Sunday, November 28, 2004

ClamXav - OS X GUI for UNIX ClamAV antiviral software

Mark Allan - Software - clamXav

Installing this sofware also installs the antivirus engine, which then downloads the antivirus definitions. So you don't need to also download the clamAV package.

This software just scans, it's not continually monitoring file I/O. Also it's not automatically triggered by receiving email.

Although ClamXav is free, the author is seeking voluntary donations. (Almost never works.) I'm testing now and it it works I'll donate $20. It's nice to have a convenient scanner.

I was able to install as a non-admin user. It does create its own directory: usr/local/clamXav.

ClamAV: Antivirus scanning software for UNIX, including BSD Unix/Darwin (OS X)

ClamAV: Abstract
Clam AntiVirus is a GPL anti-virus toolkit for UNIX. The main purpose of this software is the integration with mail servers (attachment scanning). The package provides a flexible and scalable multi-threaded daemon, a command line scanner, and a tool for automatic updating via Internet. The programs are based on a shared library distributed with the Clam AntiVirus package, which you can use with your own software. Most importantly, the virus database is kept up to date.

There are two commercial antiviral software solutions for OS X, but they both have terrible reputations for performance issues, system damage, etc. They cause more problems than they prevent. Fortunately OS X viruses are still very rare, but this is not a tenable situation.

Some OS X experts are implementing ClamAV, a UNIX antivirus solution. Apple should incorporate this into Tiger and support the project.

Macintosh hardware monitor software

MacInTouch Home Page: "Marcel Bresink's Hardware Monitor 1.3 reads all available hardware sensors in Macintosh computers and displays the measured values in a variety of ways. This release adds support for all iMac G5 sensors, support for nVidia GeForce 6800 sensors, support for many more hard disk temperature sensors, an option to attach the display window to the Desktop background, auto-save intervals for history data, and other changes. Hardware Monitor is 7 Euro for Mac OS X 10.2.5 and up."

Transportation Security Administration Wait Times at airport security

TSA | Transportation Security Administration | Wait Times

I need to add this to my travel page.

Virtual tours of Montreal, and of other worlds

MadeinMTL

Another virtual tour, this one of Montreal. I grew up there, so it's of particular personal interest. There's been an eruption of these virtual tours lately, using Flash and Quicktime panoramas. With Google's purchase of keyhole it seems likely these virtual tours will explode over the next few years. It will be fascinating to combine satellite images, panoramas and even virtual reality environments into a pseudo-coherent world. At the other end of the metaverse, bar codes and other identifiers in the physical world are being used to attach data to real world objects. Aim one's camera at the bar code on the outdoor restaurant menu and read the reviews (also find out one's physical location -- for when the GPS is down ...)

Saturday, November 27, 2004

OmniWeb -- my new better OS X browser

OmniWeb

I'm trying out OmniWeb these days. It has one amazing feature and several excellent features.

The amazing feature is workspaces. I loved tabbed browsing -- at first. Now I can't live without it, but it annoys me. On both Firefox and Mozilla I end up with a slew of windows, each with its own tabs. If I lose track of a tab, I wander through windows looking for it. In OmniWeb the Workspace gives me a hierarchical view of windows and tabs and lets me even rearrange the tabs between windows. I can display a mini-view of a tab to get more information than the tab title.

In the "just excellent" department I'd include their pop-up text editor for forms. Instead of making do with Blogger's textedit box, I have my own little editor. Slick and easy. It looks like OmniWeb has more than a few of these niceties.

Overall OmniWeb's rendering resembles Safari's -- they use the same web toolkit. Not quite as nice as Firefox and not recognized as Firefox by Blogger. On the other hand, OmniWeb doesn't suffer from the keystroke lag I get with Firefox on the Mac -- AND Mac services work with OW, they don't work with Firefox. Not to mention Firefox fonts and font spacing look pretty bad on my Mac.

Overall OW feels like a much better version of Safari. Worth paying for!