Mac OS X has certainly benefited from open source software–both inside the OS itself and running on top of the platform. In this article, John Littler surveys standalone apps and package systems to provide you with an overview of open source software for your Mac.
Browsing Posts published in April, 2006
Mexico To Decriminalize Pot, Cocaine, And Heroin:
Where’s the ethanol?
S.A. home to state’s lone seller of specialized ethanol-based fuel
RFID Passport Security Revisited
Network your music with DAAP for Linux:Apple’s iTunes popularized the Digital Audio Access Protocol (DAAP) for simple networked music playlist sharing. Linux users can take advantage of it too. Linux users can choose from several easy-to-use DAAP servers for sharing music, and several DAAP-aware applications for listening to it — as well as discover and tune in to other people’s collections.
LDAP in the enterprise:The Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) is a network protocol used to access a special purpose database (called a directory) that stores information about people, organizations, and computers. What can LDAP do for your business and your network?
Ginobili, Barry Lead Spurs to Overtime Win Over Kings: Brent Barry’s 3-pointer with 4.9 seconds left forced overtime, where Manu Ginobili scored eight of his 32 points, as the San Antonio Spurs scrambled for a 128-119 victory over the Sacramento Kings and a 2-0 lead in their Western Conference fi
Online attack exposes 197,000 personal records:The university told students, alumni and members of the press on Sunday that an unidentified Internet attacker broke into a database at the UT McCombs School of Business and made off with 197,000 sensitive records, some including social security numbers.
Stolen laptops hand hackers keys to the kingdom | The Register:
US Government To Fund Rookit Buster:
RFID ‘Til the Cows Come Home:Critics lambast plan to tag most U.S. farm animals by 2008 as a giant boondoggle for the tech industry.
Microsoft Vista’s Endless Security Warnings:Paul Thurrott has posted an excellent essay on the problems with Windows Vista.
NeoOffice 1.2:Developers Patrick Luby and Edward Peterlin released NeoOffice 1.2, a port of OpenOffice.org 1.1.5 to Mac OS X, in early February. I decided to kick the tires a bit and see how well it performs. NeoOffice isn’t perfect, but it’s a great alternative for Mac users who don’t want to shell out big bucks for Microsoft Office, and want a suite that’s more full-featured than Apple’s iWork.
A Tour of Microsoft’s Mac Lab:David Weiss of Microsoft’s Macintosh Business Unit (MacBU) gives a virtual tour of Microsoft’s Mac Lab at Redmond, reportedly one of the largest Mac labs outside of Apple (includes 150 Mac minis!).“… This is where we keep all significant hardware configurations Apple has released that run our products. We’ll use the Plasma display to, watch DVDs and play games, uh er, I mean, do important training presentations. 
It’s actually very useful because everyone can be in front of a computer and still see the main screen and follow along. Often other groups at Microsoft (the games group, hardware drivers group and even the Windows media group) will come and schedule time in the Mac Lab to test their software on the different hardware configurations.
Parker, Spurs Race Past Kings in Opener: Sparked by Tony Parker, the San Antonio Spurs began defense of their NBA title with a resounding 122-88 victory over the Sacramento Kings in the opener of their Western Conference first-round series
Five-Minutes to a More Secure SSH:One way to tighten up the security of your system.“Apart from past flaws in the OpenSSH daemon itself that have allowed remote compromise (very rare), most break-ins result from successful brute-force attacks. You can see them in your firewall, system or auth logs, they are an extremely common form of attack. Here is an excerpt from the /var/log/messages file on a CentOS Linux box (the attacking hostname has been obfuscated). You can see multiple attempts to login as users root and ftp.
Damn Small Linux plus pendrive:Interesting tiny little Linux distribution.“My conclusion: DSL is a great little distro. I can hardly imagine spending a day now without my trustworthy DSL-powered pendrive. Pendrive-based distros beat live CDs because they let you quickly save your session preferences and data on the same medium as the operating system. I won’t use live CDs anymore except on older systems that don’t support booting from a USB device, or for trying new distributions.”
Browsers feel the fuzzVancouver, CANADA–Last month, security researcher HD Moore decided to write a simple program that would mangle the code found in Web pages and gauge the effect such data would have on the major browsers. The result: hundreds of crashes and the discovery of several dozen flaws.
It’s official: Distracted drivers are dangerous
