Entries Tagged 'Review' ↓

Duh?! Physical access to any machine makes it highly vulnerable to accessing the contents of its storage media. Apple knows that. Any IT manager worth spitting on knows that. Steve Ballmer probably knows that. George Bush might even know that! These guys who developed the cold memory dumper are butt stupid because it’s a waste of time and effort. This is no big secret or mystery. If you have an OS X install disk that is not older than that particular Mac, you can simply put the disk in, force power down, restart booting from the install disk, from the Utilities menu launch Reset Password Utility. This allows you to change the password for any account on any connected bootable volume as well as enable the Root account! That’s a hell of a lot easier than this bullshit attack.Apple’s not stupid and this is no secret.If you really, really need more security, you simply do not allow physical access to the computer. Need more? Do not allow network connectivity. Need more? Enable a firmware password on the drive. Need more? Get custom firmware that disables startup keys normally available on the Mac OS. Need more? Be a Luddite.Security is always a trade-off with any connectivity. The old phrase Boot Access IS Root Access exists for a reason. 

It’s a bold new year for Ruby. The recent release of Ruby 1.9 (though it’s still not a production ready release), the inclusion of Ruby as an officially bundled item in OS X 10.5 (though 10.5 still needs a few dot-versions to reach production release itself), Rails 2.0, a whole plethora of new Ruby books…The Ruby year is going to be a good one. It may end up being a bit frustrating when the push to migrate to 1.9 actually does come, but shouldn’t be too bad.On the book side, there is a very interesting Ruby Design Patterns book as well as a few others, such as the Practical Ruby Projects book, and the FXRuby book.Now, we just need a RubyCocoa book, a Ruby Qt, a Ruby Tk, and a WxRuby book.We also need a Ruby game development book. I don’t have any interest in Lua, and Python is the Ruby for people who like the way Python does things.Myself, I’m working on a Cocoa wrapper app for RubyGems called Gem Commander. I’ve already got a proof of concept working app, but it’s slow going dealing with Cocoa and Objective-C after doing Ruby so much. Here is the logo for Gem Commander…  You see, Ruby is just so expressive and feels modern. Objective-C and Cocoa (and AppleScript, while we’re at it) all definitely show their age after coming from Ruby. The method signatures in Objective-C are conceptually very cool, and the whole thing beats the hell out of C++ or Visual Basic, but the naming of methods and the way things work is sometimes just not graceful at all. (especially, as I said, after doing things in Ruby)Even RubyCocoa is just a dog in comparison to straight Ruby. It does present the opportunity to mix good Ruby expressiveness in to things, but at the cost of still needing to navigate through Apple’s ridiculous documentation. Apple really really really could learn a lot about documentation in the modern world from the Rails crowd. (minus the people Zed Shaw bitches about… ).On the subject of Apple, AppleScript itself is really a dog these days and is overlooked or under-attended by developers. Apple really just needs to overhaul the whole damn thing in favor of serious Python, Perl and Ruby scriptability out-of-the-box. Then, you would see a real explosion of cool stuff. 

The OS X 10.4.11 Update went smooth and seems to do what every Panther update did, fix bugs and make things peppier! And best of all, the Safari 3 inclusion is wonderful. It even improves on the beta. Big bookmarks menus are much more responsive than they’ve been in years. Finally!
Only thing missing is the magic widget button available in Leopard’s Safari 3…

Well, I gave Leopard a day; One whole day of mostly lost time trying to get things working for developing again. Granted, Continue reading →

Well, OS X now comes a lot closer to having a good Ruby and Rails, but I don’t like it.
What’s the deal with giving a default Rails DB configuration using SQLite3?!!
Lame. Sorry. Most folks doing Rails work use MySQL…

And as for the gems installed… uh where is Rmagick? Why isn’t Image Magick installed? X11 is now installed by default, so it only stands to reason…
Nice try guys, but unless this is Ruby and Rails for Apple’s internal use, there’s not much point. I expect to see a one-click replacement soon, but I’m going to go back and hook up my old installation the Hivelogic way. It just works better and corresponds better to what’s available on real-world hosting providers.

The gem choices are somewhat odd. Limited and odd. I’m dumping it and going with my own. Apple, (Laurent) I will leave yours in /usr/bin but I will not use it. Thanks anyway.

This dumb video report by Michael Kanellos proves how lame Americans and their Journalists are. Does EVERYBODY just get their information about the world from crappy guidebooks?! Give me a break!
He starts out in Shibuya, rambling about how futuristic Tokyo is, but come on dude, people live there, it’s real, all you’re looking at is advertising in one of the world’s biggest cities! You get the same stuff in NY and London.

Next he’s off to darling of the guidebooks, Akihabara (except that nobody actually calls it that, it’s Akiba). Only tourists go there. It’s just like Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco. Truth is, you can buy all the same consumer electronics anywhere in Tokyo. It’s been that way for years. Don’t waste your time in Akiba. If you’re looking to buy or sell large lots of OEM components, then Akiba may be a good place to start… on the back streets in offices. But these days, even that is questionable. B2B online is real in Japan too.

I wish people would stop putting out such repetitive, derivative crap on Tokyo. It’s not that way. I lived there for 5 years, believe me. Wonderful city, but it’s not the Blade Runner set you like to imagine it to be. It’s just a big city with lots of people.

For what it’s worth, here are the Ruby Logo Contest designs I did:

I don’t believe I sent this one in at all.

This one was submitted, I believe.

This one was submitted, and is definitely inspired by the coinage in the Zelda games.

This one was not submitted, but you can see why. It’s less than inspired, I think.

Ruby has a new logo. Yawn.
It’s not great. It’s not even much different from the old one, just a knockoff.
I certainly won’t wear any t-shirts of this.
Was this really the best of the lot?

Oh well. Matz is a language designer, not a visual designer.
It’s not like PHP has one worth a flip either.
Perl and Python rule the roost on this.

Like everybody else and their dog in Austin, I went to the Apple Store in Austin, at the Domain, to see OS X 10.5 Leopard on its debut day. Well, of course the Domain is an ultra-American, artificial-as-possible, prefab shopping strip with the same stupid chain shops you find everywhere else in upper-middle-class-suburban-America. It’s hip, trendy, popular, and 100% devoid of any real culture or humanity. A perfect example of why people hate Americans.

Unfortunately, Apple Stores are all in similar places in the USA. Fortunately, I expected this, and it didn’t come between me and my mission to try out Leopard and resist the temptation to buy anything.

The sad thing is, Leopard was kind of disappointing. In much the same way that Tiger was disappointing: Panther got most of it right already. Every new thing since Panther (almost) has been toy eye-candy. That’s not true, but that’s how it feels. Panther really felt revolutionary. Tiger was indeed evolutionary. But this Leopard… I don’t know. Maybe it will grow on me. That is after I get a new Mac that comes with it. I just didn’t see anything compelling enough to get me to buy the OS or even to get me to buy a new Mac NOW.

The Dock?
Yep, it’s a downgrade that is harder to make out visually.

Spaces?
Uh, needs a little work to make it smoother, but I get it, this little piggy cried “K D E” all the way home.

Time Machine?
Oh, I’m sure it’s as good as advertised. I saw the original Steve Jobs intro a year ago. It was neato-lookin’ and all that. But backup is not so critically difficult to me, clone a drive or use RAID mirroring, with cycling out. It’s not new. It doesn’t matter how you implement it so much, until you need to recover something!

Other features…?
Nothing really WOWed me. Really.

Bad stuff?
Well the Dock for one. But the GUI in general, has taken an ugly turn with the sharper corner radius on the rounded top corners and the lack of rounded corners on the toolbar. It looks like something pretending to be a Mac, like some KDE or Gnome theme that comes close but gets it wrong.

I can wait for the polish up.

The only compelling features to me were all the dev tools!! But unfortunately, the Apple Store that I went to did not feel compelled to display any of the dev tools. Talk about lame.

I’ll keep it short. Microsoft’s recent investment in Facebook certainly garnered attention. Makes sense, valuation made based on current and projected number of unique users who can be vectors and targets of advertising sales.

Microsoft has thus far failed in every web venture of their own, other than selling crappy web dev software solutions. They’ve been trying to do something since MSN first debuted to be an AOL and then kept trying to be Netscape, to be Yahoo!, to be Google, et. al. ad hominem. Now it’s their chance to get to the social networking yawn fest late in the game by trying to be myspace.

Much like their acquisition of Hotmail, you can expect eventual destruction of what people like about Facebook and a replacement of the current crop of users with a crowd of more clueless individuals (think Yahoo! Chat) and topped off with an infiltration of MS .net garbage openning the doors to malware galore.

Goodbye Facebook. I didn’t know you long, but I was never a big fan anyway.