Good practices if enabling SSH remote login

MacInTouch: timely news and tips about the Apple Macintosh

[MacInTouch Reader 2] This is a good time to mention what I'm sure has been mentioned before - since you can't count on users *not* reusing their login creds elsewhere (or using weak passwords) - you can limit who can remotely login to your Mac with a simple addition to your sshd config. Just add:
AllowUsers dad mom
to /etc/sshd_config and then stop/start remote login using System Preferences -> Sharing.
Now only 'dad' and 'mom' can login remotely, so when daughter lets her login creds out of the bag (or you create a user/pass like 'guest/guest' or 'test/test') you're not wide open to attack.

[David Charlap] In my case, I want to allow any user to log in from my LAN or from my office computer, but I don't want to allow any account to log in from the internet. This can be done by editing /etc/hosts.allow and /etc/hosts.deny:
My /etc/hosts.deny is set up to deny everything (only allowing what hosts.allow explicitly permits). It contains:
ALL : ALL
My /etc/hosts.allow has rules that allow all services to accept connections from my LAN (192.168.1.*) and ssh logins from my office subnet. It contains:
ALL : 192.168.1.
sshd-keygen-wrapper,sshd : office IP prefix
Attempting to connect to ssh from any other location results in the Mac dropping the TCP connection before the ssh daemon even gets a chance to find out what the user ID is.

Blogbot for Outlook

Jacob Reider likes this Outlook blogging integration tool. That means it must be excellent. It's also free and it blogbot %u2122:Syncs with Bloglines!

If you have an account on Bloglines, you can sync Outlook with your feeds there.
Now you have the convenience of using Outlook at the office, and still
having access on the web via Bloglines.

The "syncs with bloglines" feature is a killer.

iPhoto 6: what a bloody mess

I was pretty confident when I installed iPhoto 6. After all, I'd verified my Libraries with iPhoto Library Manager.

Hoo boy. Was I wrong. What a bleeping mess. See [1] (below) for details, but my IPLM merged Libraries were a reall mess after updating to iPhoto 6. The unmerged Libraries were ok, but the process was odd. Two of them took only a few minutes to convert. One, about 3 times as large, seemed to hang. It let it run overnight [2], when I returned it was done. Forty images were "recovered", but in fact they were all duplicates.

Fortunately, despite my misplaced confidence, I had backups upon backups. So, I'll probably survive. I did find that when iPhoto hangs during a Library update, your best bet is to go to bed. Chances are in the morning it'll be done.

iPhoto still wreches and hangs when it comes across a corrupted JPEG. The code base for the app must be horrendous -- or the current engineers are spectacularly incompetent.

I came across some really ugly looking images, but it doesn't look like I was hit by the color space problem -- my old iPhoto 5 versions of the same images are just as ugly.

So what went wrong? I'm not sure yet. I suspect some complex interaction between the legacy of old OS X and iPhoto bugs mixed in with quirks introduced by merging my iPhoto 5 Libraries using iPhoto Library Manager. One of my many update attempts produced 620 "recovered" images, but they look like odd duplicates related to original images. I set them aside to study, but chances are I'll delete them all.

Later I did a test merge of these 3 iPhoto 6 Libraries into one new iPhoto 6 Library [2]. This time the test image was handled correctly [2], but I'm still evaluating counts of images.

More importantly, I'm done with iPhoto. I deserve Pro tools. I want to use an application that gets properly tested -- because screw-ups lead to really nasty lawyers gnawing on Apple. (I'm one of the few physicians in the world who thinks that junk dog lawyers are the best solution humans can come up with to drive quality work.)

I'm so mad I'll punish Apple by spending $250 (edu price) for Aperture -- once it gets its next point update. Oh, wait, that a minute ...

PS. I had to use Smart Folders to help with some of my analysis. That's when I realized you can't sort results based on path data, and you can't easily see the path. I'd like tp put the Spotlight engineers in the same boat as the iPhoto team, and send them all to a southern island -- something just off the Antarctic coast.

[1] IMG_0092 is the test image. Original images is 320K

Original library (iP6 - this is correct)
Ancient/Modified/2002/Roll 25: 368K
Ancient/Originals/2002/Roll 25: 320K (this is correct)
Merged library (iP6)
BadLibrary/Originals/2002/Roll 25: 368K (switch original and modified)
BadLibrary/2002/10/26/Originals (this is weird, another originals?)
Merged library, different approach (iP5)
NewMerge/2002/10/2/: 368K
NewMerge/2002/10/26/Originals: 320K (this is correct)
As above, but iP6 with 1000 "recovered" images.
NewMerge/Recovered Photos/IMG_0092.JPG: 320K
NewMerge/Originals/2002/Roll 25/IMG_0092.JPG: 368

[2] My guess is that that there's some global timeout that kicks in after an hour or two of failing to complete a task, and iPhoto skips to the next step.

[3] As per [1], but now I upgraded each of the 3 iPhoto Libraries separately to iPhoto 6. Two went very quickly, one took several hours and found 40 'recovered' images (all were unwanted duplicates). Then I merged to one new Library using IPLM. The test image was now handled correctly:

AllMerge/Originals/2002/Roll 11: 320K
AllMerge/Modified/2002/Roll 11: 368K

NeoOffice: still not using OpenOffice file formats

[Update: this blog posting gives additional perspective.]

I'm interested NeoOffice, but it's worrisome that it still not using native OpenOffice file formats:

MacInTouch: timely news and tips about the Apple Macintosh

NeoOffice 1.2 is an open source, Mac OS X-native version of the OpenOffice.org office suite, which includes Microsoft Office-compatible word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and drawing applications. This release adds the ability to import OpenOffice.org 2.0 documents, use of Apple's Java 1.4.1 and Cocoa APIs (instead of Java 1.3.1 and Carbon), support for printing EPS images, and support for all OpenOffice.org accessibility features, among other changes. NeoOffice is free for Mac OS X 10.3 and 10.4.

Since it's Cocoa, do OS X services work? I'll give it a try.

Epson has a 24 photo bulk feeder

Epson briefly sold a scanner with an integrated print feeder. The Amazon reviews were very positive, but it was discontinued. HP made a similar device, which was burned at the stake on Amazon. (HP hates their customers, and they punish them with HP's sheet feeders/shredders.)

Every so often I look to see if anyone has introduced something like this. To my surprise -- I found the Epson - Multi Photo / Business Card Feeder. It replaces the top portions of two of Epson's currently sold scanners (2480 and 2580). It's about $150 or so; oddly it's $175 on Amazon. There are no Amazon reviews of this device, in fact I couldn't find any reviews anywhere.

Is there nobody else with thousands of prints to scan? Something's funny here ...

Update: it looks a lot like the top of their limited edition scanner, the one that got great reviews.

Update 2: Hmm. False alarm. This is indeed the top of the Limited Edition scanner, but the two scanners it is said to work with have been discontinued. So this is not worth buying.

SeaMonkey for OS X: HTML editor?

SeaMonkey is the Mozilla Foundation's version of Netscape: an all in one solution. I'm quite interested in the HTML editor. There's a dearth of end-user wysiwyg html editors for OS X, and this one's free. Comments to come.

OS X Sync software updates

Mactintouch had news of two updates to sync software, a category I'm interested in because of my 10.3.9 iBook.

MacInTouch: timely news and tips about the Apple Macintosh

QuickSync 2.0 is a folder synchronization utility that can work with any device that mounts on the desktop. It includes automatic sync options, scheduling, bidirectional or unidirectional sync, session saves, reports of copied and synced files, and support for FTP, SMB (Samba), and Appletalk shared folders/drives. This release adds a system backup function, copying with admin rights, improved sync and data detection methods, and a redesigned and simplified interface. QuickSync is $19 for Mac OS X.

SyncUpX 1.5.1 is a synchronization utility that provides incremental backups, the ability to back up Smart Folders, and one-click restores, among other features. Backups can be saved to a second hard drive or external drive (including an iPod), and each backup stores its own settings, which can be restored just by selecting the backup folder. Recent changes include extended logging, interface improvements, improved Automator actions, and better error handling. SyncUpX (a Universal Binary) is $20 for Mac OS X 10.3 and 10.4.

SyncUpX gains a lot from its clever use of Smart Folder:

freeridecoding.net

You want to backup only the purchased songs out of your iTunes music library? Just create a spotlight search listing all protected AAC files and save it. Now just add this saved search to your backup. This way you can create completely dynamic backup sets really easy.