http://www.danshockley.com/weblog.php Mostly personal thoughts en-us http://www.danshockley.com/weblog.php Mostly personal thoughts http://www.danshockley.com/weblog.php?id=P28 Repeat after me, folks - a Trojan horse is NOT a virus. Anyone with the most basic programming skills can write a Trojan horse program for almost any operating system. If a user decides to run a dangerous program, you can only stop the user by not allowing the user to do ANYTHING. Programs have to be able to create/delete files. Programs have to be able to run when the user asks them to. If someone writes a program that deletes all the files in your Documents folder and asks _you_ to run... http://www.danshockley.com/weblog.php?id=P27 I was just alerted by Google's News Alert email service that hackers have released worms into the wild that attack Mac OS X. Hmm, until I read the article and discover that nothing of the sort has happened, despite the explicitly-worded headline. I'm sure Chris Jenkins will gather a lot of page hits for Australian IT's website, but anyone who knows how to read will realize the headline was completely false. Not only have no worms for Mac OS X (Apple's operating system) been released, he... http://www.danshockley.com/weblog.php?id=P26 There's an article over at MacDailyNews that discusses Rush Limbaugh's use and un-paid advocacy of Macs - http://macdailynews.com/comments.php?id=P3838_0_1_0 Here's what I think: Apple should find a way to take advantage of this. It's not as if they have really tried to avoid politically-charged figures. Case in point: Al Gore is on the board of directors. He has publicly berated the President, saying "He betrayed this country! He played on our fears!" in a Howard... http://www.danshockley.com/weblog.php?id=P25 There is a semi-informed discussion going on at Macintouch where a reader wrote to say that they somehow managed to get a malicious shell script installed on their Mac. Others wrote in to describe what the script seems to be doing. Let's get something straight - if you have to INSTALL a piece of software or shell script on your machine it is NOT A VIRUS! If you have somehow managed to install a piece of software that does something malicious, it is NOT a vulnerability in your... http://www.danshockley.com/weblog.php?id=P24 John Welch writes an interesting and informative article about the state of security on Macs at bynkii.com: On why the Mac's small population is not a defense against an attack I agree with most of what John concludes - Macs are NOT invulnerable, obviously. I had to deal with what measures to take for the SSH bug, along with several others. Those were bugs which a savvy, malicious programmer could have exploited to obtain root access remotely. However, most people would be well-served... http://www.danshockley.com/weblog.php?id=P23 The blog codepoetry explores the Color Picker in OS X in great detail, helping us find all the great hidden features found within. There are ways to use the Color Picker to choose a color anywhere on your screen. You can use external images as a custom palette, and much, much more. One thing in the Comments is a complaint about having to go into an app's font colors to work with the Color Picker. I wrote a quick little AppleScript that does the job for you. It opens the Color Picker,... http://www.danshockley.com/weblog.php?id=P22 I had been hoping for a long time that OmniWeb would reach this point. Version 5.0 finally puts OmniWeb on top for serious users. It now has the stability to match its always-amazing feature set. One unmatched feature - your browsing state is saved between re-launches. I cannot count the number of time I had many pages loaded in Safari or another browser and accidentally quit (or crashed), losing everything I had queued up to read. I partially got around this in other browsers by... http://www.danshockley.com/weblog.php?id=P21 No, I'm not talking politics here, folks. I'm talking about a company that releases poorly-designed products, harasses its users, and then tries to bully its way into a competitors product when it can't compete on its own. Real Networks has tried for years now to get people to pay for music they can't keep, and have had limited success. Apple came along and ate their lunch by combining a best-of-breed portable music player in the iPod and combined it with an easy-to-use, enjoyable... http://www.danshockley.com/weblog.php?id=P20 Well, I finally went and did it - posted my new program TuneTags on VersionTracker.com. Here's hoping I didn't miss any obvious bugs and get roasted. I thought of making TuneTags when I realized how limiting the Genre tag was for song tracks. I wanted to be able to mark songs as good for driving music, good party music, mellow to help you relax, romantic, some combination of those, or whatever. I realized that the Comment tag usually goes fairly unused, and I could save keywords,... http://www.danshockley.com/weblog.php?id=P19 John Gruber of DaringFireball.net explains very well why Apple's upcoming Dashboard mini-application-layer is NOT a rip-off of Konfabulator at DaringFireBall.net: Dashboard vs Konfabulator. Can anyone who enhances something another developer wrote really expect that the developer of the original product won't add that feature directly at some point? Read John Gruber for reasons why Apple would have been throwing money away to buy Konfabulator. I'm working on a program that...