Rubenerd

This post is coming to you several days late because my web host took the opportunity to take my site's MySQL server offline for over three days during the frantic launch time. Some warning next time Servage would be just super!

Something was brewing on Friday night here in Singapore, and it had nothing to do with nightclubs, teh tarik or the CPF contribution controversy: Apple's Mac OS X Leopard was officially launched across the island!

Now granted Apple doesn't have any official (or in local english: "branded") Apple Centres here so the responsibility for launching the new OS fell on the EpiCentre in the Wheelock Place shopping centre on Orchard Rd, the de facto Apple authorised flagship store which aside from their blasphemous Microsoft XBox 360 display is all Mac and all iPod.

At 1800hrs the OS was officially launched with a man and a very loud microphone listing all the new features followed by a presentation from a Power98FM DJ who started handing out Apple tote-bags. Alas I didn't get one!

There was plenty of stock for both the svelte single and family licensed Leopard boxes, though there was huge queues at the checkout counters and half the stock was gone by the time I left.

Following the initial fanfare there were several presentations by two people from the States highlighting the Stacks, Time Machine and Cover Flow features amongst others. There were noticeable ooh's and aah's from many of the people there, it's my hope that at least a few people converted to Mac that night ;-).

As with most events like this in Singapore given the geographic size of the country (or lack thereof!) and the general conservative population here the event was fairly orderly but there were plenty of people! What surprised me was the sheer volume of caucasian expats there, especially from the US, UK and Australia. At some points in the evening I felt as though I was right back in Adelaide!

You can see all the photos I took both on my camera phone and my proper camera on my Singapore Leopard launch gallery on Flickr.

Having used Mac OS X Leopard (Singapore, Australia) for the last few days on my MacBook Pro I've discovered many changes in security from OS X Tiger and earlier releases including some genuine surprises that threw me off guard! I'm posting what I've discovered here in the hopes it may be useful to other people.

NetInfo Manager is gone

A cursory glance at the Utilities folder will show NetInfo Manager has ceased to exist, like a certain Monty Python parrot. Some of the user specific features have been relegated to a very sneakily hidden menu in the Users panel of System Preferences.

If you want to change the UID or default shell assigned to a user for example, right click or CTRL click on the name of the user and click “Advanced Options” in the popup menu.

Firewall has moved

The Firewall has been moved in System Preferences from the “Sharing” panel to the “Security” panel. Reading comments on forums a lot of people are angry about this, but to me it makes perfect sense!

Firewall has been dumbed down

Aside from a crude menu that lets you add generic “.app” programs, there is no way now to create your own custom rules, port number assignments, UDP/TCP or anything whatsoever. I guess it’s back to the command line to configure these things.

Higher SSH encryption by default

If you open the /private/etc/sshd_config configuration file, Leopard ships with level 2 SSH security and without the option of falling back to level 1 like previous versions. This is a welcome change.

Graphically impossible to change your SSH port

But therein lies a problem! If you change your SSH listening port in your aforementioned sshd_config for obfuscation reasons, in the Leopard Firewall System Preferences pane there is no way whatsoever to open that SSH port because you’re limited to only creating generic rules based on .app’s and the Services you start in the “Sharing” panel; which will turn on port 22.

So some welcome security changes in Leopard, and you've got to hand it to Apple for trying to make configuring security more streamlined, but I'm disappointed that in doing so so much functionality has been lost. Hopefully Apple (or perhaps even a third party) will address the legitimate need to create custom Firewall permissions soon.

If I've made any mistakes or you have anything to add, please post a comment. Cheers ^^.

Related Posts

• Mac OS X Leopard Launch in Singapore!
• Making Camino look like a Leopard app

With Mac OS X Leopard's much needed move to a unified interface (aka: Burnt Aqua) some of the applications designed to look sexy in Tiger are left looking a bit silly with their white lines in Leopard. One case is my favourite web browser of all time: Camino.

Fortunately with a few quick tweaks I was able to bring Camino into the Leopard generation… kinda!

1. Install UnifyCamino. Go to "Camino → Preferences…" and click the new "UnifyCamino" option.
2. Set the “Shade” scrollbar to about 60% and choose “Suppress the toolbar divider
3. Under "Other interface elements:" choose "Streamlined tabs and status bar"
4. Download the Leopard Iconset. Control+Click Camino.app and choose "Show Package Contents". Copy the downloaded images to "./Contents/Resources/"
5. Click "View → Customise Toolbar" and change the size of the icons to small.

That's the closest I've been able to get to mimicking the OS X Leopard interface look in Camino 1.5.2.

Post a comment here if you have any other suggestions ^^.

Well Servage went and did it again. For the second time in a year their service was interrupted for more than two consecutive days. This time they stuffed up the MySQL server where all my WordPress installations are stored:

You read it right: they claimed it will cause slowness. I think they were supposed to say not work at all!

With the release of OS X Leopard last night, it was if they looked up one of the most important days of the year for this site and made it their mission to take it offline during that time. One of those things that no doubt will be hilarious in a few months, but for now is maddening.

Anyway so the SQL server seems to be having intermittent periods of responsiveness in amongst the phonebook length pages of errors, giving me just enough time to post this message. Word to those who want a reliable web host that has decent uptime and warns you in advance before they take your site offline for several days at a time, stay well clear of Servage.

These posts were imported to the Annexe from Jaiku, which Google bought and shut down.

So Jaiku was bought by Google, and now you need an invitation to join? Will probably still stick with Twitter for now.

2007-10-09 18:49:00+08:00 on Jaiku

Have decided to keep using Jaiku as an aggregation page to point to. It is pretty cool to have all my RSS/Atom feeds appear on one page :-)

2007-10-26 09:06:00+08:00 on Jaiku

Today for a quick break from studies and work I decided once again to download the latest Mozilla Firefox for Mac and install it, and once again after half an hour it was wiped off my drive. Fact is, I've been spoiled completely by Camino.

It's no secret to anyone that Firefox is slow on Mac. In a time where virtually every other Mac app has been written to use the Cocoa widgets or even Qt, Firefox (and unfortunately Thunderbird) still use the OS 9 era throwback Carbon widgets which really shows. The graphics and user interface in Firefox look tired and outdated, whereas the graphics and user interface on Camino look polished… and damn it Camino looks like a real Mac app.

Those complaints aside though, using Firefox today on Mac reminded me once again why I stopped using it: the scroll speed is abysmal. Despite the fact I have a MacBook Pro which you can use the two finger motion on the touch pad to scroll I still prefer to use the keyboard arrow keys, and using these there's a noticeable lag. I'd guess that Firefox scrolls at almost half the speed that both Camino or Safari do.

Not to mention the fact that Firefox on idle with one tab open somehow manages to use so much more RAM than Camino (or even Safari) do:

According to Wikipedia Gecko 1.9 will support native Cocoa widgets which should close this gap, then I'll be able to use all the wicked Firefox plugins. Until then, I'll continue using Camino, as I have for years.

Angélique Kidjo, in my opinion one of the most talented vocalists today.

I admit I only just read today on Truemors about how James Watson, a Nobel prize winner for his work on DNA research, blames Africa's economic, health and political woes on their "generic inferiority", but after some brief further research it already seems to be a hot issue across the internet and even on the local news here in Singapore.

There's probably nothing much else that I could type here that hasn't already been said somewhere else online about now, but even if you were to ignore the blatant racism and just focus on the economic side of it, it makes a mind boggling lack of sense.

As I posted on Truemors, from the dozen or so African people I know personally and seeing what is coming out of Africa, it seems to me they’re some of the most creative, resourceful, warm and artistic people on the planet. We should all be as "genetically inferior" as Dr Watson said.

Africa's long term economic problems have as much to do with the genetic makeup of her people than Ruben has to do with girls in general (self depreciating humour). To even entertain the notion that somehow Europe's meddling and resulting international borders which divide countries along colonial borders not on cultural or historical lines have nothing to do with it, or the corrupt governments have nothing to do with it, it's just their genetics… it boggles the mind.

Then again Denial isn’t the only river in Egypt is it?

Three random images today!

The first is a photo I snapped on my Nokia e61i when I left the hospital this morning after I visited my mum in the ICU. One thing I love about Singapore is all the greenery and well kept gardens along the roads, you don't notice it until you've travelled and come back to it:

Here's a shot further down Napier Rd crossing Tangin Rd with Tanglin Mall on the left hand side and the Camden Medical Centre in the background:

And here's a shot for Guy Kawasaki, from what I understand he's been saying on Twitter than people following the Truemors feed haven't been getting updates. I've been following Truemors for a while, but I just got my first post from the Truemors Twitter account :). Sign of good things to come?

I love Sundays ^^.

I haven't been having much luck with technology this week, but this seems to be the icing on the cake so to speak. The problem is no matter how hard I try I just can't get WXR working.

WXR is of course the WordPress eXtended RSS format which allows you to quickly export the entire written contents of your weblog including posts, pages, categories, tags and kitchen sinks. It means you can pick up the guts of your weblog, then do a backup of your wp-content folder which contains all your uploaded media, plugins and themes, then import them somewhere else.

Only problem is, this is the seventh time and I still can't get it to work on one WordPress installation. I have a local web server running on my MacBook Pro which I've set up to test new themes and plugins I'm working on, and on this local installation of WordPress I can import my Rubenerd Show material without any trouble at all, but I've had no end of trouble when I try to do the same thing from the Rubenerd Blog.

The curious thing is that there's no consistency to the errors. On Thursday I tried importing from this weblog and WordPress silently failed; the import page just stopped rendering after it had uploaded the file. Then yesterday I tried again and it was able to import posts but only up to September 2006 when it decided to stop.

The only things I can think of that could be causing this problem is the WXR export php file in WordPress wasn't uploaded to the server correctly, or the file (2.2MiB) is too big somehow for my local web server to handle, or maybe there's some malformed HTML in one of my posts which breaks the resulting XML file it's contained in… maybe it's just gremlins.

One clue though showed itself when I tried to open the exported WXR file in Smultron:

So perhaps it's an encoding issue? Or does WordPress not output UTF-8? Could it be failing because some of my posts have East Asian characters which need UTF-8?

Whatever this blasted problem is, it looks like this is going to be a very, very, very long Saturday.

The DFE-670TXD is a mysterious little ethernet card, because it's turned my old ThinkPad 600E into a very picky eater. With this card plugged into either of the PC Card slots:

• My beloved FreeBSD installs, but throws errors upon booting despite the fact the very card is named and supported in /etc/defaults/pccard.conf
• NetBSD not only refuses to install, but just reboots the machine before it’s even finished booting of the CD-ROM
• My Linux distro of choice Slackware detects and installs the card, but upon using it after installing the base system, the entire system hangs forcing a hard reset

Curiously, the only operating system which installed and detected the card perfectly was… OpenBSD! I have no idea what OpenBSD is doing differently, but booting of the CD and going through the installer the card is detected automatically. When I reboot the machine with OpenBSD installed, I can use the internet, share files on the local network and synchronise with time servers without any problems!

FreeBSD is my operating system of choice generally, but OpenBSD for some reason which completely baffles me right now is the only one that works. I'm completely baffled. Did I mentioned I'm baffled? Bamboozled? Anyone with knowledge on how OpenBSD drivers work know why or have any theories?

In any case I guess I'd better brush up on the OpenBSD FAQs, because I have an OpenBSD machine now!