Category: Blog

“It’s not hard to remember to take the pill every day, it’s just easy to forget.” – from a contraceptive commercial. I guess this is aimed at people who think condoms are effective if they’re used “most of the time”.

If you’re a “digerati” you’ve no doubt heard of this new sport, which involves driving along looking for “open” 802.11/Airport wireless internet connections.

If not, here’s the story:
Back in ancient history (1983) when the movie Wargames came out geeks had just invented programs that dialed phone numbers in sequence looking for a modem answer (“Doesn’t that cost a fortune?” “Well, there’s ways around that, too.”). Then they’d try to “break in” to computer networks, as shown in the movie, by trying to guess passwords. After the movie, sequential-dialer programs came to be known as “wardialers” – this was real 37334 haxxor warez (“Elite Hacker Software”).

Fast-foward about 20 years. For a couple hundred bucks you can set up your own home or business wireless internet connection, so you can sit anywhere in the building and not have to plug your laptop in to a wire, to get an internet connection. And some places are even setting up public networks, for example, at Starbucks.

Now, when you plug these things in right out of the box, they don’t have security set up (probably saves on dumb tech support calls). So anyone with a laptop can walk up and start sharing your internet connection. Fine for Starbucks, that’s what it’s for. But for homes and businesses this basically amounts to “sharing” your internet connection. Which is probably fine; another user isn’t going to put that big a hit on your T1, you probably wouldn’t even notice.

Now, an external user (like me) most often wouldn’t use the connection to “break in” to the owner’s computers – instead they’d just surf the web for free from their car sitting in the parking lot of some industrial park. All of your computers that are connected broadband to the ‘net have good firewalls, don’t they? Whaddya mean what’s a firewall? In any case, looking for radiowaves is (marginally) legal; and using someone’s network if they don’t secure it is (relatively) harmless.(On the other hand, driving in the car while using the PC is illegal, so when you hear the signal detector find a network, pull over…)

So. I took off from work last night, and drove home (freeway to Escondido), then to my sister’s house (Vista) – about 20 miles total. Decided for fun to leave MacStumbler running. On the way it found something like 20 wireless networks. I didn’t stop to ping each and every one of them. But this morning I did pull over,

If you have a Wintel PC, you can try Netstumbler.

Now, excuse me, I’ve got to go find some chalk.

Yes, as a matter of fact, one of the things I read while surfing the web is the sort of garbage I write, about how programs should be designed and such.

This one from Usable Help made me chuckle:

“By the way, Apple’s Style Guide is also freely available. Download Apple Style Guide PDF. Finally, Microsoft’s style guide is available for purchase, if you can find it in stock.”

My letter to Apple Developer Connection:

I love being a Select Developer member, but I just can’t afford the $500 to renew it right now. But I thought I’d offer some feedback on the program.

This membership has never really fit me anyway. I aspire to become a MacOS developer and it’s GREAT that you continue to include the developer tools with the OS. Maybe someday I’ll get time to use them. For now I’m a Perl/PHP/mySQL developer.

But my relationship with Apple is really that of Super User/ Enthusiast/ Evangelist. Maybe I’m a “Switch Facilitator” or maybe a “Freelance Genius”. One of my missions in life is to convert people from those other inferior operating systems to MacOS. Here’s how you could help me: offer some sort of membership that would include:

-A subscription for all operating System updates.
-Trial copies of ALL (Apple) MacOS software. (I’d love to try/reccommend ARA but I can’t afford it!).
-(small) hardware discounts – including some that I can pass on to others.
-special t-shirts and tchotchkes (free and/or for purchase), including some I can pass on to others.
-Special newsletters or something.
-Apple store parties and sneak previews?
(no software seeds)
(no developer disks)

This should be priced at about double the system upgrade price, say around $250/year.

I’ve always said that customers love Macs so much that Apple should sell them through multi-level marketing – maybe this would be a step in the right direction (plus it’s not bad when your salesman pay you to sell your products!).

So now there’s yet another new virus out there, “Bugbear”.

Simple steps to protect yourself against viruses:

-Don’t use Microsoft Outlook. “I know, let’s build scripting into the email client, and let scripts run automatically when emails come in!” Idiots. Outlook is the only program I could imagine letting a malicious virus grab all email addresses and mail random user files to random destination addresses appearing to come from you. Not that Sendmail (Unix) would NOT be able to do this, but you’d be more likely to know if you were about to run it.

-Don’t use Microsoft products at all. Unix or MacOS are far less likely to get viruses, partly because they’re less common but also because they’re inherently more secure and better-written. I have NEVER been “infected” by a Mac virus, and I use email on the Mac a LOT more than on Windows where I’ve had “close calls” with several (and had to deal with many more).

-No matter what OS/email client you have, run (and purchase if necessary) the latest updates. The security hole that allows this one was plugged over a year ago, if you’ve been running Microsoft updates regularly. (Of course, the way M$ does it, there’s the possibility of a really nasty virus masquerading as an update…)

-Separate your data from your applications. Data in one folder, applications in another wherever possible (Quiz: where is your email stored? Go ahead, try to find the email files. Are they in your documents directory?). BACK UP YOUR DOCUMENTS FOLDER. The best way to do this for now is to copy it to CD-ROM every now and then; once a week would be best. CDs are really inexpensive. Recreating lost data is really expensive.

I think that part of the motivation for virus writers must be a need to demonstrate other people’s stupidity – be that of people who write insecure junk like Microsoft, or the people who run it (without proper attention/precautions).

Sure, I’m a Mac bigot. The other day a co-worker bought a new computer to replace his old one that had “died”.

“Did you get a Mac?”
“No, this was a lot cheaper.”
“What, you want to _keep_ having problems?!?!?”

In case you’re checking for updates, I’ve figured out how to put archived entries down below on the left. I’m writing the software that runs this blog in PHP, which I sure like better than ASP (the Microsoft semi-equivalent) for various reasons; but lately I haven’t bothered to keep it up to date. I’m also working on a photograph display/comment program which I’ll announce here when it’s ready.

Thanks for reading!

If I were ever on “Who Wants to Be a Millionare” (or someone’s phone-a-friend) I’d do really well if I could use Google. Also a good way to practice your Google skills.

Today for lunch I went to the ATM and the gas station. The ATM always asks me “Do you want a printed receipt?” (even when it’s out of receipts and later asks, “I’m out of receipts, do you want to continue?”) And I always say yes (I’m a receipt collector – the whole Quicken thing). Then at the gas station I pay with a credit card, and it wants to know if I want a receipt. And makes me choose a grade of gas even though I always pick the same grade (as far as I know, anything higher than standard unleaded is a waste and causes more pollution).

Why can’t these machines have options of “ALWAYS” and “NEVER” in addition to “YES” and “NO”? I would think most people (like me) who want a receipt ALWAYS want a receipt, and those who don’t (like the slobs who answer YES then fling them on the ground near the ATM), NEVER do. Certainly this would be easy for the bank to add (as well as a selection of PREFS from the main menu to change it back).

Of course this would be more difficult at the gas station – especially if the preferences couldn’t be stored on a “smart” credit card itself. And what if you had two cars that took different grades of gas (probably pretty rare)?

And while I’m thinking about it, back when we had “regular” (leaded) and “unleaded”, whose idea was it to call standard unleaded “regular”? Was it that hard to come up with a different word, or just call it “unleaded”? In any case, “Viva Nova Sin!”.

When you’ve made changes to a document, then decide to exit an application, how often do you NOT want to save your work? In my case, I always want to save, and I never care about the “previous version”. Shouldn’t there be an option somewhere to say “always save when I exit?” But instead nearly every application I use insists on asking.

With the Newton or the Palm it’s easy, there is no concept of save – when you edit you edit, that’s it, and stuff is always saved. With a database, when you save a record, you’re done and the computer could crash and you still wouldn’t lose work. (Actually Newton and Palm are databases, so this explains the similarity – except when the batteries in the palm die and you lose EVERYTHING!)

Part of the problem is the lack of what I believe is called a “journalling file system” – that is, for your own files, every time they’re saved, either the original is saved (forever) or at least the list of “changes” is saved. See wikipedia (look at an article, then click “history” (Candiru for example)

I know there are some people who will use a computer to create a document, print it out, then don’t want to save it. Makes no sense to me – I consider my mutant ramblings all to be sacred. One of the reason I tend to keep emails forever; ‘course that’s a whole different rant.

My operating system user interface rant for today concerns modal menus. No, I don’t mean the pop-up menus that happen when you click the right mouse button (assuming you have one!) – those are contextual menus. I mean menus whose items change depending on what “mode” you’re in.

On Windows, the choices in the menus at the top of each window change depending on what you’re doing. This is called “invisible modal” and it’s just plain wrong. You don’t get a chance to develop “muscle memory” of what choices appear in which menus. For example, in SQL server which uses Windows (horrible) “Explorer” view: if I’ve selected something on the left, tree side of the screen I have the option to Action/Refresh; if I select something on the right, list side that choice is not there in the Action menu. Also, the button bar changes depending upon what I’ve selected so tools aren’t where I expect them either.

On the Mac, the menus at the top of the screen change (usually visibly) depending upon the application you’re in; but once you’re in an application they don’t arbitrarily hide and show choices (sometimes choices are, appropriately, dimmed out and non-clickable, but they’re still there). Occasionally a menu may change from, say, “Add User” to “Add Appointment” but this is rare and consistent.

Even worse is Windows’ habit of hiding infrequently selected items on menus. It sounds cool and useful to begin with but it gets really annoying. Here’s what happens – items you select occasionally disappear from menus, and there’s a new item at the bottom to re-show them – and you forget where they’ve gone so you have to go menu-surfing for less frequently used commands. You can turn this feature off but I don’t remember where that option is!

Now, actually I like having menus at the top of a window (Windows/Xwindows style), rather than always at the top of the screen (Mac) even though I know the reason for it: having the top of the screen be the menu means it’s easier to “hit” the menus when your mouse pointer goes flying towards them. But in most cases, windows are maximized anyway (on Windows, the functionless window title takes that valuable top-of-screen real estate, and the menus are one line below) and if they aren’t (say you have Spreadsheet and Browser open at once so you see them both) I think the menus should be attached to the application rather than changing depending on which one you’ve last clicked.