Apple invite people to Tech Talks, in Berlin and Stockholm. Announced topics include: Intro to developer tools, Apple in the enterprise market, G5 optimisation, Hardware technology update. While I'd be curious to attend such an event – none of the topics seems to be too relevant for me, though the last one sounds interesting.
In the e-mail advertising the event, Apple demonstrate their software and QA skills by having the German and Swedish non-ASCII characters removed from the respective venues' addresses.
At Apple Germany: The iLife ad, translated as Wie Microsoft Office für ihr kreatives Leben. – Like MS Office for your creative life. Not a bad translation, considering that 'life' isn't as much an opposite to 'work' in German – No simple analogy for 'get a life'.
Further down the Apple road, a report on a 'flaw' in OSX: If you're an admin user, you can authorise an installer to set up a startup item for you. If the installer is poorly written, that startup item may end up being writable by anyone – which is a bad thing as startup items are executed with unrestricted rights. Is this news? Executing an application with superuser rights, may result in the application causing damage. No news there. Neither is the problem unique to the Mac.
Still, the usual clueless forum crowd was sure to join in – happy to see a vulnerability on the Mac for a change. No matter how grave it is or whether they actually understood what they were talking about. The one interesting point made, was the following: If there are areas of the system which need to be specially protected, why doesn't the system do it? Why let applications change ownership and access rights to anything but the default? Why execute them if the rights are 'wrong'?
Taking this a step further, we may be seeing the downside of the 'Unix concept' of storing everything in normal files and using file system permissions to sort such things out. Managing such information via dedicated APIs might be as much more reliable as it is less hackable.
Talking about files… apparently there are 400000 of them on my tiny hard drive. WTF?! I don't know how many of those are 'mine' in the sense that they are actively generated or at leas managed by me (kudos to the crappy OSX Finder, that unlike its predecessor won't display the number of files contained in a folder next to its size.
15000 files used to be plenty ten years ago – and that included a TeX installation. I don't think I can do twenty times as many things with my computer today than I could do back then.
We borrowed a shiny big box full of wireless networking equipment, mainly a range of antennas, for the weekend to check out which one will be good enough for us. Nice toys. Unfortunately the card provided with them (Orinoco something) doesn't work with the driver I downloaded for it, claiming the card has a wrong version firmware or something – grrrr. So we'll have to use Björn's laptop together with the Knoppix CD that was kindly provided.
