disc as my iBook then that's just not an option.

Overall? Would I recommend it? Without questions or reservations. The iPod is just an awesome piece of engineering. Kudos to Apple.

Macintosh Small Business Accounting Software?

Mon, 09 Dec 2002 14:26:22 GMT

Macintosh Small Business Accounting Software?

Anyone have a recommendation here? Something like Quicken but for the Mac. Quicken QuickBooks Mac doesn't seem to be shipping until after January which isn't encouraging. Thanks.

Really Cogent Comments on Switch

Mon, 02 Dec 2002 21:36:34 GMT

Really Cogent Comments on Switch

Thanks to Chris Pirillo, I found Brad or Joe User who has really good comments on being a new Mac convert. From Brad (Joe User) comes a :

In my view, I’m a “Switcher”. Apple is spending millions trying to convince Windows users like me to switch to the iMac. So I bought a Mac. Not just any Mac but the iMac, the one that is most designed to be a “plug in and forget” product.

So when I get condemned for being annoyed that I can’t easily connect to a printer shared on a Windows machine, I can’t help but shake my head. When people “Switch” do Mac users expect them to just toss out their PCs and start from scratch? I am a PC user but Apple targeted people like me to switch. So don’t bitch if some of us complain that the printer settings are stuffed away in some obscure folder rather than in the control panel applet thingy. [_Go_]

New Mac Spam Filter

Fri, 29 Nov 2002 15:27:36 GMT

According to Andy Matterform has a new Mac Spam filter. Cool. [ Go ]

ThankYou John and the NoSuch! And I'm Away Until Wednesday...

Sat, 16 Nov 2002 23:33:59 GMT

ThankYou John and the NoSuch! And I'm Away Until Wednesday...

I needed some help getting OSX upgraded and John and the Nosuch both came through with bells on. John took care of a number of OSX idiocies on my part including helping me grovel through the OS X root account issue. Many, many thanks to both of you.

I've spent like 4 days straight using OSX now and while I do think it's beautiful, I think it's not right for me. Having to keep a mental model of how OS X differs from Windows and Linux is just too damn hard. If I could give up on one of the other platforms? Maybe. But that's never going to happen. John said "You know too much" and maybe that's so. Or maybe I'm too old (34, almost 35) and set in my computing ways. I've been on an Intel derived processor base now for 24 odd continuous years now and that's a long ass time. I have nothing but respect for those that can concurrently use both but I just can't. The mixture of keyboard differences, Windowing model differences, alt+tab, terminal's lameness, application installation differences, *nix subtleties (scp is subtly different as is ls and help has been removed from a number of standard gnu tools). That said OSX is just beautiful and I wish I could tolerate it. It's definitely the right choice for a lot of people.

But My iBook is now a demonstrable machine for PHP and MySQL apps. And since I'm leaving on a trip until Wednesday where I need that, that's wonderful. So, in my typical traveling disconnectedness, I'll be without email and without IM and without blog until Wednesday AM at the earliest. Best to everyone.

Ah Monday ...

Wed, 13 Nov 2002 10:16:19 GMT

Ah Monday ...

All I will say is that a) It got worse and B) It go worse. 'Nuff Said to quote Stan Lee. But now it's wednesday and I'm hopefully free of Monday's curse. Today will be a better day as exemplified by my rolling out of bed and getting some php code working even in the pre-shower period when usually it's all I can do to not drool on the floor (it's also the pre-caffeine period).

I did manage to get MySQL running on my iBook but I'm failing at getting php running on pre-Jaguar OS X. Anyone have suggestions or do I just bite the bullet and go for the Jaguar upgrade? Fink is interesting and works fairly well but doesn't list PHP as one of it's options.

Mon, 14 Oct 2002 12:14:17 GMT

Good Slashdot discussion on programming frameworks for native GUI applications under OSX. [ Go ]

Watch Out for the BugBear

Sat, 05 Oct 2002 10:53:07 GMT

Watch Out for the BugBear

This looks like a NASTY new virus. I know of one person who got it posing as an Amazon mail. The attachment comes in as an SCR, EXE or PIF file (all of which qualify as executable) and what it does is open holes in your firewall to allow someone to remote control your PC at a future point. Apparently there are over 1,000 infections to date.

W32.Bugbear@mm is a mass-mailing worm. It can also spread through network shares. It has keystroke-logging and backdoor capabilities. The worm also attempts to terminate the processes of various antivirus and firewall programs.

Because the worm does not properly handle the network resource types, it may flood shared printer resources, which causes them to print garbage or disrupt their normal functionality.

It is written in the Microsoft Visual C++ 6 programming language and is compressed with UPX v0.76.1-1.22.

Also Known As: W32/Bugbear-A [Sophos], WORM_BUGBEAR.A [Trend], Win32.Bugbear [CA], W32/Bugbear@MM [McAfee], I-Worm.Tanatos [AVP], W32/Bugbear [Panda], Tanatos [F-Secure]
Type: Worm
Infection Length: 50,688 bytes
Systems Affected: Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Me
Systems Not Affected: Macintosh, Unix, Linux
CVE References: CVE-2001-0154

Symantec's Warning

Apparently there is a hole in Internet Explorer's iFrame feature which may let it self launch if you are running Outlook's Preview Pane so be careful (as a general rule of thumb, you always want to have the Preview Pane turned off and use AutoPreview instead).

This is yet another reason to go with hardware firewalls to protect your cable modem as opposed to software products like ZoneAlarm. It's a lot harder for a virus or worm to reach across to a hardware device and screw it up (but it's not impossible). I use the excellent LinkSys BEFSR41 Broadband Cable / DSL Router.

Or, of course, you could always just get a Mac. Looking better and better.

Good News ! Tinderbox is Getting Better and Better

Thu, 03 Oct 2002 16:05:20 GMT

Good News ! Tinderbox is Getting Better and Better

I just exchanged a nice email with Mark Bernstein of Eastgate Systems and the author of Tinderbox, a very cool blogging application for OS X. I've known Mark for like 15 years now and he really, really understands this stuff. Apparently TinderBox is going well and getting a great user community going. That's just so cool when a small company brings out a good product and does well. And here's a look at how TinderBox actually looks (click on it, it's cool):

[ The Tinderbox Weblog ]. Recommended.

Seven Tricks Web Users Do Not Know

Tue, 01 Oct 2002 18:03:27 GMT

Seven Tricks Web Users Do Not Know

From the excellent TopStyle vendor blog I found this: Seven Tricks That Web Users Don't Know. Nothing here really surprised me but it does a great job of pointing out the difference between computer industry "experts" and Joe User who just wants to get the job done. There is an excellent commentary on why you shouldn't use 2nd browser windows much if at all and she does a better job than others in describing the problems users have with it. The one thing that I would be curious to know is if Mac users know more than PC users. I have no evidence that this is true but I'd suspect so.