Zac Garrett

One of the major trends today for gathering news are these social news sites. The idea is great, you give a bunch of a great tool, like digg and let them produce what they think is good news. The issue is you are giving away editorial control, therefore you will get a lot of junk. Continue Reading »

Being someone who likes the command line, one of the best features of OS X is that it is based on a UNIX variant. This means that it has a ton of power that is hidden behind a stylish GUI. If a user does not want to use this power the operating system functions just fine without any tweaking. The fun comes in when you want to change something and it can easily be altered. You do not have to go into the registry like in Windows, but you get to enjoy the goodness of UNIX’s power. Continue Reading »

About two years ago now I wanted to learn to code PHP better than I already did. The idea came to mind to build a simple game just to play around with the language. The game turned into such a mess that I started calling the internal functions exactly what they where, crappy. When I finally ran out of time/gave up, I just called it what it was a crappy game.

A few months ago I was cleaning out my server when I found little ol’ Crappy Game once again. I found it in a state of non-functioning, the login and signup scripts were both broken due to server upgrades. I spent a few hours working on it to get it all back up and running again.

Now, go play some Crappy Game!

Word of caution: This game is not that secure. I know that the formula I used for hashing passwords is not any good. I would suggest using a random password just because I know there are probably SQL injections and all that kind of fun stuff in the script. My server should block most of these problems, but just be safe.

I’ve been using OS X for a little while now and I have found that many users have a false sense of security. They believe that just because there are not many bugs found and fixed in it that means there are not many holes that need to be fixed. This is not true.

Apple is known in the security industry as being hostel to bug finders. They down play the bug that has been found and do not admit it even existed. Apple does not even acknowledge the person(s) who found the problem.

When the month of Apple bugs was first released it seemed that users did not want the security holes found. They wanted to continue in their own little world of if you don’t see it, then it doesn’t exist. This is a false sense of security. I would rather see Apple take steps to secure their systems quickly as possible. Then once the bug has been fixed state what the bug was and acknowledge the people who found it.

Microsoft has really picked up the ball when it comes to security today, mainly because they had no other choice. With the virii going around in 2001 they had to fix something. They have spent the last six years improving their security. Today Apple is in about the same spot Microsoft was in 2000; something huge is going to happen if they do not step forward to mediate it.

I really like OS X and would hate to see something like code red or Nimda on this Operating System.

There is this new trend going around that has been dubbed “Web 2.0″. This term in my opinion is lacking, it is so broad that anything can be called “web 2.0″. More than anything it is a dotcom bubble 2.0. People are now using javascript to create interactive web sites rather than flash like in the first bubble. People are starting to call this technology AJAX when it is just advanced javascript. There is nothing all that new about it, just more people are starting to use it.

From a security standpoint this new trend of moving towards a web based OS is scary. By US law a security researcher cannot test to see how secure a web site is. They can slam an application to death trying to find bugs, but they are unable touch a web site. This is bad because ethical hackers who would report bugs are not able to do so while the unethical hackers have at it. This means that the people who look for the bugs are the ones who have something to gain. They are trying to gain the users information, be it their username and password or other information stored on the account.

End users are starting to trust these web based services for data storage. If you post your personal information on a site such as google docs it is there forever. You may say to remove it, but there could be a copy floating around google’s backup servers somewhere. This means that none of your information is private. Someone somewhere could get it if they really wanted to. For most home users this is not all that big of a deal, but google is targeting businesses. When you start looking at this from a business standpoint it is truly scary. All of your trade secrets can no longer be called secrets, google knows them. So, if you use google docs along with gmail someone could gain access to everything.

Let’s go in a different direction now, security in javascript itself. Client side scripting is not safe. Moreover, javascript is not safe. You can just take a look at Jikto, it is a Trojan of sorts that is in javascript. This little piece of code looks for problems in a web site and then when it finds something it infects that site. The end user interacts with this without even knowing about it. Javascript is so powerful today that is can do much more than it was intended to do, this means that the “bad guys” can do evil along with the web developers who create tools like google docs and other AJAX sites.

This term “web 2.0″ classifies a grouping of sites that in my opinion are possible to being insecure. People are trusting their personal and business information with a company who offers a free service. If you signed a contract stating exactly what you were getting then it is another story, but with the current sites that I have seen it is a scary reality.

A Little History

When growing up around computers like I did one tends to believe that Apple computers are one of the worst things in the world. I refused to touch a Mac computer for many years, I would tell people to get a “real computer”. In all honesty I did not try OS X until recently, not because I did not want to, but because I could not bring myself to spending the money buying the hardware.

When OS X was being ported over to the x86 based Intel hardware I thought for sure this was going to give me the option to run OS X on one of my home computers. It turned out that to do this you have to do quite a few workarounds and it is not legal. For me personally, I did not have a computer at the time that would support the requirements needed. I quickly went back to my ignorant ways of hating Apple.

In the last few years I grew to love Linux. I ran it extensively at home for quite a few years and refused to run much of anything else. I did use the BSDs during this period, but nothing “mainstream”. I loved (and still do) the power you get when running Linux. If you do not like how something works it is open source and you can change it yourself or talk directly to the developers. This works wonderfully when everything is running smoothly, but you get a few bumps in the road and everything is out of whack. I cannot remember the number of times I’ve reformatted because it was easier than trying to fix the issue(s).

My biggest complaint with Linux has been the lack of good wireless support. My primary machine is my laptop and if it is wired there is no point in even using it. I know I am going to get people saying, “Why didn’t you try XYZ, it works great!” To put it simply, I spent many hours working on wireless. You could even say that number in days. I’ve tried nearly everything to get wireless working easily, nothing has made it even remotely similar to the ease of Windows XP with Service Pack 2. There were a few I had high hopes for, but the pain of installing them took that ease away very quickly.

Search for a Great Laptop

In January of this year my laptop literally started falling apart. So, my search was off for a new system. My requirements were that the hardware had to support the *NIX environment very well, have a resolution better than 1280×800, and be powerful enough to do everything I need. After a bunch of research I came down to two systems; Thinkpad T60p and the MacBook Pro (15inch).

Both of these systems will work with just about any distro of Linux and both have great reviews from everyone I asked. I was really in a quandary of which one to choose. There is one that I’ve had bad thoughts about for almost all my life. As well as the one that I’ve actually had bad experience with while working in a PC Services center at Intel. I thought it was going to be an easy choice of going with the Thinkpad. I could just not bring myself to buying a product that I dealt with on a daily basis and it had issues.

What does that mean? Yes, I am a owner of a 15 inch MacBook Pro.

Well, what do you think of it?

First impression, the sucker just works. After spending countless hours tweaking Linux to get it to work just right it is an amazing feeling to have a computer that just works. I had the computer running wirelessly in under half an hour. Most of that time was waiting for some (stupid in my opinion) demo video on the first boot. It also took me a bit of time to find my crazy WPA password (generated by GRC’s password generator).

Software

Once I was on the internet I started looking into how to change the theme. I have always been a fan of dark color themes, you might have noticed by the color of this site. I started to find some theme sites around that did not really explain how they worked. After a bit of searching around I found that a third party piece of software was needed to customize the interface. At this point I am really confused, even Windows had a decent interface for changing the colors. How could this “superior “operating system could not have a way to change the color scheme without paying someone else money. Thinking that I was missing something I forgot about changing the colors for a while and moved on to something that would be better.

I opened up the terminal and was soon at home. All of my simple commands were intact, for the more advanced tools I use I found neat tool called fink that is very similar to apt-get in the Debian based distros. I used this tool to install quite a few tools that I use on a daily basis and now that my computer is setup I do not use the fink all that much.

One of the things I miss most about Linux is a good package manager. When switching from MS Windows to Linux the first thing I noticed was the sheer number of free pieces of software out there. Take for example the Synaptic package manager that comes preinstalled with Ubuntu; The ability to install nearly anything with a few simple clicks is wonderful. Now I am back in a state where I have to manually look for the software and install it.

I’ve also noticed that there is not all that much free software for Macs. Coming from a world of free open source software it is a wakeup call when you get that annoying shareware popup asking for you to pay them. Come to think about it, I do not believe that I even get these messages on Windows much anymore. The only programs that I can think of that still give these are GetRight and WinRAR. I do not even use these pieces of software anymore as there are less annoying free alternatives.

Most of the open source software that I have used and love will work in OS X… with a bit of work. As most of these programs use the X11 GUI you need to install that. This requires grabbing the second DVD that came with the computer and finding the correct file to install. Not the simplest task in the world, but nothing compared to trying to edit the xorg.conf file.

Once installed I could then go about installing my other applications that needed it; primarily GIMP and Open Office. Both programs installed quite easily once the required libraries were on the system. I found a huge problem with running X11 applications in OS X, they are resource hogs and have quite a few annoyances.

When running a X11 application in OS X you may notice that it runs really slow. This is because it has to run a ton of different processes it has to run to get that one program working. I saw it using around half of my RAM with all of the processes combined. This caused everything else to slow down while the program was running.

The issue that caused me to stop using any X11 applications was the inability to keep focus. I do a bit of image editing for various purposes and I find that GIMP more than gets the job done for me. The issue with GIMP in OS X is that the panes for the program are in different windows. When going between these windows/panes things get moved around. For example, trying to move a file from one open file to another does not work properly. I do not know why, but it is annoying. Also, if you keep the program open in the background and you hover over it the program all of the sudden grabs attention. After having this happen a dozen times I had to stop using the program.

After a bit of research I found alternatives for the two X11 programs I wanted to use. For GIMP there is GIMPSHOP which integrates directly into the standard OS X GUI. It works exactly like I would expect. There is also a good alternative to OpenOffice called NeoOffice. It is based on OpenOffice, but puts the OS X feel to it. With these two alternatives to the alternatives I no longer use X11 for my everyday software.

Hardware

One of the things that has always scared me about the Mac was the mouse’s lack of two buttons. Being that my primary system is a laptop and I use the touchpad exclusively on it I need a mouse that works great. I right click a ton and I need something that is easy to use; the touchpad itself on the MacBook Pro may only have one button under it, but if you use two fingers on the touchpad it turns into a right click. You can also use your two fingers to scroll. I love this feature; I end up missing it when I get on another laptop. The mouse is something that should not be feared by PC users thinking of switching to a Mac. If you want to use a normal mouse, you can use just about any PC compatible mouse. I did have a few issues with an old wireless keyboard/mouse setup where only the keyboard works. Replacing it with a similar, but newer model worked like a charm.

I am very particular with it comes to a screen. This is the thing you are going to be looking at nonstop and I for one want it to be perfect. For this reason I refuse to get a glossy screen. I’ve worked on too many systems with this type of screen where if the light hits the screen just right it is annoying. I was told that Apple fixed this with these laptops, but under the glaring lights of the local electronics store I saw different. I am not a designer and would rather have something easy to look at for countless hours at a time than something that could cause an annoyance.

Conclusion

Overall I am extremely happy about getting a Mac. I was extremely hesitant on getting one, but I am very glad that I took this step. I am so happy that I will be recommending Macs to most people who ask me for a computer recommendation. The only reason I would say to stick with a PC today is if you are a heavy player of games. I have noticed that quite a few of the popular games end up getting ported over to OS X if they are extremely successful. If you look at Blizzard Entertainment, creators of StarCraft, WarCraft, and Diablo, all of their recent releases are released at the same time for Macs as the PC.

A computer should work. If you do not like the way something works then odds are someone has created something better. The OS that works the best for me is OS X. I do not try to force any software on someone. I feel that a user should use whatever they are comfortable with. If you are happy with Windows, I see no need for one to switch. If you were unhappy with it, like me, look around to see what else is out there. You may just find something you like better.

Yes, I have been neglecting this site the last few months. I've been busy with quite a few other things, so this has been on the back burner. I will be picking back up posting shortly.