How does one really hack a system?

CH reviews a book that categorizes software errors: Coding Horror: Sins of Software Security. He then provides a count of how often each has been exploited (over 3,000 times for buffer overflows). If you know a bit of C programming, then it's all very readable and it makes clear why so much software is so vulnerable. Ahh, if only we'd never left Pascal ...

iStock Photo: $2 to $4 per image

I read about iStockphoto.com in an article about globalization and crowdsourcing. These inexpensive photos look like they'd be great for desktop backgrounds (I use black and white images with limited white areas for my wallpaper so I can see icons) or presentations. Sure, you can find photos for free using Google, Flickr, etc -- but these are pretty nice quality. Might be worth a few dollars to save search time.

Ports: a handy reference for firewall work

"Well Known" TCP and UDP Ports Used By Apple Software Products lists the port, protocol and service. A handy reference, even if it's dated in places (Retrospect is no longer Dantz).

WordPress: the blogging platform of the moment

I've suffered with Blogger for years, while competitors waxed and waned. Blogger is getting more tolerable, but WordPress is the fashionable place these days. I opened an account and played with it a bit. It doesn't have much more Safari support than Blogger, but it's a strong competitor for Firefox clients and I think it has a more stable API than Blogger. I was very impressed by the import/export facilities, WordPress is not afraid to let their customers free.

I'll keep playing with it, though if Blogger improves their BlogThis! client I'll probably stay with Blogger.

Blogger BlogThis!: Drag and drop URLs

This works in the Firefox rich text field that one sees when using BlogThis! in rich-text mode:

1. View a page in Firefox
2. Click on icon displayed next to URL in the url field.
3. Drag and drop into the editing area. A link appears.

It would, of course, be better if the URL was assigned given the page title [1], but I can live with this. I've not seen it mentioned anywhere, though it's a hard topic to search on. I'm sure it's a general property of the Firefox rich text editor. It's a significant time saver.

Incidentally, Blogger 2.0 with Firefox's [2] impressive integrated spell-checking is a qualitative improvement on Blogger 1.0. I've been reluctant to declare that since I've been burned so often by Blogger! Alas, BlogThis! is still stuck in the dark ages; it doesn't support tags. I've got my fingers crossed for BlogThis! 2.0 sometime soon.

[1] Internet Explorer may use the page title, Microsoft Live Writer uses the page title as does old FrontPage 98 (which I still use - it was a good application then).
[2] Don't even think of using Safari.

iWorks MIA: OpenOffice and NeoOffice

It's been years since AppleWorks was retired, but there's still no full replacement. Apple's 10.5 delay bodes poorly for anything soon.

Time to look again at NeoOffice and OpenOffice.

NeoOffice is now on version 2.1. It's still Java based, but it has an Aqua UI and doesn't require X11. NeoOffice has been ailing ever since Apple deprecated Java as a development environment, but the small team of international volunteers is still working on it. I'll test it out, being sure to install the most recent patches. It now comes with an app that installs support for Spotlight search of OpenOffice document formats.

OpenOffice 2.2 is still dependent on X11, so it's not a consideration for our home. However, there's a tentative date for a true OS X version: Digg - Timetable Announced For Native Aqua OpenOffice - Public Release in May

OpenOffice has a very well done Wiki on the Aqua (not Cocoa!) project, including minutes from the March 30th meeting. It's encouraging news, suggesting there might be something we'd use ready for late summer. I wouldn't consider replacing Nisus Writer Express, which has been excellent (Nisus Writer Pro is in beta now), but a decent Excel clone and PowerPoint reader would be very helpful. Note that "Aqua" doesn't mean OpenOffice will become a full fledged Cocoa application with services integration, system spell checking, etc. It won't show off the (aging) advantages of OS X as well as NWE or even iWorks.

OS X: Creating a "parents only" shared folder

It began innocently enough.

I needed to move the family share off an old XP box and onto our iMac. We needed a Parents-only folder that would be shared on the network and accessible for each Parental-unit on the iMac. Print services are via a networked Brother MFC and the 802.11b/g Airport Extreme, they would not change.

The journey passed through dark places. Along the way I learned:

• Mac Classic, and Windows 95, 98, ME, NT and 2K, were all better designed for small network file sharing than OS X. I'm not sure even XP Pro isn't better designed than OS X for this particular task. The Users and Groups functionality of Mac Classic is only available in OS X server. (Same thing happened to that function between Windows 98 and XP.)
  
  
• You can't share the Shared Folder. (!) (Unless you use SharePoints, see below.)
  
  
• The NetInfo Manager is largely undocumented and the user interface is broken (are you sure you know what you're deleting? Do you know when there's a confirmation dialog and when there isn't). (The only documentation I could find was Apple's PDF. [1]
  
  
• The 10.2 edition of David Pogue's Mac OS X The Missing Manual has dangerously incorrect advice for using NetInfo Manager
  
  
• SharePoints is a bit crude and it's dangerous, but it works well for adding a Parent group. When I donate I'll suggest some UI tweaks. The author's web site has an Amazon donation box.
  
  
• If you want to do this the authorized way you either need to buy OS X server (!) or, maybe, you can buy the new Airport Extreme and a USB share (slow, slow, slow).
  

This is what I thought I'd do:

• Create a Group called "parents" and add the two parental users to it using NetInfo Manager per Pogue's explanations
  
• Create a folder in the Shared Folder called "Parents" and change the Group access to Parents with read/write privileges.
  

This is the next best thing I came up with:

• Created a folder called "Parents" in the Public folder associated with my wife's account on the iMac
• Used SharePoints to create a Group called "parents" with two user members.
• Used Get Info to give the group "parents" read/write access to the folder "Parents"

To access Parents I need to authenticate with the iMac using my wife's username and password. That would be a problem if she wanted control over her own password. In that case I'd have to either use SharePoints to create a new common networked share (point) or I'd have to create a new user with a password we could share and make the Public folder read/write.

Ugly.

BTW, here's the problem with the 10.2 edition of David Pogue's Mac OS X The Missing Manual. In that edition he recommends duplicating the Administrator group as the starting point for a new share. The problem is that the Administrator group has some extra attributes associated with it that, I suspect, are used by AFP file sharing. They aren't part of a standard Group created by SharePoints or OS X server. The result is that any user member of the new, derived, group has occult admin privileges. If they try to access a denied folder, they have the right to authenticate as an admin. This is bad. Of course maybe it did work safely in 10.2, I don't have the 10.4 edition of his book. I'll write and ask him if it's been fixed.

[1] I've been reading through the PDF. NetInfo Manager is an antique. It uses sequential integers as user IDs rather than GUIDs (globally unique identifiers) and advises strategies like "reserve range". Brrrr. Reminds me of Disco. I've read blase responses to Apple's 10.5 shipping delay, but I think the reactions are too complacent. OS X still has one foot firmly stuck in the 1970s, it needs some serious upgrades.

Update 4/14/07: It was nasty to setup (thank you SharePoints), but it is sweet. The Mac clients connect pretty seamlessly to the server, with no sleep/wake connection issues. I enabled SMB sharing for my OS X account (only) and that works very well. Interestingly OS X 10.4.9 Sharing specifies an IP address for the iMac, but while I was playing around with browsing the workgroup from my XP box the server appeared as if by magic. I'm not quite sure how that happened. The iMac shows up as \\BIGMAC\jfaughnan, probably because I'd installed Apple's Bonjour on the XP box. (Note I'd previously set the Mac to use my SMB workgroup name, using the obscure setting in the extraordinarily obscure Directory Access utility.