Greg In The Desert

A botnet is a group of computers that have been infected with automated software that is used to do nefarious things, like attack other computers or send spam. The owner of the computer doesn’t know their computer is participating in the botnet. Botnets are common on Windows based computers due to their ease of being infected by viruses.

Back in January, it was widely publicized that pirated versions of iWork ‘09 had a trojan or a virus of some sort in it. Someone with bad intentions took the standard installer package for iWork, added their malware to it and released it on Bittorent. People who downloaded the Bittorent thought they were just getting a bootleg version of iWork. They also got an added surprise.

According to ZDNet, the purpose of this malware is to create a Mac botnet that is now being detected. This shouldn’t be anything to worry about for most Mac users who legally purchase software. It was more of a social engineering solution to get the malware on users computers buy hiding it in other software. It’s interesting to see that virus writers are making some attempt to target the Mac.

Apple has released a Safari 4 beta for Mac and Windows. Although I am forced to use Internet Explorer 6 at work for internal sites, I almost use Safari exclusively for non-internal sites.

The biggest change is the user interface. Apple has abandoned the Mac OS like metal look on the Windows version. Hallelujah! I have no problem with a Mac applicaltion looking like a Mac application on the Mac, it’s just out of place on Windows.

The menu bar is missing and is replaced with two icons. One icon looks like a document and the other looks like a gear. Tabs are now on top. There is no progress indicator in the URL text field.

I don’t have the Flash plugin installed on my Windows version of Safari and Safari 4 no longer pesters me about it ever time I go to a page that needs Flash.

I have the absolutely slowest T42 on the planet and I used to most applications loading slowly. Safari has always loaded faster than Internet Explorer, but that’s not saying much. Safari 4 does seem to be considerably faster.

So far I am happy with what I am seeing but the UI changes are going to take some time to get used to using them.

Bulk Rename Utility for Windows (via Daring Fireball). See also Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines.

As a former Palm OS user, I was accustom to syncing my Palm device with both my Mac and PC. My primary interest with this cross sync is to get the same contact and calendar information on all three devices. This is a path that can be wrought with disaster since none of these devices have exactly the same fields. For my Palm devices, I used third party apps to deal with these differences. Pocket Mirror on the PC and Missing Sync on the Mac. They did a very good job and I almost never had to worry about data getting messed up or deleted.

Cross syncing with the iPhone is a different experience, it reminds me of the early days of the Palm. Syncing the iPhone on both Windows and MacOS is done via iTunes. iTunes does not expect a iPhone to sync calendars and contacts with different computers so it puts a extra dialog telling you this and asking if you want to replace or merge the data. This is an annoying extra step. The Windows iTunes interface is exactly the same as the Mac, including the sync dialogs.

The iPhone’s calendar application is lacking in many ways. It does not duplicate iCal exactly, it’s missing categories, it doesn’t display attendees and the alarms are not persistent like they are the palm (they alarm once and that’s it). Syncing with Outlook in a exchange environment has been safe so far the several times I have synced. iTunes has not wiped out categories or attendees or any meetings. I have noticed if I delete a individual appointment in a repeating event, it does not get removed from the iPhone. I’m suspecting that the iPhone stores categories and attendee information but it’s not shown in the calendar interface.

Syncing the phone with the Mac, after syncing with outlook, results in a single category in iCal called “Outlook Calendar”. if the iPhone does remember the categories and attendees, it doesn’t transfer them back into iCal. For that reason I’m not syncing the iPhone with my Mac, Outlook wins in this case.

Syncing contacts works a lot better. The iphone contacts application (if you can call it that, it’s actually located in the Phone application) does know groups, which is the equivalent of categories in Outlook. I first synced my contacts with my Mac, the with Outlook and there were no contacts missing or screwed up. When I synced back to the Mac and used the Check For Duplicates function in found lots of duplicates, I told it to merge them and I couldn’t find any missing information. I think that category information might be lost with the sync but the contact entry is kept. The Mac’s address book is kind of weird in the way it displays groups, so it might have the same contact under a group and not assigned to a group. I need to experiment with this a little more to understand what’s going on. Since it’s not loosing information I will continue to sync contacts and use the merge duplicates feature in Address Book.app.

This is my first look at cross syncing. I haven’t researched it beyond my early attempts here. I can live without the calendar information on my Mac for now. I need contacts on all three systems. This cross syncing is working for me at the moment even if it’s imperfect. It’s no where near as good as it was on the Palm. I hope that either Apple improves the syncing experience or, more likely, a third party will step and take over the syncing.

There’s been yet another story of someone’s pictures taken from Flickr and used without permission. In this case, a picture of a girl was used in a Australian Virgin Mobil ad at a bus stop. Here is a picture of the ad on Flickr.

Every time I read of someone’s photos being used without permissions from Flickr, I become concerned. I have and my photos marked with a Creative Commons Attribution, non commercial license for some time. The same as chewywong’s photos. The problem with the Creative Commons licenses on Flickr is once you have set your photo to that, it automatically gives any user fully access to the full resolution image. Which allows large prints to be made. If Flick would allow a CC licenses and still give control over who has access to the high res versions, most thefts would probably be deterred.

I have no changed my the license to all of my photos to All Rights Reserved. I hope Flickr will address this issue.

The following is in Sony’s FAQ on why they are closing their Connect online music store

Why is the store closing?
We are moving to the open Windows Media® platform in North America. In line with hat, Sony will phase out the CONNECT™ Music Service in the U.S. and Canada. Specific timing will depend on market demand, but will not be before March 2008. To be clear, the CONNECT eBook service for the Sony Reader will not be affected.

Uh what? Windows Media is open? I don’t think so. It may be very much more popular than ATRAC (Sony’s music format) and licensed by a lot more companies, but it isn’t open.

I get this error when trying to install any Apple application on my Windows XP machine at work: “The older version of apple software update cannot be removed”. Apple’s Software Update program will not auto update itself and iTunes will not uninstall.

The solution is to download the Windows Install Cleanup program from Microsoft. I had to remove Apple Software Update, Itunes and Quicktime. Since I don’t use iTunes on my Windows machine, I didn’t worry about backing it up. But if i did use it, would have backed it up.

I went back and reinstalled all the Apple programs without any problems

Microsoft has recalled Halo 2 for Microsoft Vista due to “nudity”. Don’t get too excited. A Bungie programmer left a funny error message that shows someone mooning.

Not the kind of nudity I was hoping for but funny still. Image via Shiny Shiny.

A Intel Software Developers Blog has the following on switching to a Mac:

Since the announcement of Apple’s plans to use Intel processors, I have periodically tried out their computers, planning to eventually make the switch. The day has finally arrived. Last week I acquired a new Core 2 Duo-based MacBook Pro for work. After using it for a week, I feel like I could easily become an evangelist for these systems. They have a lot to offer a Windows developer. I have especially enjoyed having things just work instead of wasting time debugging problems. For example, the first time I plugged the MacBook into my Cinema Display, the new display was detected correctly and I automatically had a desktop that spanned the built-in display and the external Cinema Display. I popped in a DVD (Cream’s concert at the Albert Hall). The DVD came up full screen on the Cinema Display and automatically began playing. Pleasant surprises like these have shown me how, on the Windows platform, I had become trained to expect things NOT to work.

The revolution is at hand. I know more people who switched to a mac than I can count on both hands, and I don’t know that many people.

Pretty much sums it up.

Many of the applications included with Windows Vista look similar to OS X applications. The gadgets are basically the same thing as dashboard widgets, Windows Calendar is very similar to iCal, the photo gallery application is just like iPhoto and Windows Movie Maker is just like iMovie and iDVD.