• The Author – Bart Busschots

  

  • About
  • On Flickr
  • On YouTube
  • On Mastodon
  • On BlueSky

  
  

  

  

  

  

  

• Site Search

  
  

• Site Map

  • About Bart
  • Blog
    • My Development Toolkit
    • Programming by Stealth
    • Taming the Terminal
    • Photo of the Week
    • Observer’s Log
  • Photography
  • Publications
    • Podcasts
    • Presentations
    • Software
      • HSXKPasswd – A Secure Memorable Password Generator

• Blog Categories

  • 42 (Life the Universe & Everything)
  • Computers & Tech
    • Automation
    • Security
    • Software Development
    • System Administration
  • Cooking & Food
  • History & Geography
  • My Projects
  • Photography
  • Polemics & Politics
  • Science & Astronomy

• Featured Tags

  • presentation
  • review
  • software release
  • tutorial

• Creative Commons

  Unless otherwise stated, the content on this site is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution, Noncommercial, No Derivative Works 3.0 License

  

Modern hard disks have a built-in system called SMART for monitoring themselves. SMART makes information on the health of the drive available to the OS. It’s far from perfect, SMART errors don’t always means your drive will die, and not all drive deaths are predicted by SMART but it’s still a good indicator all the same. Now, it’s great having all this SMART data there but it’s no good if no one reads it! OS X CAN read it but it doesn’t do so on an on-going basis. In fact, the only time a default OS X install will read the SMART data is when the Disk Utility app is opened. That’s where SMARTReporter comes in. It polls your SMART data at a given interval (default is once an hour) and lets you know if there’ any problems. It can do this in three ways: it can change the color of an icon in your menu bar, it can pop up a message, and it can send an email. You can choose to have it do all, none, or some of these things. The menu bar icon is perhaps over-kill but some people may find it re-assuring to see a nice health green hard disk icon indicating that SMARTReporter is running and that it has found no errors on any of your drives. As soon as it finds a problem this icon will turn an ominous red color. I’d suggest everyone run this app on their macs but just turn off the menu bar icon. That way it runs totally in the background and totally out-of-sight until there is a problem, which will hopefully never happen! I should also mention that because of limitations with the USB to ATA bridge this will not work with USB hard drives. It will also not work with FireWire drives because Apple’s drivers for FireWire don’t pass on the SMART data. This limits this app to internal ATA(IDE) and SATA drives, i.e. regular internal hard drives. Finally, this app is both free and open source being released under the MIT license.

[tags]Apple, OS X, Hard Disks[/tags]

On all my desktop machines I have nice ergonomic multimedia keyboards from Logitech so I can always shut-up iTunes with the stroke of a key when the phone rings or someone comes in to talk to me or something. This is something I really miss on my MacBook Pro. Today I found a free and simple solution, ByteController which you can download from bytetastic.com.

This program does two things, it gives you iTunes controls in your menu bar, and it lets you define your own hot-keys for controlling iTunes. The default look of the menu bar controls is very minimalist and looks like something Apple would do but you can customize the look at lot. You can go from the totally understated default up by flashy and on to downright gaudy. I’ve opted for something in between as you can see from the screen shot below. This program does have one limitation though, it’s only for controlling iTunes. It does let you set hot keys for controlling volume, but this is iTunes volume, not the system volume. However, if, like me, you use iTunes as your media player this app is a real God-send. It’s yet another small simple app that does one this very well.

[tags]ByteController, ByteTastic, iTunes, OS X, Apple[/tags]

Bwana is a very simple app that allows Safari to render Unix Manual Pages (man pages). The man pages are rendered as HTML making them easier to read with the addition of some simple text formating and allowing easy linking to other related man pages. Installation is also trivial, just download, expand, and drag and drop into the Applications->Utilities folder. Then, by some OS X black magic URLs of the form man:[command] (e.g. the man page for the ls command will be found at the URL man:ls) will start working in Safari. It really is that simple! To make things even sweeter this app is free and open source (released under the MIT License). There really isn’t anything more to say about this app, it’s yet another example of a small, simple, OS X app that does one thing perfectly.

[tags]man pages, OS X, Open Source, Freeware, Safari[/tags]

Another day and another Hosting365 disaster. You can read the ongoing saga on their outages blog. No one can deny that Hosting365 are expensive. You pay above the odds for them but previously my rational for doing so was:

1. They are local – so fast from within Ireland
2. They are local – so tech support during MY business hours not American business hours
3. Good customer care
4. It’s nice to support Irish companies

However, there is only so long that you can put up with ever poorer customer support and a sub-standard service before you start loosing customers and your hair! I am now actively looking for a new hosting provider.

[tags]Web Hosting, Hosting365[/tags]

Read more

Some of the Leopard stuff was cool, but much of it was old news, and the iPhone bit was down-right insulting. Not really a WWDC that will stand out as one of the greats. In fact, things even went backwards on one front, ZFS does not appear to be in Leopard at all, not even as an option, despite having been in some of the earlier betas! However, at least one of my predictions came true, Leopard has a new look. Just not sure that’s all good news, that transparent menu bar looks terrible!

[tags]Apple, Steve Jobs, WWDC, Leopard, iPhone[/tags]

Read more

Unless you are sure you want your system infested with useless bloat for ever more don’t install Yahoo Messenger! I did yesterday and now I’m really regretting it. For a start it wedges itself in everywhere. It runs a process to harass you into setting yahoo as your home page and as your default search. It wedges it’s tool bars into all your browsers and generally just puts itself everywhere it can. As a Mac user I’m not used to this kind of carry-on so it annoys me. However, my annoyance has only just begun. I had to install it to test something in work. My tests being over I went to un-install it today. I went to control panel->add remove programs and found it. Clicked uninstall. It warned me it would need a reboot to complete the uninstall and asked me if I was OK with that. I gave my consent and on it went. It took disturbingly little time and then my machine rebooted. Three guesses what started up on reboot all by itself without my ever asking it to. You got it, Yahoo Messenger! To make things worse, it is now gone from the control panel, and there is no uninstaller for it in it’s start menu folder. The uninstaller un-installed itself but not the program. Windows users need to stand up to this kind of rubbish software and stop using it. TBH I think this behavior would be classed as spy-ware and is probably illegal in the US. I hope someone takes these muppets to court. Enough is enough!

[tags]Yahoo Messenger, Spy-ware[/tags]

Update: It gets even worse! Fresh off the presses of US-CERT we have news of a publicly available exploit for the buggering thing. Just what I need, some randomers executing arbitrary code on my machine via an app I can’t un-install!

I’d normally do a prediction post coming up to a major Mac event but TBH I have very few predictions to make this time. Lets face it, this WWDC is all about Leopard and the iPhone, there’s not going to be time for much else. So, instead I want to just outline my wish-list for Leopard and just mention the iPhone briefly.

[tags]Apple, Steve Jobs, WWDC[/tags]

Read more

The All Things Digital conference has always been able to draw the big names. However, this year they have out-done themselves. Bill Gates with Steve Jobs in one interview. I’m very jealous of Allison Sheridan of the NosillaCast podcast who was there live! (she took the picture opposite). I was talking to her over ICQ/AIM/.Mac earlier today and she was very impressed by the interview. She felt she was present at a historic event. I think she’s right. However, the great news is that the good people at the the D conference have put the videos on the web so we can all share in this great event!

The whole interview is well worth watching but it is long (7 parts averaging about 15 mins plus a prologue running at about 8 mins). What impressed me most is how well Bill Gates came across. At the time of the Vista launch I saw him do quite a few media interviews and he never really came across very well. Today he was relaxed, witty and interesting …. though his voice still reminds me of Kermit the frog 🙂

One other point to note is that I think Steve gave us a hint as to at least one thing we’ll see at the WWDC, the next generation of .Mac. I sure hope I picked up that hint right because .Mac is well over-due a major over-haul (see .Mac – The Devil is in the Implementation).

[tags]Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, All Things Digital, .Mac[/tags]

Read more

It’s hot news in the mac world today that Apple have not yet patched Windows File Sharing (Samba) on the very latest OS X. This is unforgivable since they released a security update this week and a fixed version of Samba has been available for weeks now. That was the blog post I wanted to write this evening but before I did I wanted to read the actual Symantec advisory that I see quoted all over the place. Surely, if there was any proper journalism on the web all online articles referencing the advisory should contain a link to it so people can read it themselves? None that I have found do. So, I went to the Symantec site to see if I could find it there. Not a hope. I used Google to try to find the original everyone is quoting. No joy. I don’t feel comfortable reporting on what Symantec supposedly said in an advisory based on second-hand information. Others on the web don’t seem to be as picky as me. Shame really.

[tags]journalism, standards, symantec, usability, Mac World[/tags]

Read more

I get very grumpy when a person who has spread hate and misery in the name of God dies and people suddenly feel the need to say all sorts of nice things about him and pretend he never blamed 911 on gays and pagans. It’s OK not to be sad when some people die! Not all people are good! Some people are right royal sh*ts! And I’m not going to pretend to be sorry to see the back of them! Anyhow, I could rant on and on about all the really crappy things Gerry Falwell has done in the name of a supposedly loving God but I know I could never do it as well as Bill Maher, so I’ll let him do it 🙂

« more recent posts — older posts »