In Through The Out Door

[From iWork and Office: How to share files]

While I’m not trying to only focus on security topics, they just seem to pop up more often than not, including today’s serendipitous discovery that TrueCrypt is available for OS X. Security isn’t just about maintaining system integrity (loosely defined as keeping malicious code from getting onto/running on your system). A critical component is ensuring [...]

After blogging about the need to use and maintain an anti-virus solution for your OS X systems, an anonymous reply questioning the need to use security tools at all on OS X systems gave me pause. You do not need me to link to the numerous articles flying around the internets that report on how [...]

The first stop is a little utility called opensnoop. Leopard ships with something called DTrace that gives developers and administrators the ability to take a peek at what all running code is doing in a flexible and dynamic way. Giving DTrace the coverage it deserves is beyond a simple blog post, but there are some [...]

What’s Leopard really worth?

A look at VMware Fusion:If you’re a Linux user who’s just been issued an Apple computer, you might want to look into a virtualization solution for Mac OS X. VMware’s Fusion, which was officially released from beta at the beginning of the month, works well for running Linux (or other x86/AMD64 OSes) on the Mac desktop, and provides a great solution for multi-OS users who need simultaneous access to all their operating systems on the same machine.

Mac OS X Leopard is now officially Unix, according to the Opengroup.” I know everyone out there was really worried about this one. Welcome to the August news vacuum!

VMware Fusion vs. Parallels Desktop revisited:Now that Parallels has released Desktop 3.0 and VMware released a feature-complete Fusion RC1, it’s time to take another look at them.

Tools that manage PCs, Macs

Hi, I’m a Mac

Apple Remote Tricks:Stephen Korecky has posted a bunch of handy Apple remote tricks over at MacInstruct. His post shows you how to pair your remote with a Mac, how to use the remote to send your Mac into sleep mode, and more. Who knew that holding down the remote’s Menu button produced the same disk-switching behavior on an Intel Mac as pressing the option key as you boot? Some of Korecky’s tricks are a bit obvious (flipping through iPhoto slideshows and controlling Keynote presentations) but most of them are gems.

Parallels Desktop supports Leopard, Vista:Parallels today released a free update to Parallels Desktop for Mac to enhance its virtualization software with a new installation assistant tool, shared networking support, and official compatibility for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. The latest release of Parallels Desktop for Mac also supports Microsoft’s recently-released Windows Vista operating system, adds several additional features, and repairs numerous bugs. Parallels Desktop for Mac runs ‘guest’ operating systems inside a Mac by allowing that operating system to run alongside Mac OS X, managing system resources as the two systems co-exist side-by-side. The latest revision ensures that Solaris guest operating systems don’t hang after suspending or resuming, and includes an improved Parallels Tools package. Parallels Desktop now offers full support for OpenBSD 3.8 as a guest operating system, and ensures that the G4U hard disk cloning tool works in virtual machines.

The Future of Podcasting:You will get a kick out of this.

AirPort Extreme: Apple Breaks 90 Mbps:My review of the new AirPort Extreme Base Station is up at Macworld: This lengthy review, aided by several colleagues at the magazine, covers a lot of the basics for home users…. I was able to see consistently high speeds in testing, in excess of 90 Mbps in a single direction over 802.11n to Ethernet (flooding packets from N to Ethernet), and about 50 Mbps when flooding from N to N via the base station…. The Extreme has a minor flaw that won’t bite many people in its ability to pass traffic at full Ethernet speeds across its WAN port when network address translation (NAT) is engaged…. I’ll be writing more soon about particular aspects of the base station, but for now, I’d like to direct you to the technical discussion about the Extreme’s use of IPv6, the next-generation Internet routing protocol that’s been “next generation” for something like eight or nine years now. IPv6 support is found throughout Mac OS X and is fully supported in the Extreme base station–so fully, Ars Technica’s Iljitsch van Beijnum reports, that by default every Mac OS X computer that connects to a new Extreme gateway will be fully reachable through tunneled IPv6 from the rest of the Internet….

What happens in the Mac OS X boot process:Nice write up about what happens when you boot your Mac.“Long gone are the days of OS 9, watching our Macs boot up with a series of extensions and control panels that we could always identify. Today with the Unix underpinnings of OS X, many users are entirely unaware of what is going on behind the scenes. So what exactly happens during the Mac OS X boot process? A segment at KernelThread carefully lists the sequence of events, from start to finish. It is fairly thorough and worth a read.

I really like OS-X especially since CLI is available.I just feel the need to explain why I will not buy new Apple products:1) Apple iPhone: A) SIM Locked/Contract Required.

Inside the iPhone — 3G, ARM, OS X, 3rd Partyware:DECS writes “After heading off the top ten myths of the iPhone, Daniel Eran of RoughlyDrafted has written a series of articles looking ‘Inside the iPhone,’ exploring (1) why Apple didn’t target faster 3G networks, (2) a substantiated look at how the iPhone is indeed running OS X (contrary to reports that it isn’t), and (3) what it means to users and developers, and how ARM is involved, in Mac OS X, ARM, and iPod OS X, and why the supposedly ‘closed’ system Apple describes for the iPhone won’t preclude third party development.”

Beware the Apple iPhone iHandcuffs:“Randall Stross makes a fresh and surprisingly accurate review of one of the biggest ”features“ in the upcoming iPhone and the iPod in general, ‘fairplay’. Stross writes, ‘If ”crippleware“ seems an unduly harsh description, it balances the euphemistic names that the industry uses for copy protection. Apple officially calls its own standard ”FairPlay,“ but fair it is not…. You are always going to have to buy Apple stuff…. Can mainstream media coverage help the battle over DRM or will this warning, like those of the past, continue to go unnoticed?”

Apple is DRM’s Biggest Backer:“Arstechnica is running an article pointing out that while some pockets of the entertainment industry are experimenting with DRM-free distribution, Apple Inc, which announced that they have now sold over 2,000,000,000 songs on iTunes, is now the strongest pro-DRM force in digial media. From the article: ‘DRM is dying. It’s a statement being echoed with increasing frequency around the Web over the last few weeks, and is perhaps best articulated in this Billboard article.

Ash: An AppleScript Shell:Looking for an easier alternative to osascript that still runs in the command line?… It’s a Perl-powered script that lets you interactively execute AppleScript commands (including multi-line tell commands) as well as create interpretable scripts (via #!/usr/bin/env ash). There are a number of useful flags built in that can be used to execute commands from a specified file, echo values during execution, to display the current AppleScript, to repeat the most recent script, to call Unix commands, and so forth. e.g.tell application “Finder” set theSelection to selection set n to number of items in theSelection -echo “number of items selected: ” & n repeat with i from 1 to n -echo “item ” & i & “ is ” & (item i of theSelection as alias) end repeatend tellThe script downloaded easily–although you do have to gunzip it and chmod it to make it executable…. There were some strange echos during the execution trace, i.e. it listed the whole script up to the current line for every step along the way, but I’m guessing this could be turned off by one of the built-in flags or by editing the source itself, which is quite short.