Entries Tagged 'Vista' ↓

Back in the days before OS X came out, there was Yellow Box. If it were available today, it could easily be described as XCode and Cocoa for Windows. There was also Red Box back then, essentially the same as what we’ve got now: OS X on Intel processors. To make things interesting, it is well-known that iTunes exists for Windows, and (somewhat infamously) also known that Safari exists for Windows. Apple even makes a utility for Windows to manage AirPort base stations.

“So, what!?”, right?

No. It’s bigger than that. What Apple is tinkering with more and more in their skunkworks is the development environment formerly known as Yellow Box. That technology never went away. It may have languished with time somewhat, but thanks to Microsoft’s determined support for backwards compatibility, most of what was ever in Yellow Box still works. Sure, some of it is crufty and all that, but the recent developments with Safari and on-going development of iTunes for Windows is indicative enough that they’re definitely toying with the idea of releasing Yellow Box once again.

This makes perfect sense. Macs run on Intel. Windows runs on Intel. Mac users can install Windows on a Mac. Why not develop the same application on a Mac, in Mac OS X, in XCode, then compile it for both operating systems at once!? That’s right. That’s exactly one of the things you will see coming out of Cupertino in the next year or two. If they don’t announce it at this year’s WWDC, you can expect it at the following year’s WWDC.

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. 

Some Ruby Gems are better than others. Some are great once they are working, but how to get them working is not always obvious… BlueCloth (the Ruby implementation of Markdown) is one of these. Unfortunately, simply doing sudo gem install BlueCloth is not enough. The BlueCloth home page, a Trac site, does not tell you squat about it either. So what do you do? Well, as with any gem that doesn’t just install easily and work with a simple require 'gem_name_here', the first thing to do is look in the gem’s directory!!If you do not know where your gems are, at the command line do gem environment and you will see the path to your gems. Copy that path and cd to it. Then do ls and you will see you’re still not there. cd gems will get you into the proper directory for the gems.Once there, you will notice that each gem has a directory with the name and version number of the gem itself. In this case, cd BlueCloth* should be enough to get you into the BlueCloth directory. If you do have more than one version, you will need to add the version number to that.Once inside the BlueCloth directory, you will see a README and install.rb, first read the README. Hmmm… it is not real clear language, but it does indicate you will need to run install.rb. OK. In the same directory, run ruby install.rb and you should see a few lines:Cloth Installer Revision: 1.3 Testing for the StrScan library...foundTesting for the Devel-Logger library...foundInstalling   If you get any error message, you either need to use sudo to do it, or you just do not have enough permissions/privileges on that machine.  If you get no error message, then you can now use BlueCloth for converting Markdown to html!In any normal Ruby code, simply be sure to add:
require 'rubygems'
require 'bluecloth' In a Rails application, simply add the second require line in application.rb and you will be ok to use BlueCloth from within your Rails application. You can actually use both require lines there, but the require for rubygems is just taking up space on the page at this point. If Rails is working, then RubyGems has already been required somewhere else! The beautiful thing is, BlueCloth is easy to use and very effective!  One more thing… this information is true on Linux, OS X, and any *NIX installation. On windows… I have no idea. Personally, I cannot see why people go through the pain of programming on windows, except that it can pay the bills…? 

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.

Wow. Xcode and Leopard are going to be better! Xcode now apparently does PHP and Ruby and Rails in addition to XHTML and CSS. Let’s just hope they stole a lot of keyboard shortcuts from TextMate… Can’t wait to get my hands on this cat.
And, unlike Microsoft and Windows, it’s all freely included in OS X 10.5 Leopard !
How can anybody say that Macs are more expensive, when all the dev tools are free !?
I know Windows dev tools are anything but free, and no way they’ve ever been this cool.

One thing I’ve always wanted: syntax highlighting that actually shows scope!

Looks like Objective-C 2.0 has borrowed a bit from Ruby! Those Apple engineers, they just kick ass at making good stuff with end-users in mind.

Learn more at:
http://www.apple.com/macosx/developer/

Oh, and let’s hope that the inclusion of PHP and Ruby and Rails means that those tools will be updated regularly (or at least update-able ). After all, web software changes rapidly, and with the impending releases of Ruby 2.0 and Rails 2.0 in the next few months to a year, we can’t just have a one-time installation. We will need the ability to update gems and such.

Now all we can ask for is that Apple gets into making it better for developers who want to make games for the Mac. Investing in some game libraries (cross-platform…?) or even say Nintendo (the two companies would be soooo beautiful together…)…?

Microsoft finally rolled back its WGA (Windows Genuine Advantage) requirement for downloading IE7. Are they being nice now?

Nope. So why’d they do that? Here are some clues… Continue reading →

I had the pleasure experience to work with Windows Vista a bit the other day. Let me tell you all now. It’s a stopgap release. It seems to work well enough, if you don’t mind the screwy approval dialog boxes and the lack of hardware and software vendor support… It’s the new ME. Windows ME, that is… Continue reading →

After many go rounds with various Linux distros and failed installs on the old clamshell iBook, it seems I may have found a winning solution. Continue reading →

I’ve been playing with Linux on two machines the past two days. An old clamshell iBook (whose noisy HD irritates the hell out of me) and an old Dell Latitude (whose overall lack of quality just irritates me). Continue reading →

The other day, a friend unloaded an old Dull Platitude (dell latitute) notebook on me. Physically it looked to be OK, but of course the built-in track pad and mouse buttons are sketchy. Oh! It also had a failed life as a Win2K machine. Initially, I tried to install Kubuntu (basically Ubuntu, but with KDE desktop instead of Gnome desktop for the GUI, which means it’s Debian Linux under all of that.) Last night, I tried and tried, but no luck. So today, on a whim, I reinstalled Win2K (wiping the HD). Seemed OK until reboot and it mistakenly believed itself to have only a 640 x 480 screen with 16bit color depth!! What junk Windows is!!
I was considering learning some Windows programming (*shudder*) but it just isn’t worth all of that. Then, on one last whim, I decided to pop in that Kubuntu CD I made again to see if a refreshed hard drive made a difference… WOW !! I guess Windows is good for one thing: wiping out a corrupted windows installation to prepare for Linux!! Woohoo!!
As I type this on my beloved iBook G4, Kubuntu is installing on the Dull Platitude and it’s getting real close to done! So I will now have a second dev machine to monkey around with.

Now if I can just get that old clamshell iBook G3 to boot off the Linux live CDs for PPC… then we’d be in serious business!