Put the knife down and take a green herb, dude. (c) Ruffin Bailey 2001-2021

From PC World's Techlog:

Just a moment ago, I logged into iChat--the IM client I use when I use a Mac--and was startled to find buddies in my buddy list who...weren't my buddies. Their handles: Prof Gilzot, Sharethisdotcom, Spleak, and WSJ.

Well, what the heck, lemme add another mindless blog saying, "That happened to me too. No WAY!!!1!"

Odd. Here's the Techlog author's wrap up:

I'm wary about bashing AOL over this; AIM is their service and they can decide what they do with it, and as someone who usually uses it with third-party clients that don't show me AOL's ads, I'm pretty much a leeching freeloader. Also, once you've figured out what these bots are, it's easy enough to nuke 'em.

Okay, perhaps. But this still violates pretty clearly the conventions of using an IM client. I'm tired enough of people offering to be my friends over at myspace in junkmail (though, again, the rapper junk emails I've gotten are very well done overall), but I comfortably assume that if I was on myspace, these folk don't get added as friends automatically. Apparently AOL put these into some bot category on the official AIM client, which is a little better, but please, invite yourself in before assuming it's okay for AOLiza to be a regular.

Shouldn't Apple have given me a head's up, at least? Seriously, this is very un-Apple like user experience.

I'll save the fact that this pushes through the woman commodified to the woman commodity. Sure, we've all heard that one before -- prostitution, escort services, 976-LOVE numbers, trophy wives, etc -- but this has got to be the most widely experienced attempt to do it online (even pr0n hopefully not excepted), right?

Thank you Alastair's Place:

For those who are wondering, I put privacy in quotes when I talk about “privacy” advocates, because most of them are not, in fact, advocating privacy. Instead, the majority advocate anonymity, which is quite different and has many effects that are detrimental to the rest of society [for instance, it’s much easier and safer to commit fraud and other crimes if you have anonymity…].

Interesting way to make the distinction, but it's an important set of concepts to get straight. This is why people run after blogs thinking they'll do the same work as diaries -- they can, up until a point. It's almost like having your cake and eating it too; you have a diary online, you get anonymous feedback, and poof, you're having conversations with amateur psychoanalysts (or at least virtual buds) instead of simply writing catharticly. Then later, a "RL friend" finds it, and your conflation of this magically responsive anonymity meets with a complete lack of the conventional diary's privacy protections (there's only one; it's not left out where it's easy to find; perhaps you lock your diary, etc; your handwriting is difficult to read).

This is the digital revolution, not that it needs to operate in this fashion. That is, as we are increasingly seeing on friend-boards like myspace and friendster, etc., that allow people to make their online presence private and only expose it to "friends" they approve. Not a perfect fix, obviously, as it's still difficult to vet a "RL friend" in virtual sheep personas, but it does show there are ways to protect an online presence. Firewalls, encryption, permission protections on the servers -- they are all opprotunities that blogs don't conventionally provide that old school diaries, in a fashion, did.

title: Put the knife down and take a green herb, dude.	descrip: One feller's views on the state of everyday computer science & its application (and now, OTHER STUFF) who isn't rich enough to shell out for www.myfreakinfirst-andlast-name.com Using 89% of the same design the blog had in 2001.
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Wednesday, June 27, 2007
More spam poetry This opportunity will spread completely surely like a run fire!!! Let us start immediately! If you need further assistance, then call me simply on or sends itself email. AGLOCO STARTS NOW THROUGH - STILL ALSO YOU CAN BE THEREBY! Many greetings & you also much success!!! posted by ruffin at 6/27/2007 08:07:00 PM

Sunday, June 24, 2007
Appletalking OS 9 and OS X 10.4 I've been trying to back up an OS 9 laptop without any writable media, and that includes the System Folder. The easiest way to do this would be to boot from CD and Appletalk things to someplace with enough room for the backup. Well, when one Appletalks from OS 9 to OS X as a server, they're likely to get the error, "The file server's connection has unexpectedly closed down." Guess what happens next? Yep, the Appletalked OS X share drops off of the OS 9 desktop. Apparently this happens when you try to copy a file over a certain size across the Appletalk connection. I've seen complaints of this happening with as small as 500k. Luckily, this Apple help file has an answer not only for OS X Server, but also for plain jane OS X trying to share with OS 9. You have to use the "defaults method". Solution On the server, change the TCPQuantum value used by the Apple File Service from 262144 to 327680. You can change this value using the serveradmin command, or by directly editing the preference file. You only need to use one of these methods: [ignore OS X Server-only method] defaults method Make sure all users are disconnected from the server. Stop Apple File Service. Open Terminal (or ssh to the server from another computer) and execute this command on a single line: sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.AppleFileServer TCPQuantum -int 327680 The end. Instant giant file transfer via Appletalk. Thank freakin' heavens. That was annoying. posted by ruffin at 6/24/2007 09:33:00 PM

Tuesday, June 19, 2007
Using Gmail as default mail app in OS X It happened nearly two years ago, but I've just become privy to the fact that Gmail Notifier for Mac OS X lets you set Gmail (in your browser) as your default mail app in OS X. Nice. posted by ruffin at 6/19/2007 07:19:00 PM

Monday, June 18, 2007
The end of the mini I'd missed this rumor from AppleInsider at the end of last month that the Mac Mini was soon to be discontinued. It's a shame; we've got a Mini, and quite enjoy using it. It's as portable as most external hard drives, extremely easy to set up to your existing peripherals, and at the price overall seems like the perfect box for potential switchers. The sites that offer Minis as web servers via colocation are cute little testaments to the slick design. Which is why I don't quite understand this comment from AppleInsider: There is some speculation that Apple conceived the Mac mini under pressure from shareholders who wanted a sub-$800 Mac, but never really saw much in the design itself. It's almost as if the mini stood in direct contrast to Apple's fundamentals from the get-go. What's against the fundamentals? That it's simply not expensive enough? It's not like the entry-level iMac is particularly powerful under the hood, especially for gaming, one of my biases. I wonder what the breakdown is for the systems all the first-time mac buyers Jobs bragged about at WWDC? I bet they're disproportionally Minis, though apparently not enough to move the bottom line. Still, I wonder how many were lured in by the thought of a $600 Mac, only to be seduced by more impressive and expensive iMacs once they're in the Apple Store's door? (Those screens are nice, but very VERY hard to reuse...) posted by ruffin at 6/18/2007 08:00:00 PM

Unwanted iFriends! Yay! From PC World's Techlog: Just a moment ago, I logged into iChat--the IM client I use when I use a Mac--and was startled to find buddies in my buddy list who...weren't my buddies. Their handles: Prof Gilzot, Sharethisdotcom, Spleak, and WSJ. Well, what the heck, lemme add another mindless blog saying, "That happened to me too. No WAY!!!1!" Odd. Here's the Techlog author's wrap up: I'm wary about bashing AOL over this; AIM is their service and they can decide what they do with it, and as someone who usually uses it with third-party clients that don't show me AOL's ads, I'm pretty much a leeching freeloader. Also, once you've figured out what these bots are, it's easy enough to nuke 'em. Okay, perhaps. But this still violates pretty clearly the conventions of using an IM client. I'm tired enough of people offering to be my friends over at myspace in junkmail (though, again, the rapper junk emails I've gotten are very well done overall), but I comfortably assume that if I was on myspace, these folk don't get added as friends automatically. Apparently AOL put these into some bot category on the official AIM client, which is a little better, but please, invite yourself in before assuming it's okay for AOLiza to be a regular. Shouldn't Apple have given me a head's up, at least? Seriously, this is very un-Apple like user experience. I'll save the fact that this pushes through the woman commodified to the woman commodity. Sure, we've all heard that one before -- prostitution, escort services, 976-LOVE numbers, trophy wives, etc -- but this has got to be the most widely experienced attempt to do it online (even pr0n hopefully not excepted), right? posted by ruffin at 6/18/2007 06:50:00 PM

Locking the OS X desktop LIGHTNING FAST Thanks, Macworld's Mac OS X Hints: It turns out that the screen saver is just an application, so you can put an alias to it in an easy-to-access location, such as your dock, or the Finder’s sidebar or toolbar. Just navigate to System -> Library -> Frameworks -> Screensaver.framework -> Versions -> A -> Resources, and then drag ScreenSaverEngine.app onto your dock, sidebar, or toolbar. Now when you want the screensaver to activate, just click the convenient icon. posted by ruffin at 6/18/2007 06:41:00 PM

Saturday, June 16, 2007
Safari 3.0 Screenshot Bug-ige So, let's say you use the fancy smancy "find text" feature in Safari with the Blogger-colored button style (orange & white), find three occurrences of a word, and want to take a screenshot of the page using Mac OS X's Apple-Shift-4, Space Bar technique to ensure you only get the current window. Here's what you get... Nice. Looks like the highlights are in a window, so that's all you get. posted by ruffin at 6/16/2007 08:21:00 PM

Thursday, June 14, 2007
Google makes [Mozilla 1.x] good, again. I'd gotten annoyed that Google, a company whose web-interfaces have typically impressed me for their backwards compatibilty -- an important mindset for those of us who occasionally use Mac OS 9 and Mozilla 1.x -- had finally, though understandably, put such old school browsers to bed with their new search interface. You could still use it fine, but the "images video groups" etc bar at the top wouldn't display correctly. Oh well, us [even part-time] relative Luddites were finally going to be second-rate citizens on Google. Not so anymore. The stuff works, and by works I mean I can now access everything in the toolbar without incident. That's cool. I know I get excited about the littlest things at times, but there's no reason to cut out even the small percentage of users that still surf with pretty old browsers. You can write dhtml that hits pretty much everyone if you're deliberate and considerate enough in your coding. Though Google sometimes starts out with changes that don't quite work as many places as they could, I'm again impressed with their long-term committment to creating excellent, lowest-common-denominator interfaces. posted by ruffin at 6/14/2007 03:17:00 PM

Tuesday, June 12, 2007
*Google pays Mozilla for your* searches!** I had no clue. Mr. Gruber did: It’s not widely publicized, but those integrated search bars in web browser toolbars are revenue generators. When you do a Google search from Safari’s toolbar, Google pays Apple a portion of the ad revenue from the resulting page. (Ever notice the “client=safari” string in the URL query?) The same goes for Mozilla (and, I presume, just about every other mainstream browser.) According to this report by Ryan Naraine, for example, the Mozilla Foundation earned over $50 million in search engine ad revenue in 2005, mostly from Google. Heck, if they can read my gmail to decide what advertisements to pimp in my face, I guess I can't act like this is a big deal. Still, is there a capitalism-free crevice anywhere nowadays? If open source software doesn't have it... This is part of the reason I'm starting to like RMS all the more. posted by ruffin at 6/12/2007 06:11:00 PM

Monday, June 11, 2007
Safari 3.0 Okay, I downloaded it onto my iBook G4. Haven't played in Windows yet, and it'll be a while; no Win2k version. Differences? * Feels marginally slower than Safari 2.0.4 on OS X. * The resizable textboxes are kinda neat, but fairly gimmicky. I am happy to see that it's checking my spelling now; did it do that before? My vague recollection is that only Firefox did (well, Firefox and OmniWeb, the latter being the first that I recall doing it). In any event, potentially a web form designer's nightmare (though it tends to fill up horizontal space with nothing, which is better than shrinking indiscriminately). * The new find function is, at best, gimmicky. I suppose it'll make spotting words a touch easier, but still pretty gimmicky. Color scheme works well in Blogger, however. I'm getting pretty danged tired of having to use the mouse to hit the "Send" button in Gmail, however. Yo, Safari folk, fix that. AAPL stock is down over $4 a piece already. Ouch. posted by ruffin at 6/11/2007 04:36:00 PM

Vista, meet my MacBook Of all the announcements at WWDC, this one, as reported by MacWorld, impressed me most: Jobs said that with the Leopard implementation of Vista, users will no longer have to burn a CD of Windows drivers or install those drivers separately — it will be built in to the operating system. I know, that's hardly the most impressive to most, but for me, it shows how much Apple gets it. Now only will Vista be esay to install on your Mac, it'll be easier to install on a Mac than any other x86 system without it already. posted by ruffin at 6/11/2007 04:17:00 PM

Sunday, June 10, 2007
Email is part of the digital manuscript culture Here's a quick bit from Jeffrey Zeldman that plays into my contention that email (along with blogs, etc) is a key cog in the remediation of manuscript culture and genres: But when I say HTML mail still sucks, I don’t mean it sucks because support for design in e-mail today is like support for standards in web browsers in 1998. I mean it sucks because nobody needs it. It impedes rather than aids communication. E-mail was invented so people could quickly exchange text messages over fast or slow or really slow connections, using simple, non-processor-intensive applications on any computing platform, or using phones, or hand-held devices, or almost anything else that can display text and permits typing. That’s what e-mail is for. That’s why it’s great. posted by ruffin at 6/10/2007 05:44:00 PM

Privacy vs. Anonymity Thank you Alastair's Place: For those who are wondering, I put privacy in quotes when I talk about “privacy” advocates, because most of them are not, in fact, advocating privacy. Instead, the majority advocate anonymity, which is quite different and has many effects that are detrimental to the rest of society [for instance, it’s much easier and safer to commit fraud and other crimes if you have anonymity…]. Interesting way to make the distinction, but it's an important set of concepts to get straight. This is why people run after blogs thinking they'll do the same work as diaries -- they can, up until a point. It's almost like having your cake and eating it too; you have a diary online, you get anonymous feedback, and poof, you're having conversations with amateur psychoanalysts (or at least virtual buds) instead of simply writing catharticly. Then later, a "RL friend" finds it, and your conflation of this magically responsive anonymity meets with a complete lack of the conventional diary's privacy protections (there's only one; it's not left out where it's easy to find; perhaps you lock your diary, etc; your handwriting is difficult to read). This is the digital revolution, not that it needs to operate in this fashion. That is, as we are increasingly seeing on friend-boards like myspace and friendster, etc., that allow people to make their online presence private and only expose it to "friends" they approve. Not a perfect fix, obviously, as it's still difficult to vet a "RL friend" in virtual sheep personas, but it does show there are ways to protect an online presence. Firewalls, encryption, permission protections on the servers -- they are all opprotunities that blogs don't conventionally provide that old school diaries, in a fashion, did. posted by ruffin at 6/10/2007 05:15:00 PM

Thursday, June 07, 2007
Nothing says "Update soon" like "Free download!" from Creative Guy: For a limited time (meaning that once this article hits other peoples RSS feeds and picked up on other sites I think the promotion will probably end - but I hope I’m wrong), RealMac Software is offering MacUser readers a sweet deal - RapidWeaver 3.5.1 is yours absolutely FREE! Okay, I get it. You give this all away for free via the "first hit of heroin" tactic and then, wham!, less than a month from then you release a pay-to-play update to go from 3.5 (that free version) to 3.6. This breaks two rules, imo: 1.) Never let your previous customers feel they got ripped off. Ooops! Too late. 2.) Never, EVER, release a pay-to-play update where uses of, say, 3.x have to pay to go to 3.(x+1). This is confusing. If it's just an update, I'm due to get it, right? Look, I don't care how dumb it sounds, call it 4.0! Thank you, goodnight. posted by ruffin at 6/07/2007 06:09:00 PM

Monday, June 04, 2007
*Now that's* sharing: Graphic Converter** If you used Mac OS 9 for anything approaching serious web work, you've bumped into Graphic Converter. It really does everything non-graphic design professionals need from their image manipulation program. You also probably didn't pay for it. Though it's mean enough to lock up your entire box for 30 seconds after you've used it a while, the picture here from Graphic Converter's site shows that you've got quite some time before Mr. Lemke is going to be mad at you for doing it. That's awfully nice, and I suppose is part of the community-buliding motivation that used to go with shareware. As i've posted before, this study/experiment, "Why Do People Register, Does Crippling Work, Does Anybody Really Know?", assuming it's legit, seems to make it pretty clear that such altruism doesn't pay. Though such openness might make you the proverbial industry leader, like it has for GraphicConverter and WinZip, I'm not sure it doesn't lose one money. For GC and WZ, I'm tempted to say the openness worked, but it's a very different model that seems less likely to pay off, short to medium term, and even long term for most developers who don't "share" their way to become an industry standard. Hrm, this is starting to sound a little like my reasoning behind the GNG Manifesto. Labels: crippleware, graphicConverter, os9, shareware posted by ruffin at 6/04/2007 03:44:00 PM

Sunday, June 03, 2007
Yeah, right, Steve. From the Jobs/Gates "summit" as reported by MacWorld: "So the big secret about Apple is that Apple views itself as a software company. And there aren’t very many software companies left. And Microsoft is a software company," said Jobs. "We look at what they do, and some is really great, and some is competitive, and some of it's not." No, Steve, you're not. You're a hardware company whose advantage is that you can write great supporting software. iTunes without iPod would have meant zippo. So what if you were the preferred mp3 player interface? That doesn't allow you to leverage AAC, much less the iTunes Music Store, onto the vast majority of mp3 player owners. Don't get me started with OS X. I like the OS, but it's driving sales of Macs. I can't imagine the vast majority of the Mac revenue comes from iLife and OS upgrades. I'm betting it comes from hardware. Perhaps the MacBook gets its OS a bit more cheaply than a Vista-powered Dell 1501, but that's not a dealbreaker. And where else does Apple make scads of cash on software? iWork? Final Cut? FileMaker? Come on. If Apple seeing itself as a software company helps it do the good work it's done, well great. But without iPod, Mac, and now iPhone, its stock isn't worth a tenth of what it's worth today. posted by ruffin at 6/03/2007 06:50:00 PM

iTunes 7.2 prevents iTMS >> CD >> mp3 importing [by default] Whoa. This is waaay too suspicious to pass off as a bug without quite a bit more information (from Chris Breen at Macworld.com): Yesterday, I noted that iTunes 7.2 had trouble syncing certain MP3 files to an iPod. It appears that this is a bug. Specifically, if you burn a playlist of iTunes’ protected music to a CD in iTunes 7.2 and then rip that CD in the MP3 format (a trick people often use to remove the tracks’ copy protection), those MP3 tracks won’t copy to an iPod. Try, and you’ll be told that the tracks are incompatible with the iPod. Chris goes on to show how rebuilding/recreating an iTunes library (the xml file keeping track of your stuff in lieu of a dbms) can get around this "bug." For me, in light of Sony's rootkit, you'll need a decent amount more proof -- here, what changes in the rebuilt xml that allows copying the burned CDs -- before I'd feel comfortable deciding this is an innocuous move in Apple's account. posted by ruffin at 6/03/2007 06:32:00 PM

Saturday, June 02, 2007
mfn: 1 Didn't I call this one? from Listening Post - Wired Blogs: Apple has declined to explain why its new DRM-free music files are watermarked with users' names and e-mail addresses. Well, duh. DRMless doesn't mean that you're allowed to trade it, folk. And this is essentially all FairPlay had become -- something embedded in the file to identify its owner that anyone savvy enough could yank out. Instead of trying to beat the pirate, Apple and EMI have simply said that they'll keep trivial tabs on them. Most pirates, aka "normal people", will trade the "unprotected" files without running them through some sort of cleaner, making them easier to bust, in theory. Now what happens when someone spoofs your email and name in a file they trade? posted by ruffin at 6/02/2007 10:52:00 PM

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