Month: February 2008

Categories
Apple

Resource Forks Suck

Dear Apple,

Please kill off resource forks. They add an unnecessary complexity to data archiving and management that’s unneeded by todays standards. Since Mac OS X it seems only a few places exist where resource forks are actually used. For example the older pre-Mac OS X “font suitcases” used a resource fork, while the modern “Data Fork Suitcase Format” as it’s name implies, does not1.

One could argue keeping resource forks is good for legacy purposes. But since Mac OS X 10.5 can no longer run Classic even on PPC systems, is there really a need?

If that’s really not possible, could you please make rsync suck a little less?

Ideally since rsync 3.0 looks like it will be a lot better, make it a high profile download for Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5 similar to what was done to push Safari 3.0. That would be a nice stop gap solution.

I hope you’ll fix this since it’s a real pain in the butt for people like me.

Thanks,
Robert

1. 25251 Mac OS X: Font file formats

Categories
Apple

I Can Has iPhone SDK Now

I can Has iPhone SDK Now?

Very interesting. I’m curious to see what we’ll learn. Should be very soon as the SDK was scheduled for the end of this month.

Categories
Apple

1080p For Apple TV

I’ve mentioned the Apple TV a few times before. One reason why I considered it to be mediocre is that it lacked 1080p, which lets face it is the likely future of TV. Seems that’s now changed as of the last software update. Awesome.

Categories
Apple

Flash For iPhone

Gear Live is reporting that Flash for the iPhone is coming. Given how many times rumors like this come around, I’m slightly skeptical until I actually see confirmation for myself.

That said, if there is an implementation, I suspect it will be a special mobile version, and very MPEG-4 centric. By that I mean H.264 as the encouraged (if not only) video encoding, and AAC as the preferred audio format, with MP3.

There’s a simple reason for this. AAC, MP3, and H.264 can be processed using hardware decoding. This means the CPU isn’t needed, resulting in lower power consumption. Many mobile devices have specific hardware for this reason. There is unknown hardware in the iPhone, which may very well be for hardware decoding.

By leveraging hardware decoding it allows Apple to offer things like video without sacrificing thermals or battery life. Since Flash can now use H.264 as well, it could offload some of that complicated processing. The CPU itself contains PowerVR MBX 3D graphics.

This could allow for most Flash to work, with much lower power consumption. The downside to this is that VP6 encoded video wouldn’t be able to use hardware decoding. For many online video sites (which use VP6 since H.264 is still very new) you’d have to run off of the CPU meaning more thermals and power consumption. A notable exception is YouTube, which thanks to Google’s work with the Apple apparently uses H.264 by means of a custom application.

Categories
Apple

Mac OS X 10.5.2 Leopard Update

Apple released Mac OS X 10.5.2 weighing in at a hefty 343MB. Generally speaking, Mac OS X 10.5.3 is where the OS is really firing on all pistons. Before that, it’s similar to Windows before SP1. Still some rough spots. This release fixes a fair number of bugs, and adds some polish.

So far so good, it installed fine, rebooted and I’m up and running. Overall not to much changed for me, since my mini doesn’t support menu transparency (which you can now disable). The list view for stacks is a very welcome addition. I’m glad they decided to include that. For larger stacks it’s so much easier to browse.

I don’t have Time Machine running on my mini, so I’m really not sure why Apple decided to make the new menu item for it on by default. In my opinion it should be off unless you setup Time Machine. So I turned that off, and reclaimed a few pixels of valuable menu space.

Still not fixed is the Apple Mail issue I noted before where you can’t view nested mailboxes in IMAP. Maybe next time.

Categories
Mozilla Security

False Alarm, Go Back To Bed

The other night I was reading about this new security flaw, and for some reason I couldn’t figure out why it was a security flaw. Why couldn’t you just download Firefox and open the file yourself? I presumed I was just tired, and went to bed.

Ends up I wasn’t the only one who didn’t think it was a vulnerability. Mike Shaver has more info on it. If someone wanted to get that information, they don’t need to get people to visit a hacked server. They can just download Firefox and open the file itself. No big deal.

Theoretically a custom enterprise build made by a company for use on it’s network could be modified, but I doubt it. Even if it was, it wouldn’t really contain anything very useful.

Always take things posted on a tech site with a grain of salt, unless they are confirmed by multiple experts. Slashdot ran the story a little premature.

Categories
In The News Politics

There’s No Such Thing As A Free Lunch

Many think that tax rebates they will soon receive thanks to the economic stimulus package recently passed is “free money”. Reality is that unless you made less than $3,000 or suddenly have a change in income between now and next year, that’s likely not the case. As this MSN Money article puts it:

Remember, this is your money you’re getting back, and the rebate checks are basically an advance on your 2009 refund.

I wonder if this misconception of free cash causes more reckless spending.

That said it is possible to make a few dollars if it’s invested well as you’ll collect a nearly a full year’s interest on money the government would have otherwise been collecting interest on. So in reality, the free money is only the interest you “make” on it if you invested it well.

Categories
Internet

W3C On DTD Perversions

According to the W3C Systeam’s blog, there’s a lot of poorly designed software out there. It’s pretty rare that something has a legitimate need to pull down a DTD in order to work. They should never be requesting it on a very frequent basis. It’s a very cachable asset. The post includes some pretty impressive stats too:

..up to 130 million requests per day, with periods of sustained bandwidth usage of 350Mbps, for resources that haven’t changed in years.

They also make a few requests which really all developers should follow. Here’s my summary:

  • Cache as much as possible, to minimize your impact on others (not to mention improve your performance).
  • Respect caching headers
  • Don’t fetch what you don’t need
  • Identify yourself. Don’t use a generic UA.
  • Try not to suck.
Categories
Mozilla

Hotmail Doesn’t Work With Firefox 2.0

According to Mitch Meyran at Free Software Magazine Hotmail is crippled in Firefox 2.0 for Linux. The fix? Spoof the user agent to be Firefox 2.0 for Windows. Another fix is to use Gmail or Yahoo Mail. Anyone else experience this problem? There does seem to be a few reports of this.

Categories
Mozilla

Customizing Reporter

Mike Kaply pointed out a blog post on customizing reporter.

For the record most changes can be made without actually touching code, simply by including the correct preferences. This is done intentionally so that upgrading later on doesn’t involve complicated merging of your changes into an updated code base.

To point reporter to an intranet server, the pref you need to use is:

extensions.reporter.serviceURL

To show a custom privacy policy, just point this preference to the page of your choice:

extensions.reporter.privacyURL

Or to not show it all, just default this pref to true:

extensions.reporter.hidePrivacyStatement

For Firefox 3.0 it will no longer use SOAP, instead it will use xmlHttpRequest since SOAP support won’t ship in Firefox 3.0. It’s also easier to implement on the server side.

At one point I half-implemented a proxy service that once installed would capture reports sent to it that matched a given list of hosts, and forwarded all the rest to reporter. Theoretically it would be even easier these days.