It’s a little off-topic for this site but I couldn’t let Doug Morris’s interview with Wired go by without comment. Mr. Morris is the “chair and CEO” of Universal Music Group. This quote brought forth uncontrollable laughter: “If you had Coca-Cola coming through the faucet in your kitchen, how much would you be willing to pay for Coca-Cola? There you go,” he says. “That’s what happened to the record business.” Mr. Morris, what does come out of faucets is water. Which is a $15 Billion business (and growing) in the [...] Read the rest »
Security Links & News
No Security Quest this week, but here’s some links from the past week. Akismet.com: It really is spam – Interesting article about comment spam. In the past, I’ve had to delete a few of these “compliment” comments that contained spam links and made it through the filters, and I’ve seen numerous others that were caught by the filters. It does seem to be a growing trend. Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.10 Release Notes – Firefox 2.0.0.1o was released to address 3 high impact security issues. (High is less than the highest rating [...] Read the rest »
OS X 10.5 Leopard Frustrations
While I’m very hapy with OS X 10.5 Leopard overall and don’t regret the upgrade there are some things that annoy me or a outright bugs. Let’s get the translucent menu bar and menus out of the way. The translucent menu bar doesn’t bother me because I use a dark background. Still, the translucent menus are a problem when they drop down over other programs. Having the text on the screen bleed through the menus makes them hard to read, looks terrible, and makes no sense. I’ve seen hacks for [...] Read the rest »
No Trail Log This Week
Anyone who cares probably always noticed there wasn’t a new Trail Log on Sunday. A bit of a slow week on the quest due to holiday preparations and no links or other news I felt like talking about. Read the rest »
Parallels 3 Beta Updated
Parallels has released Parallels 3 Beta Build 5570, it’s available from their beta download page. Most of the improvements over the previous beta center around Leopard compatibility. I’d been having problems with Parallels under Leopard which had driven me to start using VMware Fusion almost exclusively. Most of my really annoying issues have seemed to revolve around Spaces in coherence mode. The release noted mention “multiple problems” in this area have been fixed. The release notes (included in the download DMG file) lists several known issues that remain in build [...] Read the rest »
Happy Thanksgiving
Happy Thanksgiving to those of you in the States. Happy regular old Thursday to everyone else. Read the rest »
Security Quest #11: Leopard Firewall Updates
Apple recently released security updates for their OS products and among those were updates for Leopard all centered around the firewall. The three firewall updates were included in the OS X 10.5.1 update. One of the fixes took a page from Microsoft by changing some words to help call the problem solved. This “re-wording” was for the problem described as: The “Block all incoming connections” setting for the firewall is misleading. Apple fixed this so the setting now reads “Allow only essential services”. According to the bulletin they have reduced [...] Read the rest »
Mac BitTorrent Client: Transmission
Fedora 8 was released recently and I wanted to download a copy. With a DVD size of over 3GB bittorrent was the way to go. I’d used Azureus in the past, but hadn’t re-installed it after upgrading to Leopard. I decided to change up and go with something new. Azureus was moving heavily toward video and had the interface to prove it. I wanted a simple client that would just download files. I went with the popular Transmission open source bittorrent client. The Mac version is a universal binary. The [...] Read the rest »
Amazon Kindle e-Book Reader
Amazon announced their e-Book reader, called Kindle, today to much fanfare. I just don’t get it. To me, it seems like a solution in search of a problem. I like gadgets as much as the next person, but if someone was to give me one of these I’m not sure I’d use it once the novelty wore off. And at $400 the only way I’d use one is if someone gave one to me. One claimed benefit is that it’s smaller than a paperback book. Great. But even at today’s [...] Read the rest »
The OS Quest Trail Log #15:
When I upgraded to Leopard I kept Safari as my default browser so it would open whenever I clicked a link. But I kept using Firefox for almost everything. I liked how fast Safari was when I did fire it up. So this morning I decided to switch over and start using Safari as my primary browser, only going to Firefox when there’s no choice. Safari definitely feels faster and uses less memory. The Greasemonkey and Browser Sync extensions to Firefox give it an edge in features over Safari, especially [...] Read the rest »
