I Hope Phil's Ass Is Feeling Alright...

Sorry, I couldn't resist...



All snark aside, I'm really glad Apple had their mini press junket on tuesday.  Such a direct mea culpa is staggeringly uncharacteristic for the company, but it was sorely needed among their pro customers.  (Of which, at least according to the Schedule C in my tax return, I still count!)

As others have said, actions speak louder than words, but these words were exactly what they needed to be.  They also helped to explain Apple's recent actions - or lack thereof - in a way that rang true.  I have no trouble believing Apple would bet big on a radical new design, confident in their read that the pro market was moving to dual-GPU systems, only to find that their design couldn't accommodate  the real ways that hardware developed, and that they had backed themselves into a corner when they tried to plot future revisions.  Every company makes mistakes, and this is exactly the kind of mistake Apple would make.

It also should cement (if there was any doubt) the 2013 Mac Pro's place in computer history as the G4 Cube 2.0.  Heck, 10 years down the line the trash can will probably be a collector's item of sorts!

With as much work as they have ahead of them completely redesigning a modular and frequently-upgradable Mac Pro, the wait certainly isn't going to be easy.  But I'm excited to see where this leads...

Fragmentation

I kept deleting files and deleting files, but for some reason Parallels kept saying that it couldn't reduce the size of my virtual machine file!

I wonder why that could be...

(It's better now!)

Post-Gazette Video on iD Tech Camps

As some of you might already know, I spent the last month and a half working at the CMU location for iD Tech Camps.  This past week was my last week working there, and during the week a reporter from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette stopped by, doing a story on "non-traditional" summer camps in western Pennsylvania (the story appears in today's paper, starting in a sidebar on the front page).

The reporter also shot some video of the camp!



Unfortunately, the class I was teaching that week was in a different lab, so you won't see any of me there.  But the camp director gets plenty of face-time!

And yes, I was (more or less) dressed as a pirate that day too...

Hacked!

Oh well isn't that cute... someone hacked my webcomic!

Of course, I'm not exactly clueless when it comes to these things, so after verifying the extent of the damage, I did some digging through the logs.

Ready for a laugh?

"K4Rel," the Iranian "L337 H4x0r!" who defaced my site is a complete poseur!

The actual break-in was done on Monday by someone in Jakarta, Indonesia.  They found a way in, uploaded a backdoor for themselves (the quite useful "b374k" php script), and changed the (hashed) passwords for the admin section. Once finished, it appears this individual passed off (or let's be honest, probably sold) the admin passwords to a second person.

The second guy actually was from Iran.  But he was only able to add a new "comic" to the database, as you can see above, and wasn't able to touch anything else on the site.  Heck, he barely even did that - the internal page id had incremented by two, which means he effed it up the first time and had to try again!  Laaame.

For the technically curious:  the original Indonesian hacker used classic SQL injection.  SomeryC, the extremely lightweight comic-oriented CMS I use for Directionless, was doing nothing to sanitize the page number in the URLs.  This allowed him to edit the hashed passwords for the admin section.  From there, he used the comic uploader to install the backdoor script, and after that appears to have left the server alone, after passing it off to the Iranian "hacker" (and for him, I use the term very loosely indeed...)

Over the last few hours, I've restored Directionless to normal.  Will helped me with some of the PHP, so the site should no longer respond to bogus input.  Additionally, I have put the entire admin section between an additional level of security with htaccess, and of course, changed all the passwords. DirectionlessComic.com should be secure now, at least from this type of attack.

ConFICK!

The Enemy Within - Magazine - The Atlantic

Utterly fascinating (albeit long...) article on the history of the infamous "Conficker" worm. I had never realized just how sophisticated - and let's be honest, clever - it was/is.

Spoiler:  The worm is still out there, lying dormant in a massive botnet estimated at over 6.5 million computers in size.  And security researchers aren't entirely sure they can ever truly eradicate or contain it...

Valve Announces Steam For Mac OS X

(Image blatantly taken from the WIRED story)

Awesome. Some reading material:

WIRED story: "Valve Brings Hit Games, Steam Service to Mac"

Valve Press Release

Valve Software has announced that next month they will be releasing a Mac client for their popular online video game store and community portal, Steam. With this, comes the news that they have also ported their substantial catalog of games, as well as the Source engine running most of them (as well as a fair number of other 3rd-party games)

There's plenty of info in the two links above, but here's a few takeaways:

• All Source-powered Valve games you've already bought will carry over to either platform - no need to re-buy anything!  (Valve is also encouraging other developers who sell their games on Steam to do the same)
• Games that use the relatively-new "Steam Cloud" services will be able to sync game settings, save files an the like across platforms.
• Full multiplayer compatibility.
• All future Valve games (starting with Portal 2, which looks great) will be simultaneous releases on Windows, OS X, and Xbox 360. (still no love for the PS3)

This ought to make things rather interesting.  Back in early 2005, I got a Mac as an early high school graduation gift. It made a lot of sense - I was going to film school in the fall, and I needed a laptop for college. Obviously, that machine needed to be something that I could run Final Cut Pro on.  I had been a gamer all through high school, even attending QuakeCon the previous year. But if I wanted to keep playing Counter-Strike at Syracuse, I would need to lug up my old self-built PC tower.

However, the specs of my new PowerBook were tantalizing. Admittedly, the 1.67Ghz PowerPC G4 wasn't anything to write home about.  The weaknesses of the PPC had become so severe that Apple would announce their big Intel switch later that very year.  But the hard drive and (upgraded) RAM were respectable, the screen was gorgeous, and the ATI Radeon 9700M graphics card really caught my eye.

It was a generation behind the current cutting edge... but this was a laptop.  And it had as much video memory as my desktop GPU!  I tested a couple games that did have Mac versions (Quake 3 and the demo for Unreal Tournament 4) and they ran pretty well, for a laptop.  Keep in mind, back then very few laptops actually had decent GPU's, unless you were talking about Alienware.  But even lower-end Macs always had dedicated graphics cards, simply because they needed the graphical horsepower to run the Aqua GUI smoothly, especially on anemic G4 chips. It was a real shame I couldn't just fire up some Half-Life on this shiny new machine...

Of course, a few years later a fortuitous run-in with Applecare would net me an even shiner new Intel-based MacBook Pro. It had even better hardware than my now-ancient PC tower, so I wasted little time in installing XP on a Boot Camp partition, and being only a reboot away from gaming bliss.  Of course, the rebooting does get to be annoying...  I'm looking forward to April!

This is also pretty fascinating from a game-industry standpoint.  There are now two major long-time PC developers (Blizzard and Valve) dedicated to simultaneous PC/Mac releases. (id Software fell off that wagon with Doom 3 and Quake 4, but looks to be coming back with Rage? We'll see.) And the Source engine - quite popular among both developers and mod teams - can now, presumably, seamlessly target either DirectX or OpenGL.

Interesting. Very interesting.

Re: Social Media Revolution

My father is the General Manager of WDUQ-FM, the NPR-affiliate public radio station at Duquesne University. Over the last few years, he's been bombarded by people in his business worried about "what's happening" with social media, and where traditional media fits in. A few minutes ago, he e-mailed me a link to this video, noting that he'd "love your reaction to this."

Here's my reaction (posted on my blog, for that extra kick of "meta"-ness!):

Personal computers have been used to improve communication almost from the beginning. Even a lowly, non-networked IBM PC with a word processor and a spreadsheet improves the efficiency of crafting office memos and accounting reports drastically over that of a typewriter and a ledger. Networks made computerized communication faster, and spread it farther. The internet kicked things into high gear.

The biggest mistake people make when talking about digital communications, is in calling things "revolutionary." Technology as a whole is the poster-child for evolutionary thinking. Unfortunately, to the uninitiated, there appears to be more going on than that, because the rate of evolutionary advancements taking place also increases.

Perhaps the biggest advantage held by people my age, who grew up with all of this well into full swing, is our ability to take it in stride. Sure, we use facebook on a many-times-a-day basis, but we don't fawn over it. Already, we usually give it little more thought than previous generations did to how many times a day they used the telephone. (Though, like them, we do still retain the ability to, once and a while, marvel at how ridiculous it is that you can actually do this. Tech is cool.) We don't analyze how each new innovation is going to change the entire world and the nature of humanity - we just use it. If it works for us, we keep using it. If we get bored, or it doesn't seem interesting to begin with, we move on. Are there downsides to this approach? Certainly. But I do think we have a more level-headed appraisal of things.

I think growing up in the nineties has tended to create a perspective that is difficult to impress anymore, when it comes to the internet. "Things are suddenly happening twice as fast and in twice as many ways as before? Ok... this is supposed to shock me? It's been that way for most of my life."

The internet, like people of my generation, is a product of the nineties, and in many ways still operates like it. On a recommendation from my girlfriend, I recently read Douglas Coupland's Microserfs. It was lauded as a portrait of a cultural microcosm specific to its time and place, but honestly, I didn't find the world all that different from the one we live in today. "Dot-Com" start-ups have been replaced by "Web 2.0" start-ups, but the tale is largely the same.

One more thing about my generation - having lived through the "Dot-Com Era," we have grown to truly loathe transparent buzzwords. Seriously. "Socialnomics (tm)" actually made me cringe.

I'm not sure where exactly I'm going with this, (commentary on the stream-of-consciousness web I find so little unnerving about?) but I've already ranted for much longer than I intended to, so I'll leave it at that.

Also: I've always liked that Fatboy Slim track. (also a product of the 90's...)

Google Experimenting With Customizable Search Results?

Today I noticed some new icons next to my Google search results...


Seems they're part of a trial "Edit Results" program Google is testing on a random selection of people with Google Accounts over a few weeks. They set up an informational page to explain it more.  This feature only applies to people who are logged in to their account when searching, and it only affects the result list of that particular user.

You can click on the Up arrow to promote good results to the top, delete bad ones altogether, and add notes about different results.

This seems like an interesting way to approach user-feedback-driven search, without actually making Google search results user-feedback-driven.  However, if they could figure out a more configurable way to do this (split into different "Search Sessions," perhaps?) I think it could actually be very useful when trying to do research online, especially with the note-taking feature.

My Room is a Digital Graveyard

It's really pretty sad. The truly depressing part is - this isn't even half the stuff. It's just the junk I'm currently trying desperately to get rid of!

Click the image for a larger view. Any or all of this stuff can be yours if you want it, just make me an offer. ("Free" counts as an offer. Ok, maybe not for the 350W power supply. That's still almost useful.) I'd just throw most of it in the trash, but I've got too much Liberal Guilt for that. (I mean, come on now.)

A list of this stuff as near as I can figure...

1. External 56K modem. Supposedly works with Macs or Windows 3.1/NT/95. Serial connection. Copyright date says 1998.
2. Stereo multimedia speakers. They sound pretty tinny, as I recall. Standard minijack plug.
3. Seagate IDE hard drive. About 150% as thick as most 3.5" drives. Doesn't list capacity, but I expect a few hundered megabytes...
4. Seagate IDE hard drive. 261.3 megabytes.
5. 2x Sun SparcStation IPC's. You can Google them. 25 MHz Unix workstations that should outperform most 50MHz Intel 486 PCs! They power on, but use an obscure monitor type that I can't find, and so I have no idea how well they work.
6. Sun keyboard, mouse, and monitor cable to go with one of the SparcStations. Also, a few little adapters that supposedly let you connect the boxes to a VGA monitor, but they only work with "sync-on-green" VGA monitors, which apparently none of mine are.
7. An ancient NEC 5.25" hard drive. Weighs a ton, and uses some sort of pre-IDE proprietary connection that hooks up to the attached 8-bit ISA card... The date on it is 1984...
   
8. Bog-standard 5.25" floppy disk drive. Nothing exciting or exotic here.
9. 90-watt AT Power Supply (came before ATX)
10. 350-watt ATX Power Supply (this is probably the only one I'd expect any decent price for, as it's still somewhat decent, and works fine)
11. Creative CD-ROM drive. Doesn't use IDE - I think it has to hook up to some sort of Sound Blaster card it was bundled with. No idea where said card is though...
12. Logitech "Scanman Plus Controller Board." ISA card. Copyright date is 1989.
13. Some sort of ISA sound card. Pulled from an old IBM Aptiva.
14. Lucent 56K modem. ISA card. (and the telephone cable to go with it! Awesome!!!!1)
15. Random old floppy cables, the kind that go to a 5.25" drive.
16. Actually, these two adapters are kind of neat, in an old-tech sort of way. They're used to hook up a 3.5" floppy drive in machines that were only designed to support 5.25" drives.
17. A Pentium I heatsink.
18. VEGA graphics adapter from 1986. 8-bit ISA card. Uses an older, pre-VGA graphics plug (looks like a serial port)
19. "ATI Mach 32" 2D video card. ISA card, normal VGA connector. I think its big selling point was it had an amazing 2 megabytes of VRAM... or something.
20. SMC network card from 1993. ISA card, does 10-baseT ethernet, or two different, obsolete networking connections (including one that appears to use coaxial cable...) This was actually the NIC that was in my machine when I first started playing CounterStrike and going to LAN parties...
21. Assorted F-ing RAM. All pre-DDR, mostly SIMM's (pre-DIMM)
22. A couple of standard CD-ROM drives. One of them is 52x! I don't remember if they work...

Most of this stuff should be functional. Or at least, it was functional the last time it was in a machine.

And like I said, that isn't even close to all of my older computer junk... It's just the really ancient crap I'm trying to get rid of, hopefully without it ending up in a landfill. I still have (including my normal everyday machines) 5 computers that will boot and run, a couple spare AMD motherboards and AGP video cards, 2 Palm PDA's... and a few assorted knick knacks:

Newsflash: Computers Crash

It's pretty common knowledge that some people get as worked up over their computer's operating system as others do about, say, religion. (I mean, I really like Macs, but just listen to the caller at the beginning of this web-show where the woman on-screen is installing Vista on her MacBook Air. You want to cry...? My goodness...)

Sometimes, a little perspective is fun:



And I know some have tried to compare me to the caller in that first link. But, come on. As strongly as Final Cut Pro pulled me into the Mac universe, Portal still keeps me pretty rooted in Windows XP... :)

Update: Ok, this one's funny too!

Why Does Apple Have Such a Good Rep? This Might Be Part Of It...

It's no secret that Apple usually gets some of the highest marks for customer satisfaction among computer makers in places like Consumer Reports. But why is that? The value proposition is about the same these days, objectively anyway. And Macs certainly are just as capable of having major hardware mishaps as other manufacturer's machines - especially now that the Intel transition is complete and everybody basically uses the same guts.

So why do people love on Apple so much? A pretty GUI and elegant OS architecture don't make Customer Service any better. So what gives?

I offer this anecdote:

A couple weeks ago, my trusty, almost 3-year-old PowerBook G4 started having a few issues. Namely, Kernel Panics, the UNIX-y equivalent of the infamous Blue Screen of Death. Now, if your PC bluescreens, you just cuss Bill Gates (or Steve Ballmer, your pick) and reboot. On a Mac, if things manage to go this wrong... it means there's something wrong!

Long story short, some troubleshooting of my own narrowed it down to the RAM, and specifically, the actual RAM slots in the logicboard (Mac-parlance for laptop motherboard) as opposed to the sticks themselves. Bummer. Fortunately, this problem cropped up two weeks before my extended AppleCare warranty was set to expire. So I made an appointment and brought the machine in to the local Apple Retail Store, where the guy there confirmed the problem, checked with me to make sure I had everything backed up (I did) and shipped the machine off to the nearest Apple repair center. Zero cost to me, because it was all covered under AppleCare.

It was away for about a week, mainly because they don't keep a ton of spare parts for machines as old as mine on hand. The next week, I get a call.

"We have the machine back here... but it's failing our standard diagnostic test. It says here there's a problem with the VRAM. Now, it does boot, so if there's an immediate need for the machine you can come and pick it up, but I'd just as soon send it back and have them re-replace the logic board."

Ok, so that's kind of crazy... but hell, my AppleCare is expiring soon so yeah, by all means send it back until it gets a clean bill of health.

Another week passes, and I get a call.

"Ok, so the machine is still failing the diagnostic. So... there's two options I'm authorized to give you, but I think I know which one you're gonna take..."

I'm listening.

"First, we can order yet another new logic board, have it delivered here to the store, and install it ourselves to make sure it's done right, and hope that fixes whatever the issue is."

Or...?

"Or... we offer you what's called a CRU Exchange, which would be the closest replacement machine that is not lower spec'ed than your current one."

...meaning?

"You'd get a MacBook Pro."

Needless to say, I went with option 2! So in a nutshell, my computer started acting up, and now - at no cost to me whatsoever, - I'm going from this:

PowerBook G4 15.2-inch
1.67 GHz PowerPC G4
2 GB PC2700 DDR RAM (upgraded from 512 Meg originally)
120 GB ATA hard drive (upgraded from 80 GB originally)
ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 - 128 Meg VRAM
2x DVD Burner

To this:

MacBook Pro 15.4-inch
2.2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
2 GB PC2-5300 DDR2 RAM
120 GB SATA hard drive
NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT - 128 Meg VRAM
8x DVD Burner

... Sweet. For comparison purposes, this is my current "gaming rig" PC tower:

AMD AthlonXP 3200+ @ 2.2 GHz
1 GB PC3200 DDR RAM
160 GB ATA hard drive
NVIDIA GeForce 6800 non-ultra - 128 Meg VRAM
DVD... reader.

In short, once I get this new machine (in a week or so.... whatever, I can wait) I'm going to be very interested in seeing how 3D Mark scores match up once I make a WinXP partition (ah, the convenience of Intel chips!).

In conclusion, if you ever wonder why Apple's customer loyalty is so high - stuff like this is a big part of it. Oh, and if you ever get a Mac, particularly a laptop.... get AppleCare!
Update: Corrected the spelling of "CRU." Apparently it stands for "Customer Replacement Unit." Pretty straightforward.