Mac Style

Tabbed Terminal Problem Solved

Well, after much searching, I finally discovered that iTerm has the tab feature built in. I guess it made it hard to find as the toolbar only includes options for a totally new window and not a new tab. I ended up finding the new tab function in the menu options.

I guess I should look harder next time!

Looking For Tabbed Terminals

Being accustomed to system administration on Linux, I've gotten used to using the terminal program that comes with KDE. One of the main features that I used was the tabbed browsing feature, very similar to tabbed browsing in Mozilla, Firefox, Safari, etc. It allows you to have multiple terminals open within the same "window".

Can anyone point me to a terminal program for Mac OS X that includes this feature?

NeoOffice 1.1 Release Candidate 1 Available for Download

NeoOffice, the OpenOffice.org office suite native port to Mac OS X has just released their first release candidate of version 1.1.

]]> From the NeoOffice web site:

NeoOffice/J 1.1 Release Candidate is here! After months of testing, the first Release Candidate of NeoOffice/J has been released. This represents a major milestone towards a fully stable final release. It is based off of OpenOffice.org 1.1.4 and has many user requested and community funded improvements including interapplication drag-and-drop, speed improvements, smaller PDFs, and many bug fixes. It's also available in over 40 different languages.

Downloads are available from the download section of their site.

Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" Goes Gold

AppleInsider is reporting that the latest build of Mac OS X "Tiger" has been classed as the gold master release, meaning that this build is ready to be distributed and released to the public.

Pre-order from Amazon and get $35 off.

]]> Apple is not officially commenting on the news, only holding to their previous commitment of a release in the 2nd quarter, 2005. This latest build was only released a few days ago, so this sort time of testing on the latest build makes me a bit suspicious that this could be an April Fools Joke. I'm sure we're all hoping that it's true, the sneak peaks at Apple's website certainly look appealing.

Amazon is giving $35 off, and is taking pre-orders.

Apple has some great previews of what's to come in Tiger, it's worth looking at if you haven't already.

Read the AppleInsider article.

Return of the Mac

An interesting look at the return of the use of the Apple Mac among hackers ("hackers" meaning the nice computer geeks, the naughty ones are called "crackers"). It sounds similar to my experience, although I haven't had quite the exposure to the Mac, or hacking previously. Anyway, an enjoyable read going into the reasons that a lot of computer geeks are attracted to the Mac, mainly through the BSD based operating system, Mac OS X.

Hacking Mac OS X

A long, in depth blog interview "Behind the Red Shed, with Jonathan 'The Wolf' Rentzsch" is available from DrunkenBlog, a great name for a blog too! It's a really interesting read, and I'm not even all the way through yet. John is the author of mach_inject and mach_override, open source extension technologies for Mac OS X.

The Apple Motion Sensor

Amit Singh has done some clever work with the Apple Motion Sensor that features in the new PowerBook range. Along side some utilities that are available for download, he has also done some a huge amount of testing of ideas for adapting the technology as a human interface device.

The New 15" PowerBook Review

Macworld has an informative review of the new 15" Apple PowerBook. Some of the most interesting aspects are the historical information on the PowerBook, covering how it has advanced over the past year or so.

Virus Contest Announced, And Then Cancelled

DVForge have announced and then withdrawn a virus writing contest. If you can infect a standard Mac with a virus, you win $25,000! And if you're a Symantec employee, you could have stood to win $50,000. This is in response to a recent piece of FUD released by Symantec warning about the potential security risks in Mac OS X.

Symantec Bring Out The FUD

ZDNet are covering some new reporting that apparently, Symantec have published some FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) in a warning to Mac users that the platform could well be a target for virus, malware and spyware writers as the Mac takes more of the desktop market.

]]> The main problem with their comments and arguments is that the security of a system is related to the size of your market share. There are many products that prove this theory wrong, yet analysts seem to pull this out every now and again.

Take for example, Apache. Apache web server is the most popular web server on the Internet, and has been for a long time. It's market share is huge compared to its competitors, the only thing is, it has the least number of vulnerabilities. Microsoft's Internet Information Server on the other hand, has a small percentage of market share, and yet, has the highest amount of vulnerabilities.

If you look at some simple differences between the security setup of Windows compared to a Mac, you can see that just from the design, you are much more secure on a Mac.

In a default install of Windows, your user is given full administrative privileges, this means that any program you run as a regular user has the ability to write to system or program files. This means that a security hole could allow a virus or malware full access to your system.
Windows encourages you to use Internet Explorer, which is highly insecure and has an extremely high amount of vulnerabilities published against it every year. Some of them even go unpatched for a long period of time. Mac on the other hand encourages you to use Safari, which is based on the Konqueror engine, a much more secure web browsing technology.
On Windows, Internet Explorer is heavily built in to the operating system. So much so that Microsoft have tried to claim in court that they cannot separate the two. This is a very dangerous design decision. If you place Internet browsing on the same security level as operating system functions, you potentially open your computer to anything that Internet can throw at you.

And that's just a few examples of security that doesn't relate to market share, rather, design should be used for a more accurate assessment.

The Mac Attack Has Begun - Part III

Part III of my journey to embracing the famous Apple Mac.

]]> Please read Part I and Part II if you haven't already.

Mac OS X had the Unix element giving me access to all the reliability and command line glory that Linux provided, it also seemed to have the effort in design on behalf of the user. It even had support from companies like Palm to officially support the use of their hardware on that plaftorm, only since I started seriously using Linux did I realise the importance of this. It looked like a perfect solution, so I placed a request to get one from work.

I waited and waited. There was a shortage of PowerBooks at the time as Apple had just released the new hardware upgrades on the PowerBook specs. After around 4-5 weeks, it finally arrived.

I went down to the Apple Store, Next Byte, on Elizabeth Street in Melbourne to pick it up. I've noticed a few things about Apple Stores in comparison to your everyday computer store, firstly, cool people seem to frequent Apple Stores. It seems that the regular customers in small computer stores selling the usual beige PC, seem to attract geeks or people after the cheapest, nastiest hardware they can get. Apple Stores on the other hand, are full of normal, everyday, intelligent, cool kind of people. It was an interesting observation.

In fact, when I originally was talking to a salesman in the Apple Store, I was inquiring about the 17" PowerBook model. The salesman asked, "are you using it for design, or film?" I laughed and said "No, I'm a Linux Systems Administrator, my need to a high resolution screen is for more terminals!" I'm not sure he'd ever met anyone like me!

The whole experience reminded me of being a young boy in the Commodore shop, when my Dad bought our Commodore 128D. This was a store that was serious about delivering a quality experience to its customers. To me it was a high contrast to my experiences with small beige PC computer stores, they're just after a quick buck, and the Linux crowd seem to like coding but don't really care about usability much.

So, I took my PowerBook and started to learn how to use it. It is quite different from a PC, but I'm not getting the hang of it after a few weeks, and I've fallen in love with it. Luckily there was a guy in the office who had used Macs for a while, so he helped me out bit in getting started.

I'm very happy with my Mac, and I wouldn't go back, never. The extra cost is worth it, Apple really take care to deliver an excellent quality product. The Mac even have a quite healthy shareware scene with great, innovative software being written. I'm very. very happy.

The Mac Attack Has Begun - Part II

Part II of my journey to embracing the famous Apple Mac.

]]> Please read Part I if you haven't already.

Last year I bought an IBM ThinkPad R50, with a Pentium M 1.6GHz, 1Gb RAM, and a high resolution screen. It was black and mean, and when I say black, it was very, very black, if not a bit ugly. But it performed well.

As far as operating systems go, I've progressed from whatever came with the C64 and C128D then onto MS-DOS 3.3, 6.22, Windows 3.1, Windows 95a, 95b, Windows 98, Windows 98SE. After forming the habit of re-installing my computer every 30 days or so due to slow downs in Windows 98SE, I decided to switch to Linux.

Linux was a great friend. It was open, it was free, and most of all, it was geeky. A perfect fit! Even the new IBM ThinkPad is running SuSE Linux 9.2, one of the best Linux distributions that I've ever used. But, in the end, I started to find all the shortcomings of a Linux desktop. In the early days, there used to be hardware problems, which were eventually overcome by recompiling something, upgrading something, or switching a small piece of hardware over. But, near the end, I just couldn't get my Palm Pilot to reliably sync with anything, Evolution, Kontact, you name it, it worked, but was quickly followed by a data corruption.

I also found the lack of consistent design in software designed for Linux. I'm not sure what causes this, in the old days of shareware, software was generally good quality, with innovative features and consistent designs. It was like thought went into the design of the software. Unfortunately in the Linux world, this same level of thought is not generally put into software design. Keyboard compatibility is inconsistent, general user interface design is poor, useful and innovative features are missing, the software is designed for a developer, not a user. I think that overall, I hold usability as a high priority in the software I use, if software I use distracts me from working because I have to think for the software developer, then that is bad, and in the end, it got unacceptable for me. I couldn't take it anymore, I needed to switch.

Now, I'd fallen in love with certain parts of Linux, and I really couldn't go back to Windows, so Mac OS X looked promising. Little did I know just how enjoyable a Mac would be.

Continue to Part III...

The Mac Attack Has Begun - Part I

A little while ago, my work bought me an Apple Powerbook 12". I've been a computer geek for many years, but I have never owned, or really used to any great extent an Apple computer. But, after a matter of weeks, I'm now converted, so much so that I feel that I need to write about it.

]]> My experience of computing has been so affected by this little silver item of beauty that I've actually decided to devote a whole site to share my new obsession.

I suppose a little bit of my background and experiences in platforms would be helpful. I started using computers when I was a young lad, my weapon of choice was the old, faithful, Commodore 64. That eventually grew to a Commodore 128D, a model that was not widely known, but came with a Z80 microprocessor that allowed the system to perform as a 80 column word processor. The 128D was a boring piece of equipment from my perspective, I generally booted into the C64 mode, and pined after the amazing Commodore Amiga 500.

From there came the great XT IBM Compatible. My particular model was a turbo, 8GHz from memory, with a suped-up 640kb RAM. It had a very clear, although uninspiring, orange monochrome screen. It played Prince of Persia great, and I enjoyed the Microsoft Paint program, Word 5.0, and DOS 3.3. It was my first of many PCs that I either owned or interacted with. As a side note, it had nothing on my C64, no real sound, no real graphics, a real step backwards, but it did get me good marks in high school as I could write up my assignments in Word.

My next beast of computing was the 486 DX 33, originally it had 4Mb of RAM and a SVGA monitor. I realised how much fun Doom was, and eventually upgraded to my first Sound Blaster card and 8Mb of RAM. A great machine that now gave me a smooth Doom experience. After a going through a few CTRL keys, I also ended up upgrading various bits and pieces like a DX4 100, CD drive, and an additional 800Mb hard drive alongside the original 200Mb.

I then went to a Pentium 200 MMX, then a Celeron 366. My main desktop computer these days is a highly modified version of the original Celeron 366 upgraded to a 1.8GHz on a BX motherboard using a great little adapter that enabled the conversion.

Continue to Part II...