Firefox 3 for the Mac

Thursday, June 19th, 2008

I tried Firefox 3 on Windows and I liked it there, but on the Mac? Bleah. It looks like a bad knockoff of Safari but without the attention to detail that signifies Apple products. A lot of the icons are ugly, and off by just a pixel here or there. You’d think one pixel wouldn’t make that much difference but it does. Plus I actually preferred the traditional Firefox 2 chrome to the Safari style brushed metal widgets.

Plus it’s perceptually much slower than Firefox 2. I’m a 20 WPM typist at best and I’m typing faster than Firefox can enter text into this form. The characters are several words behind where I’m typing about half the time.
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Apple gets Pwned

Wednesday, June 18th, 2008
$ osascript -e 'tell app "ARDAgent" to do shell script "whoami"'
root

Wow. A one line script that allows any logged in user to grab root, not even a buffer overflow or third party software involved. This is movie plot hacking at its finest. I haven’t seen an attack this bad in years.

The only thing I would imagine that could be worse would be if you could execute this attack remotely.

Wireless Menu Icons

Thursday, April 24th, 2008

Sometimes when trying several wireless networks before finding one that works, I connect to one that gives me an icon like this in my menu bar:

classic Mac in a gray piece of pie in the Finder’s menu bar at the top right of screen

Basically it looks like a small classic Mac in a gray piece of pie. Does anyone know what this means? All I’ve figured out is that the connection usually (always?) doesn’t work.

A New Printer?

Monday, April 14th, 2008

My HP LaserJet 2200dn seems to have given up the ghost. It is reporting media-jam-error even though there’s no apparent media-jam. I suspect a broken sensor of some kind. At this point my options are to take it in for repair or replace it. It’s a tad more than five years old; and while I’ve seen printers last longer than this, not all do. So two questions:

  1. Does anyone know a reliable HP repair shop in or around Irvine?
  2. If I do replace it, what should I get?

Here’s what I’m looking for in a printer:
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VMWare Fusion Cheap

Wednesday, April 9th, 2008

Just noticed that Academic Superstore has VMWare Fusion on sale for $39.95 with free shipping, no rebates or academic IDs required. That’s more than $20 cheaper than I’ve seen it anywhere else. I’ll probably grab a copy since the more expensive Parallels still isn’t working for me.

Undo All in iPhoto

Sunday, January 20th, 2008

Few companies seem to feel as free to violate Apple’s human interface guidelines as Apple itself. One thing that has annoyed me consistently for years now is the poor Undo support in iPhoto. You can make edit after edit to a photo, but as soon as you leave editing mode or export photo Boom! The edits are all committed, and the Undo stack is cleared. You better like your what you did because there’s now no going back. Or is there?
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