Tag: server

Amazon’s new mobile app

Download Amazon’s free app for the iPhone. Go to the “Remembers” section. Take a picture of any product. The picture will get uploaded to Amazon’s servers, which will try to match the image to a product in the catalog which you can then buy right then and there. I couldn’t believe it the first time I tried it. Nor the second time. It’s stellar! Doesn’t work every time, but the fact that it works at all blows me away.
I keep wondering: Why don’t they make these kinds of features more obviously available on our actual computers?

Will my Mac get a virus?

There was news earlier this week that Apple had released an article recommending that Mac users install anti-virus software. Many journalists made a big deal of this. Turns out the tech-support article in question was several years old, and had simply been updated, and looked recent. In response to the whole kerfuffle,  Apple has since yanked the article, because…
We have still never seen a Mac virus “in the wild.” 
Definition: virus = “a piece of code that is capable of copying itself and typically has a detrimental effect, such as corrupting the system or destroying data.”
Viruses infect Windows computers, and they do so invisibly. But over the years, including just recently, a couple of anti-virus software companies recently reported a couple of  “Trojan horses” exploits of the Mac.
Definition: Trojan horse = “a program designed to breach the security of a computer system while ostensibly performing some innocuous function.”
Trojans are somewhat different than viruses. Trojan horses require that you, the user, do something to accept and install the malicious app on your system. In one example from earlier this year, the OSX.RSPlug.A Trojan, a web site purportedly offering a movie — guess what kind of movie — says that the video cannot be displayed, and asks the user to download a “codec,” which is actually an app that changes your DNS servers to send you to phishing and spamming sites.
OSX.RSPlug.A may be a pest, but it ultimately does not really screw up your computer, and like other Trojan horses, it is removable. This one, for example, can be wiped through this admittedly annoying process or using a free tool now published by SecureMac.
But here’s the really important point: As with any system-level software on the Mac, one has to enter one’s administrative password to install this Trojan. Which is yet another reason Macs are more secure, and is also a lesson: If you don’t know where a piece of software comes from, don’t install it. Know your admin password, and know what you’re doing when you use it. Simple. 
A wag of the finger went to the people at Intego, who publish VirusBarrier for the Mac, and who blew the worry about this exploit way out of the water, which created a media scare and gave Mac haters a change to spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD).
Finally, if a virus scare ever becomes real, Mac users will be able to download and run the free ClamXAV. But doing is neither my recommendation nor, apparently, Apple’s.

Got the new MacBook

13″. Back-lit keyboard. Now with 4GB RAM. 0.1 lbs. lighter than my 12″ PowerBook.
Oh, it’s so good. I’m more impressed than I have been with any previous model, at the time. Although, now I’m thinking back [cue bubbly dream-sequence transition]…

  1. 5300cs – 750Mb HD, 256MB RAM – The passive-matrix 256-color screen made it adequate but not special. Certainly a workhorse, but a pre-Jobs/Ive design.
  2. PowerBook G3 “Pismo” with FireWire – 500MHz, 512MB RAM (I think), 6GB HD – Stellar, with heft that was attractive at the time. DVD drive was so nifty. Airport card. I had the Zip drive that I could swap with the optical drive, which was a nice trick.
  3. Titanium PowerBook – 800MHz, 1GB RAM, 60GB HD – Ahhh, 10 times more storage, a G4 processor and a huge, bright screen. And so well built. The metal-encrusted TiBook was a major move forward in laptop design.
  4. 12″ PowerBook – 1.33GHz, 1.25GB RAM, 80GB HD – The fetish Mac. Wished I coulda gone to 2GB. Wished for back-lit keyboard. Wished for brighter screen. Wished for sudden motion sensor. Wished for bigger hard drive. Was able to hack the two-finger scroll. But for all of that, the 12″ is a fantastic unit.
  5. 15″ MacBook Pro – 2.2GHz, 4GB RAM, 160GB HD – Had to buy it. The 12″ had run its course and wouldn’t run Leopard well. Needed Intel. A rocketship with a bright, beautiful (and matte) display, although I hate to say I’m biased against it because a) it’s heavy and b) its logic board was screwed up from day 1. Having received the 13″, I can finally turn the MBP into AppleCare for the second time. I’m looking forward to getting it back for designing, viewing, and gaming. Also worth noting here that this was the last rev of Apple’s original aluminum laptop design, which had stayed incredibly consistent from January 2003 to October 2008, when the glass-trackpad-and-screen MacBooks were introduced. That’s a long, successful run for a design in this industry.
  6. 13″ MacBook – 2.4GHz, 4GB RAM, 250GB HD – Hewn from a single piece of aluminum, which is hot. LED screen that I can actually make too bright for indoors. User-accessible hard drive (want 7200RPM, but I love this 250GB!), which compensates somewhat for lack of FireWire. One single glass multi-touch trackpad, which my (slight) paunch seems to brush against and prevent good cursor tracking. And two option keys, which means no more key-remapping hacks. I’m officially a fan.

The only non-laptop Mac I’ve ever bought is my Intel Core Duo Mac mini, currently functioning as my media server (with a Drobo) and OS X Server break-and-fix learning box.

Things we love and hate

And then there are those phenomena that stoke our duplicity:

  1. Apple’s rigidly constrained product line: Purchase decisions are easy, but you always want that one other product — the iMac that’ll take 8GB RAM, the MacBook Air with FireWire, the … dare I say it … tablet.
      
  2. Apple’s increasing popularity: It was fun to drive the BMW of computers. But now every other car at the coffee shop … er, I mean, on the road … is a BMW. I think Mac users used to skew smarter and more open-minded; now we’re all over the place. Plus, as evidenced by the MobileMe fiasco, Apple needs to stop trying to be all things to all people. Let the iPhone sync wirelessly with other services like Google or Plaxo, why dontcha? (I mean, besides Exchange, which is discountable as a consumer solution.)
      
  3. The Mac mini: 2GB RAM? Really? Come on! It’s a fantastic machine. I’m typing on one now. Gigabit Ethernet. Fits anywhere. Super-slick. It’s my multimedia server, and home backup. Fantastic — until it runs out of memory, and then nothing but a reboot is gonna fix it. Reaaaaaally?
      
  4. Democracy
     
  5. An unhacked iPhone
     
  6. OS X Server: So good, so pretty, so clean, yet so limited, and not nearly stable or reliable enough. There’s a reason that MS Small Business Server is so popular; if you follow the Microsoft dogma, you don’t have to learn anything else to be a PC tech. Apple has waited too long to make the managed-client scenario obviously plug-and-play GUIfied. And it’s got a lame Address Book Directory, and a calendar server that won’t easily sync with the iPhone. REALLY?!
      
  7. The f@$%*& iTunes App Store. What a boon to the iPhone, but I really can’t believe Apple rejected a podcatcher application. Jerks.

Things that bug us

I’m compiling a list of junk that Erick and I run across that make us crazy. In some particular order, and warning: profanity follows…

  1. Western Digital MyBooks
  2. Maxtor drives
  3. Backup software not backing up
  4. Backup software not backing up because your stupid MyBook keeps unmounting itself
  5. Best Buy’s crappy prices and inventory
  6. That Best Buy sucks so bad we actually miss CompUSA
  7. Circuit City
  8. Altex
  9. The disturbing lack of a Fry’s Electronics store in San Antonio
  10. Yahoo not offering IMAP access to mail clients besides the iPhone
  11. Configuring email on a Blackberry
  12. Dell printers
  13. Gas prices
  14. Ill-informed AppleCare reps
  15. Tech-support phone monkeys who don’t listen, who assume they’re dealing with ignoramuses, and who keep insisting that you need to archive and install
  16. No CalDAV support on iPhone
  17. DSL
  18. Best Buy’s upping the price on DSL modems — Fuckers!
  19. Having to buy a modem at Best Buy because the know-nothing, knee-biting AT&T rep installed a crappy 2Wire wireless router even though the client had a router sitting right there.
  20. AT&T
  21. 2Wire
  22. AT&T’s damn DSL setup CD, which a client unsuspectingly inserted in their server, only to have it change the server’s network settings and screw up their whole operation.
  23. Lack of copy-paste on the iPhone
  24. Black iPhones shipping with white accessories
  25. Entourage (though admittedly less so these days, but don’t tell Microsoft I said so)
  26. Windows Windows Windows
  27. Windows Me
  28. Windows Vista
  29. Windows XP
  30. Windows 2000
  31. Microsoft Small Business Server
  32. Mac OS X Server (yeah, it’s on the list of Things We Dig, too)
  33. Printer/scanner manufacturers with poor driver rollouts for OS X
  34. Stupid fucking Jar Jar (I just had to)
To be continued…

iPhone Friday: Epic clusterf**k + happy ending

This from the NY Times:
This from “Sluggo”:
AT&T sucks… so does Apple for forcing them on us, very un-Apple-like behavior if you ask me.

Yeah, they do suck. I’m nonplussed at how badly today has gone. I mean, I’m comfortable and happy sitting at a restaurant with wifi, but that’s blissful ignorance, ‘cos I can’t receive any phone calls and don’t know who might be trying to get ahold of me. The grilled salmon at Luca is helping, too.

I don’t guess Apple had much choice but AT&T. Anyone who pays attention to the mobile communications market, and I mean worldwide, knows that a manufacturer has to choose a partner provider, or they can’t get a deal anywhere. It’s like the guy with the greased hair at the high school dance trying to put his hand on every sophomore girl’s ass, and pretty quick he’s got no one to dance with.
It’s also important to remember that, according to reports, Apple did offer the iPhone deal to Verizon, who said that Apple drove too hard a bargain. I know, you’re shocked. So, I’m gonna posit that Verizon is the second best provider in the States to AT&T. Better coverage, slightly more fascistic, about the same level of customer service. Sprint sucks rhino, and T-Mobile rates high in customer support, and terrible in connectivity.
So maybe if you can’t get Verizon, you go with AT&T. It’s possible, too, that the Verizon deal was itself a myth: AT&T is the only GSM provider worth its weight, and GSM is quickly becoming the world standard. Apple doesn’t want to make two iPhone models, one for GSM and one for CDMA, a whole different chipset.
Whether you’re a consumer or a manufacturer, whichever provider you marry, bring a jar of Vaseline to the nuptial consummation.
Perhaps Apple couldn’t have avoided this fiasco. What carrier on earth is used to thousands of devotées showing up, some a week early, to buy a bloody mobile phone on day of launch? We hoped Apple would have been able put up the infrastructure to handle the traffic. It was iTunes that was reporting the failure, but who knows whose servers were at fault?
Ah well. 6 hours after I got started, I have an new, activated iPhone 3G. 
I was without a connection for maybe 2 hours. 
My voicemail has been deleted, but I did take screenshots just in case. 
My original iPhone remains a wireless iPod, which is awesome. 
I’ve got GPS, good fast internet, and a bunch of cool apps. 
There are also more cool apps that cost more than I feel like paying. 
I don’t have copy & paste. 
I don’t need MMS. 
I haven’t tried the 3rd-party video recorder. 
I’m still with godawful AT&T, but I have an unlimited-minutes plan at a reasonable price (not more than I was paying before).
Today was a good day.

Free VPN!

Finally I had the opportunity/need/inspiration/circumstances to look for a free VPN server that would run on a server with a static IP on a LAN. 

Turns out Mac OS X has one built in! It’s an open-source UNIX deal called vpnd, and it’s the same one on OS X Server and configured through the GUI. It’s no surprise that Apple left a VPN GUI out of OS X client — Server costs either $499 or $999 — but a very nice developer named Alex Jones came up with the free iVPN, and after a little port forwarding on the router, and 30 seconds of config of iVPN, we had ourselves a legit L2TP VPN tunnel.

It was important to me that the VPN be accessible by the client built-in to OS X — found in Internet Connect in Tiger or earlier, and in Network System Preferences in Leopard. I have become bored with downloading and config’ing standalone software: too many checkboxes, not enough stability.

So…. whoop! Very easy, very free. 

Now, one thing about most VPN connections that has always bugged me is that, even if the client connects to a network resource, say a server, via its local Bonjour hostname, e.g. server.local, when a connection is attempted over the VPN it fails, and the user has to revert to using the IP address. Which is sort of fine, but a turn off to the less technically minded. So I just found this article on macosxhints.com about editing the /etc/hosts file:

Create the illusion that Bonjour works over a VPN

I haven’t tried it yet, but it makes sense to me. 

Leopard Server: file names are screwed up when connecting over SMB

Apple is all too aware of the chronic Apple File Protocol authentication issues with 10.5 Server. Some people have fixed this with a cron task that restarts AFP, say, every night. In my experience, this starts to corrupt file sharing altogether, to the point that, eventually, nobody can log in over AFP.

So I’ve been switching people to using SMB (Windows file sharing), which sucks just on principle, but it also cuts out Time Machine backups. I am also nervous about it losing Apple-specific file resources.

Anyhoo, at one site where I’ve asked everyone to connect over SMB, several on the server appeared with weird random file names, such as “_GNEWM~A” or “4UI5WM~7”. Didn’t matter which machine or which user account I was using to connect.

After some poking around, I figured out that folders and files with odd characters in their path, and especially with spaces at the ends of their names, were the culprits. Extra long names, too.

I don’t know if this is an historic problem with OS X Server, and I just never ran into it because most of my clients use Macs, or whether this is specific to 10.5. Regardless, right now OS X Server is hurting my schedule really bad, and I can’t believe I’m having to be wary of proferring it as a recommendation.