Tuesday, March 30, 2004

My site VirtualParks.org was featured in the Update section of the March/April VIA magazine for Oregon/Idaho, and should appear in the California edition soon. VIA is the Auto Club magazine, also known as the AAA Traveler's Companion. The title is "A virtual walk in the park" and had a sharp printed panorama of Lower Lamarck Lake, one of my favorite scenes. 7:52:37 AM

An update on the Safari browser problem I reported a few days back: as a result of the changes I made, Safari 1.2 appears to work fine with panoramas  the first time you visit a page on my site. If you press Reload page enough times, you can get the browser to error. No other browser fails in this way. There has been no response from anyone at Apple regarding this problem, which could affect other VR sites besides mine. 7:34:26 AM

WWDC 2004 is June 28th to July 2 this year, and looks to have a strong QuickTime focus. "Until last year, QuickTime developers had their own conference held in Los Angeles, but Apple canceled that show and rolled the sessions into an expanded WWDC. Okamoto said more is being done this year to attract QuickTime developers to make sure they have all of the information they need to continue developing for the platform." From MacCentral 7:30:29 AM

BBC News looks at some of the Pretenders to Microsoft's media crown, including QuickTime, Real, WinAmp, & MusicMatch. 7:30:07 AM

QiPo, the utility that processes a QuickTime movie and creates an image containing sequential frames that conform a preview of the movie, has a new owner and URL. Bebosoft, Inc. is the authorized new owner of QiPo, and the new web location for the tool is  http://www.bebosoft.com/products/qipo/ 7:29:33 AM

MacDailyNews has the news of a New virtual reality website launched featuring Apple's QuickTime VR 7:29:12 AM

Remember the QuickTime hole waiting to be filled in? Well there's still no patch from Apple, and no information on whether this vulnerability has been used by hackers. But until the patch arrives, it's best to be prudent. I don't know in what part of the QuickTime software the vulnerability exists, but it's interesting that "The hole exists across all versions of QuickTime and is present in the software's default settings." One possible implication from that is the vulnerability might not be active if you change the default settings. So things I can think of to reduce the chances of exposure include: operate your computer behind a firewall; turn off QuickTime's "check for updates automatically" (in the QuickTime control panel), turn off "show HotPicks movie automatically" (in QuickTime Player preferences), don't play QuickTime content that people e-mail you even if it does feature 100 talking hamsters dancing on a baby's head, and don't leave the QuickTime Player running when you are not using it. Of course once Apple provides a patch, restore your settings back to the way they were. I wonder if Apple will provide patches for older operating systems and versions of QuickTime: Mac OS 9, QuickTime 5? 7:28:39 AM

© Copyright 2006 erik goetze.