Input Manager as an infection vector
on
First Mac OS X Virus?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
John Gruber on daringfireball.net wrote at length recently about problems with OS X, mainly relating to how the Smart Crash library adds itself to applications through the Input Manager system hook. His current article "Smart Crash Reports Addenda" talks at length about the security implications of the input manager.
Number 23 has a link to a piece of PC software for reading RSS feeds.
For all us Mac users, http://www.carnglas.com/ has a free piece of software called iFeedPod which will sync RSS feeds to the iPod - very useful for those boring commutes!
If the price does go up as much as they want, the balance of economics shifts back to making it more worthwhile to buy the CD and rip it myself to AAC format. I only buy music from the iTunes music store at the moment because of the convenience factor, but it's only just inexpensive enough to make the lower quality AAC tracks. I use iTunes to find new music I might not otherwise hear - but I'm betting the new music will be the more expensive tracks.
It's a shame to see themselves pricing people back to ripping their own, or the pirate networks again.
Cahoot (www.cahoot.com) offer this in the UK. There used to be two options, either log in to their site a use a little applet to generate a one time number with the limit set to the maximum you wanted to spend, or download an application to your Windows PC to do the same. They suddenly withdrew the online version, and insist you use their Windows only application now, no use to me now that I use a Mac exclusively.
The 'Take Control' e-books cover an excellent range of topics, and are published as PDF files for $5 or $10 each.
They cover things like take control of buying a mac, take control of your airport network, take control of your mail app, take control of customising panther, etc.
They're generally pretty short, but they're focused on one topic, and will cover that one topic in much more detail than a chapter in a bigger book would.
They're also published by the people who do the excellent Tidbits magazine. You can find them here: http://www.tidbits.com/takecontrol/
It might not be exactly ten years ago, but I remember getting very excited in around 1995/1996 when the mbone was in use, which was a trial multicasting network that allowed me to watch live Nasa TV coverage of Shuttle launches and missions.
That was video streaming from the US to around the world, and worked pretty well, and was free too.
If this goes further, it will be interesting to see how it could be combined with a Tivo-like device to make the concept of channels obsolete, as you should be able to record multiple streams at the same time, making program clashes a thing of the past.
Re:Is this book good for C++ programmers, too?
on
Pragmatic JUnit Testing
·
· Score: 5, Informative
They certainly are. Most of the book is about how to write good unit tests, e.g. test the boundary conditions, and how to think clearly about what the boundary conditions are. I took enough away to start using nUnit successfully (nUnit is a framework for.Net unit testing). I've found unit testing extremely useful in day to day development, and this book taught me how. It's also available in PDF from the authors' web site if you prefer that format.
You're so right - working in co-locate suites is hell. For one thing, it's usually the weekend (how come servers only ever die on a Friday night or the weekend?), and the suite is devoid of anything mentally stimulating - it's a windowless room full of locked beige racks. Then you're either freezing cold, or stood in the hotspot of some rack pumping out a million BTUs. There's no seat, so as you say you end up standing for hours watching the painfully slow restore procedure. What I find worst is that you're not allowed food or drink, but the air conditioning is sucking moisture out of you at an unbelievable rate, so pretty soon the headaches start. I find it musch easier now that I can just send someone else:-)
Ignoring the issue of the quality of the audio rip and the DRM for a moment, why do you think the $1 a song model can't work. Thinking back 10 or 15 years, here in the UK at least, the 'kids' would head out on a Saturday to their local record shop and spend between 1 and 4 on a 7" single - essentially paying for one track off an album. Maybe you listened to the free 'B' side, maybe you didn't.
It's only recently that the music selling model has moved away from single records and towards the concept of an album anyway, and many people complained about that.
Two of my favourite hacks involved manipulating the display hardware.
The C64 came with 8 hardware 'sprites' which were hardware controlled bitmaps which could be
floated over the background for no computational cost. Of course, 8 wasn't enough, and we soon found that if you keyed off the horizontal display interrupt (i.e. you got an interrupt for each display line), you could wait until the screen raster had drawn the sprite, then quickly move it down the screen, where it would be redrawn in its new position.
The other hack involved changing the screen size as the raster beam went past, which allowed the sprites to move off of the display area, outside on to the screen border, effectively allowing you to place scores, and other graphics off of the main screen.
Programming the C64 taught me a heck of a lot though. The "real time" idea that the screen refreshed 50/60 times a second, and each game frame needed to be complete within that time forced a lot of efficiency into everything that was written.
I remember the excitement of coming up with (what I now realise is a pretty simple) a compression scheme, to fit whole screens of graphics into a fraction of the space, and also unknown to us, lots of computational and maths theory, e.g. the use of fast sorting routines so I could work out the order to draw the sprites in using the above hack, the use of polar vectors to make the on-screen characters move in proper circles, etc.
I think the key to the fun of programming on the C64 was that you were only one step away from being able to produce the same quality of games as those being released commercially - me andmy friend started so many games just to work out how to do do some special effect, but never had the attention span to work through to a complete game, but instead shelved it to work on the next exciting problem. These days unfortunately, I feel the gap between bedroom programmer and commercial team is unbridgable.
Yeah, but that's my point, it throws up a list of many many open ports. My linux servers put up a list of 2 or 3. It's all the service interdependencies in Windows which makes it harder to close everything down.
Even though firewalls and packet filtering play a big role, I believe in security in depth, and assume that someone wanting to break a server can get past the firewall. A key reason I feel safer with a *nix box as a server is that I can run netstat -a and be sure that only the ports I want listening are listening. And I can be sure that I have the latest version of each service on that port.
With Windows, I find it hard to be absolutely sure about what services are available over the network, and what patch version they are at, what with all the service packs, patches, patch roll-ups, etc, that I have to apply in the Microsoft way.
On the other hand, I also make sure that no users other than admins can log into the servers, because keeping track of all the vulnerabilites in the user level software is a lot of work on *nix too, probably just as hard as on Windows.
As an IT manager who also has a Comp Sci PhD hopefully I can give an answer from both sides. This is
also from a UK perspective.
My PhD was based around networked information systems like the Web and Gopher, back in 1992-1996.
My PhD improved my technical skill set a little, with extra programming experience, and early awareness
of protocols such as HTTP, and standards such as HTML. But the real advantages came from the other
part of earning a PhD - the ability to present your ideas to others, whether that's on paper, or
stood at the front of a room. The ability to organise my thoughts, to analyse problems and come
up with solutions, to think outside of the already known base of information and come up with new
ideas, to manage my own time, these were all the skills that I picked up between graduating with my
first degree, and being given my PhD.
As a manager looking to hire someone, I would expect someone with a PhD to have the skills mentioned above.
But you can also pick up those skills "on the job", or just have them as innate abilities, so as ever it
would come down to how you present yourself at the interview. Having a PhD would certainly not count
against you.
Maybe I'm lucky, but I've never come across the "overqualified" argument myself, and I'm very happy that
I had 4 or 5 years dedicated to researching something that I found extremely interesting, in a superb
learning environment. I think the skills of analysis and logical thinking are very handy in the IT and programming enviroments.
I've not tried it yet (I'll be flashing the new ROM tonight) but there's been good feedback about the PPP module on the Zaurus developers board).
The Bluetooth support has been getting better and better too, if you install the Affix packages and the excellent Connector, which makes connecting to something like the T68i a one click operation. It's been excellent to use with GPRS too.
I just signed up for the trial, and browsed a book using Opera on the Sharp 5500, and it renders beautifully on the small screen.
This is online of course, but there are tools which let you grab sections of sites for offline reading which I'll be trying this evening. It's nice to see the terms and conditions allow you to do this as long as you delete it once your subscription expires.
That's to miss the point of the form factor though. I'd love a C700, but currently have the 5500. What I love about it is that it really is small enough to fit into a coat pocket, or be dropped into the bottom of a bag, so that it's there when I need it. I don't have to worry about where I'm going to leave it if I want to go out for the evening after work say.
Also, even with the smaller screen on the 5500, I find it very comfortable to lie back on my sofa and do a bit of email reading and web browsing, something only the far more expensive Tablet PCs come somewhere near.
A laptop is good for where you need to get lots of typing or editing done, but seeing as 90% of my leisure PC use is web surfing, the small form is what I love. But if I need to, I can fire up a shell, ssh into my servers for some emergency work, fire up VNC to get into my Windows servers, start Kismet to see what's in the area. If I'm sat in a small cramped train seat I can even watch a divx off of a compact flash card, and with a lot lower profile than a mugger enticing iBook.
The Sharp Zaurus plus tkcVideo lets me watch DivX on the go. A 25 minute TV show compresses down to about 50 Mbytes, so I can fit two episodes onto a 128M Compact Flash card. Pretty watchable too on long boring train journeys.
Slashdot Mirror
John Gruber on daringfireball.net wrote at length recently about problems with OS X, mainly relating to how the Smart Crash library adds itself to applications through the Input Manager system hook. His current article "Smart Crash Reports Addenda" talks at length about the security implications of the input manager.
Number 23 has a link to a piece of PC software for reading RSS feeds. For all us Mac users, http://www.carnglas.com/ has a free piece of software called iFeedPod which will sync RSS feeds to the iPod - very useful for those boring commutes!
If the price does go up as much as they want, the balance of economics shifts back to making it more worthwhile to buy the CD and rip it myself to AAC format. I only buy music from the iTunes music store at the moment because of the convenience factor, but it's only just inexpensive enough to make the lower quality AAC tracks. I use iTunes to find new music I might not otherwise hear - but I'm betting the new music will be the more expensive tracks. It's a shame to see themselves pricing people back to ripping their own, or the pirate networks again.
Cahoot (www.cahoot.com) offer this in the UK. There used to be two options, either log in to their site a use a little applet to generate a one time number with the limit set to the maximum you wanted to spend, or download an application to your Windows PC to do the same. They suddenly withdrew the online version, and insist you use their Windows only application now, no use to me now that I use a Mac exclusively.
They cover things like take control of buying a mac, take control of your airport network, take control of your mail app, take control of customising panther, etc.
They're generally pretty short, but they're focused on one topic, and will cover that one topic in much more detail than a chapter in a bigger book would.
They're also published by the people who do the excellent Tidbits magazine. You can find them here: http://www.tidbits.com/takecontrol/
If the fans and ventilation slot are on the back of the screen, is there enough clearance is you wall mount it?
That was video streaming from the US to around the world, and worked pretty well, and was free too.
If this goes further, it will be interesting to see how it could be combined with a Tivo-like device to make the concept of channels obsolete, as you should be able to record multiple streams at the same time, making program clashes a thing of the past.
They certainly are. Most of the book is about how to write good unit tests, e.g. test the boundary conditions, and how to think clearly about what the boundary conditions are. I took enough away to start using nUnit successfully (nUnit is a framework for .Net unit testing). I've found unit testing extremely useful in day to day development, and this book taught me how. It's also available in PDF from the authors' web site if you prefer that format.
You're so right - working in co-locate suites is hell. For one thing, it's usually the weekend (how come servers only ever die on a Friday night or the weekend?), and the suite is devoid of anything mentally stimulating - it's a windowless room full of locked beige racks. Then you're either freezing cold, or stood in the hotspot of some rack pumping out a million BTUs. There's no seat, so as you say you end up standing for hours watching the painfully slow restore procedure. What I find worst is that you're not allowed food or drink, but the air conditioning is sucking moisture out of you at an unbelievable rate, so pretty soon the headaches start. I find it musch easier now that I can just send someone else :-)
It's only recently that the music selling model has moved away from single records and towards the concept of an album anyway, and many people complained about that.
The C64 came with 8 hardware 'sprites' which were hardware controlled bitmaps which could be floated over the background for no computational cost. Of course, 8 wasn't enough, and we soon found that if you keyed off the horizontal display interrupt (i.e. you got an interrupt for each display line), you could wait until the screen raster had drawn the sprite, then quickly move it down the screen, where it would be redrawn in its new position.
The other hack involved changing the screen size as the raster beam went past, which allowed the sprites to move off of the display area, outside on to the screen border, effectively allowing you to place scores, and other graphics off of the main screen.
Programming the C64 taught me a heck of a lot though. The "real time" idea that the screen refreshed 50/60 times a second, and each game frame needed to be complete within that time forced a lot of efficiency into everything that was written.
I remember the excitement of coming up with (what I now realise is a pretty simple) a compression scheme, to fit whole screens of graphics into a fraction of the space, and also unknown to us, lots of computational and maths theory, e.g. the use of fast sorting routines so I could work out the order to draw the sprites in using the above hack, the use of polar vectors to make the on-screen characters move in proper circles, etc.
I think the key to the fun of programming on the C64 was that you were only one step away from being able to produce the same quality of games as those being released commercially - me andmy friend started so many games just to work out how to do do some special effect, but never had the attention span to work through to a complete game, but instead shelved it to work on the next exciting problem. These days unfortunately, I feel the gap between bedroom programmer and commercial team is unbridgable.
Yeah, but that's my point, it throws up a list of many many open ports. My linux servers put up a list of 2 or 3. It's all the service interdependencies in Windows which makes it harder to close everything down.
With Windows, I find it hard to be absolutely sure about what services are available over the network, and what patch version they are at, what with all the service packs, patches, patch roll-ups, etc, that I have to apply in the Microsoft way.
On the other hand, I also make sure that no users other than admins can log into the servers, because keeping track of all the vulnerabilites in the user level software is a lot of work on *nix too, probably just as hard as on Windows.
My PhD was based around networked information systems like the Web and Gopher, back in 1992-1996. My PhD improved my technical skill set a little, with extra programming experience, and early awareness of protocols such as HTTP, and standards such as HTML. But the real advantages came from the other part of earning a PhD - the ability to present your ideas to others, whether that's on paper, or stood at the front of a room. The ability to organise my thoughts, to analyse problems and come up with solutions, to think outside of the already known base of information and come up with new ideas, to manage my own time, these were all the skills that I picked up between graduating with my first degree, and being given my PhD.
As a manager looking to hire someone, I would expect someone with a PhD to have the skills mentioned above. But you can also pick up those skills "on the job", or just have them as innate abilities, so as ever it would come down to how you present yourself at the interview. Having a PhD would certainly not count against you.
Maybe I'm lucky, but I've never come across the "overqualified" argument myself, and I'm very happy that I had 4 or 5 years dedicated to researching something that I found extremely interesting, in a superb learning environment. I think the skills of analysis and logical thinking are very handy in the IT and programming enviroments.
I've not tried it yet (I'll be flashing the new ROM tonight) but there's been good feedback about the PPP module on the Zaurus developers board). The Bluetooth support has been getting better and better too, if you install the Affix packages and the excellent Connector, which makes connecting to something like the T68i a one click operation. It's been excellent to use with GPRS too.
I just signed up for the trial, and browsed a book using Opera on the Sharp 5500, and it renders beautifully on the small screen. This is online of course, but there are tools which let you grab sections of sites for offline reading which I'll be trying this evening. It's nice to see the terms and conditions allow you to do this as long as you delete it once your subscription expires.
Also, even with the smaller screen on the 5500, I find it very comfortable to lie back on my sofa and do a bit of email reading and web browsing, something only the far more expensive Tablet PCs come somewhere near.
A laptop is good for where you need to get lots of typing or editing done, but seeing as 90% of my leisure PC use is web surfing, the small form is what I love. But if I need to, I can fire up a shell, ssh into my servers for some emergency work, fire up VNC to get into my Windows servers, start Kismet to see what's in the area. If I'm sat in a small cramped train seat I can even watch a divx off of a compact flash card, and with a lot lower profile than a mugger enticing iBook.
The Sharp Zaurus plus tkcVideo lets me watch DivX on the go. A 25 minute TV show compresses down to about 50 Mbytes, so I can fit two episodes onto a 128M Compact Flash card. Pretty watchable too on long boring train journeys.