Archive for October, 2007
In reading about why it seems so difficult for Microsoft to develop an OS that isn’t full of security holes, I came across this. OSX.Leap.A. The very first virus on Apple’s OS X operating system? Wow. I mean, I knew, it would happen eventually. Especially as Macs are becoming more and more popular and consumer-friendly.
As far as viruses go, this one seems pretty tame. Technically, it’s not even a virus. It’s a trojan. Very low risk. I don’t even think it’s around anymore. It utilized a very specific vulnerability in iChat to distribute itself, and only on Intel-based Macs, but there were less than 50 known infections.
According to Mac360:
The two known examples of Trojans, (Leap-A and Oompa-Loompa), required the user to accept and download a compressed zip file, open it, and double click on the file inside, then type their password in order for their Macs to be compromised. This is not a ‘well written’ trojan, but a simple matter of Social Engineering, fooling the end user with a promise of something for free.
So, 114,000 for Windows, still 0 for OS X.
Update: Here’s a new one at DMiessler. And a good explanation for the major difference between this kind of threat for OS X and viruses for Windows.
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Actually, it is listed, but Apple doesn’t really fully describe what it does.
Archive Mailbox
Create an archive of your mailbox to back up important messages or to transfer your mail to another computer.
Yeah, so you can create an archive of your mail. But Apple doesn’t use a proprietary archiving method. This actually is just a simple export to the standard mbox format. Woo!
In Tiger, the previous version of OS X, Apple switched from using the mbox format–which stores emails in one monstrous file–to a single-email-per-file system using an emlx extension so that Spotlight could search the emails individually. But this also left people wanting to switch from Tiger’s mail (or simply backup their emails) out in the cold rain. Nearly every other email system uses the mbox format, so you’d have to employ the dodgy method of converting emlx to mbox with Cosmic Soft’s aptly named emlx to mbox converter. It worked. Uh… sometimes. There were always gitches.
It’s nice to see this unannounced feature in Leopard Mail!
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I searched and couldn’t find a method for autostarting XAMPP upon startup for Mac OS X. I’ll publish this method, and I can definitely say that it works. I can’t promise there isn’t a more efficient way. This uses AppleScript to run a shell command. Open up Script Editor from Applications > AppleScript. Insert this command:
do shell script "/Applications/xampp/xamppfiles/mampp start" user name "YourUserName” password “YourPassword” with administrator privileges
Of course, replace YourUserName with your OS X username and replace YourPassword with the respective password.
Save the script as an application (through the Save As… menu), and in System Preferences > Accounts > Login Items, include the new little application you just made. (I also chose to hide mine. It shouldn’t really matter, once the application is finished running, it quits.) It’ll start XAMPP upon startup, and of course, shutting down your computer will automatically stop the XAMPP server. You’re welcome.
If you didn’t really understand most of this little tutorial, then you probably shouldn’t be messing with XAMPP anyhow.
If anyone knows how to run a shell command at startup without going through AppleScript, please let me know. I’m sure it’s possible, I’m just not skilled enough to figure it out on my own.
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Just in time for Leopard. I’d been wanting to switch back to using Apple Mail because of all the coolness that’s been promised in the new version, but managing Gmail through mail.app is like a low paying part-time job. Once you read everything in mail.app, it still comes up as unread in Gmail’s web interface. Well no more. By using the IMAP protocol rather than POP, your local collection of email stays in sync with the web version. Which makes reviewing old emails and composing offline possible while staying in sync with the server.
Basically, it’s gonna make things much smoother. And here’s an unannounced bonus to Gmail with IMAP…
Goodbye GMail Loader!
For some time, folks have been cooking up ways to get their entire email archive into the Gmail web interface. Why? I don’t know, maybe for archive purposes? Maybe so we don’t have to worry about keeping copies in our old mail program? Let’s face it, if you really want to keep all your old emails, it’s much easier to have them all within the same interface so you don’t have to go hunting around between the several different email programs you used to use and the webmail you now use. It simplifies the search.
In case you didn’t know, you can literally just drag an email from your local folders to the IMAP folders inside Mail.app. It will copy that email, with sent and received dates intact, to the server as if it had always been there. It solves the timestamp issue that the GMail Loader encountered. With the GMail Loader, you can get all your old emails uploaded to Gmail’s servers, but they would show up in the interface list as if they’d just arrived (because it had… it had just arrived on the Gmail servers). When reading the email itself, it would show the actual sent date. Kind of an ugly problem.
Something else I’ve noticed. The way Gmail interacts with IMAP is strange, mostly due to the unorthodox “label” method that Google designed for Gmail instead of folders. Since messages could have more than one label applied, that translates to having the appearance of being in more than one folder inside your IMAP client (obviously I use mail.app). So when you delete a message from one of the IMAP “folders” you are really just removing the label from the message. That is, unless you’ve opted to have your IMAP client store deleted messages on the server (instead of using a local trash bin on the computer).
This is why Google recommends you don’t select that option. It ruins the ability to remove labels from your messages because then when you delete a message, it actually deletes the message. (They’d also like me to not select ‘Store Junk Messages on Server’, but frankly, I’ve not found a bug in letting mail.app work hand-in-hand with the Spam label/folder on Gmail’s servers.)
Of course, if you’re not going to use the Gmail labeling scheme, selecting this option would make your IMAP client behave more like you’d expect. Anyway, just something I thought about, tested, and confirmed.
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It sounds completely impossible, but I thought I’d throw it out there to see if anyone has suggestions on ways to get my cardio out of an upper body workout. I’ve noticed that my legs appear to be in much better shape than my upper body, and I suspect it’s because most of my workouts are dedicated to cardio. And the best way I achieve that cardio workout? Running. So naturally that works the leg muscles at the same time. And yes, my upper body gets the fat burning benefit from the overall cardiovascular workout, but I can’t help but think I might be looking at a more toned upper body if I could shift some of that cardio time to working out the upper body while at the same time keeping my heart rate up in the 60-70% range.
So… anyone with some suggestions?
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