Has the Leopard lost it’s spots?

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 19 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

If you read many Apple or Mac OS X forums, magazines or listen to Mac-related podcasts, soon enough you’ll come across a comment about how Windows Vista was late to market, only just competes with Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) and how OS X 10.5 (Leopard) will rewrite history and further boost Apple’s growth. Some of the podcasts I listen to even expected Apple to release Leopard at MacWorld in January and therefore beat Vista to market. Well, Leopard wasn’t ready at MacWorld (why would Apple rush it to market just to “beat Microsoft”, especially as Vista was already available to Microsoft’s business customers at that time?) – all Apple announced at MacWorld 2007 were some products that weren’t ready yet (although the Apple TV and AirPort Extreme have since begun shipping).

For a while now, Apple has said that Leopard will arrive in the spring 2007. Well, spring is here, and there is no sign of Leopard but when exactly does spring end? I could be generous and assume that the second quarter of the year counts as spring and maybe Leopard, iLife, iPhone, a new iSight camera and updates to the Macintosh and iPod product lines will be launched at Apple’s worldwide developer conference in June. Nope. Leopard will be late. Except in the southern hemisphere, where it will be spring in October. Yes, October. Now, I’m no Microsoft apologist (although some of my friends may disagree) but I do feel an element of smugness here as the same Apple fanboys who poured scorn on Windows Vista weep while they have to wait until the autumn (at least) for a new version of OS X.

To Apple: shame on you. I’m not sure whether to be more annoyed that you dropped the ball and let down your existing customer base in order to enter the highly-competitive smartphone market with an unproven product or that you are hiding behind the development of the iPhone in a crude attempt to mask the hypocrisy of criticising Microsoft’s incessant delays on Vista then delaying your own operating system update.

100 million iPod sales is a fantastic achievement, as is the resurgence in Apple’s computer sales but, by introducing uncertainty into the market, delaying releases of Mac-related products and failing to ship a new generation of iPods in order to follow a dream of becoming a consumer electronics giant, Apple risks losing it all. If they don’t get their act together soon then the winners will be Microsoft (PC operating systems), Nokia (phones) and Sony (consumer electronics).

Even before Apple announced that Leopard would not ship until October, there were rumours that all is not well in Cupertino – in TWiT episode 94 it was even suggested that the reason for the delays is not actually a lack of resources but actually because Steve Jobs is personally involved in so many of the decisions at Apple and only has limited time himself. An interesting theory (there were others too that I hold less credence in).

From a personal perspective, I’ve been considering a new Mac purchase and was looking at Leopard to see if it’s worth waiting for – even before this announcement I’d been preparing to blog about Leopard because my conclusion is that it’s probably not worth the wait. It looks to have some nice features but it doesn’t seem to offer much at all that’s ground breaking and I very much doubt that it can live up to Apple’s claims of “advancing the world’s most advanced operating system”. Now, before I get flamed, I’ll set out why I don’t see what the fuss is about, based on the Leopard Sneak Peek on the Apple website:

  • Time Machine. Looks good. Very pretty. Windows has had a backup utility since the mid-1990s (Apple make you pay for theirs) and has had the volume shadow copy service (VSS) for snapshots since Windows XP too – not as pretty as Time Machine but present in the operating system nevertheless.
  • Mail and iCal. The first new Mail features that Apple cites are based around HTML stationary, which either looks nice or tacky (depending on your point of view) but is pretty pointless as any decent mail client will block images in HTML mail for security reasons (at least until the message can be confirmed as safe). iCal’s collaboration functionality sounds good but in my experience the majority of non-geek users struggle to get any further at collaboration than e-mailing documents to one another. As for Notes and To Dos – have you ever heard of Outlook or Entourage? They may not be part of the operating system but let’s face it there aren’t many PCs in the world that don’t have Office on them. Regardless, I’ll concede that Mail and iCal are already better than their Windows equivalents.
  • Anti-phishing improvements in Mail and Safari. Check – already there in Windows, whether you use Internet Explorer or Firefox.
  • iChat. Fair enough – it is a great IM client and the new presentation features are miles ahead what the competition offers but in order to use the iChat audio-visual features with non-iChat contacts there are a lot of hoops to jump through, and getting iChat to talk to certain IM networks is difficult too.
  • Spaces. Something similar has been there on Linux for as long as I’ve used it (which, admittedly, is not very long) and the technology is already available for Mac OS X using VirtueDesktops. It’s a pity that Apple pulled up the rug from under Tony Arnold’s feet rather than making him an offer he couldn’t refuse, although the Leopard implementation does look pretty cool.
  • Dashboard. Nice. Should widgets be on a separate desktop or at the side of the screen? I guess that depends on your preference – personally I prefer the Apple implementation but I already have it in OS X 10.4 – either way, widgets weren’t invented by Apple (or Microsoft). As for users creating their own widgets… hmm… that’s sounds like a way to inject something nasty into my system (at the very least, user-generated widgets are unlikely to be frugal with system resources).
  • Spotlight. I hope it’s better than in Tiger – at the moment the productivity gurus recommend Quicksilver instead.
  • Accessibility. I understand that accessibility is a legal requirement (maybe that is just for websites). Maybe one day we’ll have a computer that can speak without sounding like a computer. Sorry but that new “Alex” voice still sounds very synthetic.
  • 64-bit. We’ve had 64-bit support for Windows since XP (albeit with limited driver support) and it’s been around in Linux for a while too; however the main advantage of 64-bit processing is access to more memory and unless we get some more Macs that support more than 2-3GB (at the time of writing, only the Mac Pro can use more than 3GB), what’s the big deal?
  • Core Animation. I’m not a developer but I understand all the core-* technologies are a method of exposing functionality to developers in a way that encourages simple application development. Is that like the Microsoft.NET framework or Java then?

Now I’m not saying that Windows is better than Mac OS X. That would be a purely subjective view; what I will say is that, even though I still use computers running Windows and Linux, my personal preference is to use my Mac as much as possible (probably just because it’s the computer with the large display, two processing cores and 2GB of memory, rather than any operating system considerations). Even so, I guess it means that I’m still a switcher – as is Kevin Ridgway, who thinks that people who prefer Windows are dumb. I just think this whole “my operating system is better than yours” nonsense is pointless and am disappointed that Apple has sunk to that level in their (admittedly rather funny) advertising. As for Kevin’s assertion that the latest version of OS X will be “an even more enticing reason to make the switch”, I just can’t see it.

Incidentally, for those who favour a third way (i.e. not Microsoft or Apple), a new version of the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution was released today…

Removing duplicate search engine content using robots.txt

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 19 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Here’s something that no webmaster wants to see:

Screenshot showing that Google cannot access the homepage due to a robots.txt restriction

It’s part of a screenshot from the Google Webmaster Tools that says “[Google] can’t current access your home page because of a robots.txt restriction”. Arghh!

This came about because, a couple of nights back, I made some changes to the website in order to remove the duplicate content in Google. Google (and other search engines) don’t like duplicate content, so by removing the archive pages, categories, feeds, etc. from their indexes, I ought to be able to reduce the overall number of pages from this site that are listed and at the same time increase the quality of the results (and hopefully my position in the index). Ideally, I can direct the major search engines to only index the home page and individual item pages.

I based my changes on some information on the web that caused me a few issues – so this is what I did and by following these notes, hopefully others won’t repeat my mistakes; however, there is a caveat – use this advice with care – I’m not responsible for other people’s sites dropping out of the Google index (or other such catastrophes).

Firstly, I made some changes to the section in my WordPress template:







Because WordPress content is generated dynamically, this tells the search engines which pages should be in, and which should be out, based on the type of page. So, basically, if this is an post page, another single page, or the home page then go for it; otherwise follow the appropriate rule for Google, MSN or other spiders (Yahoo! and Ask will follow the standard robots directive) telling them not to index or archive the page but to follow any links and additionally, for Google not to include any open directory information. This was based on advice from askapache.com but amended because the default indexing behaviour for spiders is to index, follow or all so I didn’t need to specify specific rules for Google and MSN as in the original example (but did need something there otherwise the logic reads “if condition is met donothing else dosomething” and the donothing could be problematic) .

Next, following fiLi’s advice for using robots.txt to avoid content duplication, I started to edit my robots.txt file. I won’t list the file contents here – suffice to say that the final result is visible on my web server and for those who think that publishing the location of robots.txt is a bad idea (because the contents are effectively a list of places that I don’t want people to go to), then think of it this way: robots.txt is a standard file on many web servers, which by necessity needs to be readable and therefore should not be used for security purposes – that’s what file permissions are for (one useful analogy refers to robots.txt as a “no entry” sign – not a locked door)!

The main changes that I made were to block certain folders:

Disallow: /blog/page
Disallow: /blog/tags
Disallow: /blog/wp-admin
Disallow: /blog/wp-content
Disallow: /blog/wp-includes
Disallow: /*/feed
Disallow: /*/trackback

(the trailing slash is significant – if it is missing then the directory itself is blocked, but if it is present then only the files within the directory are affected, including subdirectories).

I also blocked certain file extensions:

Disallow: /*.css$
Disallow: /*.html$
Disallow: /*.js$
Disallow: /*.ico$
Disallow: /*.opml$
Disallow: /*.php$
Disallow: /*.shtml$
Disallow: /*.xml$

Then, I blocked URLs that include ? except those that end with ?:

Allow: /*?$
Disallow: /*?

The problem at the head of this post came about because I blocked all .php files using

Disallow: /*.php$

As https://www.markwilson.co.uk/blog/ is equivalent to https://www.markwilson.co.uk/blog/index.php then I was effectively stopping spiders from accessing the home page. I’m not sure how to get around that as both URLs are serving the same content, but in a site of about 1500 URLs at the time of writing, I’m not particularly worried about a single duplicate instance (although I would like to know how to work around the issue). I resolved this by explicitly allowing access to index.php (and another important file – sitemaps.xml) using:

Allow: /blog/index.php
Allow: /sitemap.xml

It’s also worth noting that neither wildcards (*, ?) nor allow are valid robots.txt directives and so the file will fail validation. After a bit of research I found that the major search engines have each added support for their own enhancements to the robots.txt specification:

  • Google (Googlebot), Yahoo! (Slurp) and Ask (Teoma) support allow directives.
  • Googlebot, MSNbot and Slurp support wildcards.
  • Teoma, MSNbot and Slurp support crawl delays.

For that reason, I created multiple code blocks – one for each of the major search engines and a catch-all for other spiders, so the basic structure is:

# Google
User-agent: Googlebot
# Add directives below here

# MSN
User-agent: msnbot
# Add directives below here

# Yahoo!
User-agent: Slurp
# Add directives below here

# Ask
User-agent: Teoma
# Add directives below here

# Catch-all for other agents
User-agent: *
# Add directives below here

Just for good measure, I added a couple more directives for the Alexa archiver (do not archive the site) and Google AdSense (read everything to determine what my site is about and work out which ads to serve).

# Alexa archiver
User-agent: ia_archiver
Disallow: /

# Google AdSense
User-agent: Mediapartners-Google*
Disallow:
Allow: /*

Finally, I discovered that Google, Yahoo!, Ask and Microsoft now all support sitemap autodiscovery via robots.txt:

Sitemap: http://www.markwilson.co.uk/sitemap.xml

This can be placed anywhere in the file, although Microsoft don’t actually do anything with it yet!

Having learned from my initial experiences of locking Googlebot out of the site, I checked the file using the Google robots.txt analysis tool and found that Googlebot was ignoring the directives under User-agent: * (no matter whether that section was first or last in the file). Thankfully, posts to the help groups for crawling, indexing and ranking and Google webmaster tools indicated that Googlebot will ignore generic settings if there is a specific section for User-agent: Googlebot. The workaround is to include all of the generic exclusions in each of the agent-specific sections – not exactly elegant but workable.

I have to wait now for Google to re-read my robots.txt file, after which it will be able to access the updated sitemap.xml file which reflects the exclusions. Shortly afterwards, I should start to see the relevance of the site:www.markwilson.co.uk results improve and hopefully soon after that my PageRank will reach the elusive 6.

Links

Google webmaster help center.
Yahoo! search resources for webmasters (Yahoo! Slurp).
About Ask.com: Webmasters.
Windows Live Search site owner help: guidelines for succesful indexing and controlling which pages are indexed.
The web robots pages.

Where are the WVP2 codecs for QuickTime on a Mac?

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 19 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

It’s generally accepted that Macs are great computers for graphic design and audio-visual work – so why is it so hard to play Windows Media content on a Mac? I know that QuickTime is the centre of Apple’s audio-visual experience – so why should Apple support competing formats – but perhaps I should really ask why the various software companies have seen fit to introduce such a myriad of audio and video codecs? I’m a techie and I can only just keep up – think about the poor consumer who just wants to share some family videos with the grandparents!

The trouble is that Microsoft, as the developer of the most widely installed operating system on the planet (with a correspondingly huge number of multimedia file formats as described in Microsoft knowledge base article 316922), has seen fit to dump development of Windows Media products for other platforms. Quoting part of the Wikipedia article on Windows Media Player:

Version 9 was the final version of Windows Media Player to be released for Mac OS X before development was cancelled by Microsoft. WMP for Mac OS X received widespread criticism from Mac users due to poor performance and features. Developed by the Windows Media team at Microsoft instead of the Macintosh Business Unit and released in 2003, on release the application lacked many basic features that were found in other media players such as Apple’s iTunes and QuickTime Player. It also lacked support for many media formats that version 9 of the Windows counterpart supported on release 10 months earlier.

The Mac version supported only Windows Media encoded media (up to version 9) enclosed in the ASF format, lacking support for all other formats such as MP4, MPEG, and Microsoft’s own AVI format. On the user interface front, it did not prevent screensavers from running during playback, it did not support file drag-and-drop, nor did it support playlists. While Windows Media Player 9 had added support for some files that use the WMV9 codec (also known as the WMV3 codec), in other aspects it was seen as having degraded in features from previous versions.

On January 12, 2006 Microsoft announced it had ceased development of Windows Media Player for Mac.[4] Microsoft now distributes a third-party plugin called WMV Player (produced and maintained by Flip4Mac) which allows some forms of Windows Media to be played within Apple’s QuickTime player and other QuickTime-aware applications.[5] Mac users can also use the free software media player VLC, which is also able to play WMV-3 / WMV-9 / VC-1 Windows Media files.

It seems that the Flip4Mac WMV Player, which should provide the missing Windows Media support for Mac users (as endorsed by Microsoft) does not support all Windows Media codecs, namely it refuses to play content encoded with the Windows Media Video 9 Image v2 (WVP2) codec.

I can understand Microsoft’s position – after all they want to preserve their market share – so why doesn’t Apple make it easier for switchers with legacy video content? As the iLife applications are such a selling point for Apple, why not make it easier to convert from the Windows equivalents?

My problem is that, for the last few years, I’ve been creating home video content using Windows Movie Maker and Photo Story. They may not be the best video applications in the world but they are fine for movies of holidays and the kids and are included with Windows XP (well, Movie Maker is – Photo Story is a free add on). Nowadays, I have a Mac but I still want to play my old content.  The resulting WMV content from Movie Maker hasn’t caused too many problems as it uses the Windows Media Audio 9.1 and Windows Media Video 9 (WMV3) codecs and simply needs appropriate QuickTime components to be installed. Unfortunately the Photo Story output refuses to play the (WVP2) video track in either QuickTime (WMV Player) or Windows Media Player for Mac OS X and as far as I can tell there are no suitable codecs available.

In desperation, I went back to PhotoStory and tried to export in another format but there is no such option (it supports various screen sizes and frame rates but they all seem to be using the same codec).

One macKB thread suggests using Dr Div X to convert the file but the latest version of Dr DivX failed (on both Windows and Mac); similarly the DivX Converter didn’t work for me.

Eventually, I found a utility that could convert the file for me (Advanced X Video Converter) – it’s done a good job although whilst the quality is acceptable for my home movies there are some visible compression artifacts (I used the H264 video and 24bit audio codecs to convert to a .MOV file). In fairness, the compression artifacts may also be visible in the original WMV file and anyway they are hardly surprisingly as the video was created from compressed JPEG and MP3 files, which have then been compressed to WMV and once more to MOV so the quality is certain to have suffered along the way. What’s possibly of greater concern is the resulting increase in file size – up from 19.5MB to 431.4MB.

I’m glad I got there in the end – for a while it seemed that I would have to keep a Windows virtual machine just to play old home movies – and there I was, naively believing that converting to digital capture and storage would save me from issues with legacy formats.

The extent of automotive IT

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 19 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

I know that modern cars contain several computers (obviously there is engine management, then there is access control, in-car entertainment, possibly satellite navigation, etc.) but I’ve just returned from the local Saab dealership after having to have the electric windows reprogrammed! Next month the car is going back to have some bits of trim replaced, a new key fob and a software upgrade!

Whatever next, Microsoft Windows Vista Sportswagon Edition? Or perhaps a new version of Ubuntu codenamed Speeding Saab (which turns the Warty Warthog, Hoary Hedgehog, Breezy Badger, Dapper Drake, Edgy Eft and Fiesty Fawn into roadkill)?

(Sorry – I think last weekend’s sunshine has made me delirious.)

Missing QuickTime codecs

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 19 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Earlier this week, I needed to play back a .AVI file in iTunes/Front Row. That’s not really a problem as it’s easy to convert the video to a .MOV file using Apple QuickTime Pro but one major issue was a complete lack of sound.

Now, before I go any further I should explain that there is one common theme throughout the comments section of every site discussing media formats and players – someone always says something to the effect of “use VLC – it plays everything”. VLC is a great media player but:

  • I have Apple QuickTime Pro.
  • I use Apple iTunes and Front Row (both of which depend on QuickTime).
  • QuickTime components are available for many audio and video formats.

In other words, using VLC isn’t the right solution for me. QuickTime gave me a clue as to the problem as it informed me that:

Some necessary QuickTime software is missing. It may be available on the QuickTime Web site.
If you have a dialup connection to the internet, make sure it is active, then click the Continue button to check for the software.

I could have worked out for myself that I was missing a codec (and that message is pretty poorly written… should I not click continue if I don’t have a dialup connection? Maybe I’m reading the message too literally!) but clicking continue took me to the QuickTime components page and I didn’t know which one I needed. I was pretty sure that the video was an XviD movie and I already had the DivX codec (v6.4) as well as Christoph Nägeli’s XviD codec (v0.51) installed but then I found a big clue in the XviD FAQ:

It’s important to understand that video and audio are two separate things, which when combined make up movies. A movie consists of a video stream for the picture and an audio stream for the sound. The XviD codec is what makes it possible to decode the video stream, but it has nothing to do with decoding the audio stream. If the sound in a movie isn’t working you have to find out which audio codec is missing and install it.

The FAQ continues to explain how to use a Windows utility called GSpot to identify the necessary codecs but after reading Mike Peck’s article about playing XviD movies on an Intel Mac (and Paul Stamatiou’s follow-up post on getting Front Row to play XviD, DivX and 3ivX videos), I realised that the missing codec was for AC-3 (Dolby Digital). After installing the A52Codec (v1.7.2) for AC-3 playback and restarting QuickTime and iTunes I was able to watch my video, complete with the previously-missing audio stream.

I’m sure that over time I’ll need to add more codecs and one potentially useful resource is afreeCodec , offering downloads for Windows, Linux and Macintosh computers, games consoles and mobile phones.

Microsoft SharePoint products and technologies

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 19 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Over the last few years, I’ve had a couple of attempts at learning about the various Microsoft SharePoint products and technologies but I’ve never really had the chance to implement SharePoint for a customer. Recently though, I’ve had the opportunity to get involved with some work around Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 (which replaces SharePoint Portal Server 2003) but unfortunately, much of this work is commercially sensitive so I can’t really write much about it here. One thing I can write about is that in the course of this work I learned that my long-time colleague Andy May has a blog with lots of useful information about SharePoint products and services (I should probably point out that the Andy May that I work with shouldn’t be confused with Andrew May, who works at Microsoft and writes about SharePoint).

I’ve found Andy’s posts on WSS and MOSS client access licenses and feature differences between [Windows SharePoint Services] WSS and MOSS 2007 particularly useful as I’ve attempted to cut through the differences between WSS and MOSS (which is just as complex as it was with previous versions of WSS/SharePoint Team Services and SharePoint Portal Server). Microsoft has a description of the relationship between the various SharePoint products and technologies but the diagram Andy uses (from Mart Muller) makes it all a little clearer.

Running VMware Server Console on a Mac

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 19 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Last year, I bought a 20″ wide-screen monitor which I run at a resolution of 1680×1050 pixels. Working with all that screen space is fantastic (especially with 4 virtual desktops), except that I’ve got so used to it that the standard 1024×768 pixels on the notebook PC that I use for work seems too small and an upgrade is out of the question as the PC is only 18 months old.

For a while now, I’ve been running the notebook on the desk next to my main display but I’m running out of desk space. As I virtualised my corporate Windows XP build a while back, I thought it would be great if, when I’m working at home, I could run the Linux VMware Server Console on my Mac (which is connected to the large display). The virtual machine would still be limited to 1024×768 but I could access corporate applications in the VMware Server Console and do the big screen stuff (web, e-mail, document edits, etc.) natively on the Mac, using the whole display. Yes, I know that if I used Microsoft Virtual Server I could run it in a browser, but I’d need ActiveX and I’m not using Internet Explorer. Similarly RDP is an option, but I find it to be a bit flaky on an Intel Mac. Anyway, I’m a (pseudo-)geek and so I need to feed on problems like this from time to time!

Actually, much of the hard work has already been done for me – googling for vmware console mac soon turns up Rui Carmo’s article at The Tao of Mac on how to run [the VMware Console] remotely with Apple’s X11; however Rui’s article was written a while ago now and my VMware Server (v1.0.1-build 29996) installation on Fedora Core 5 doesn’t use the command vmware-console – instead I have to use vmware. Nevertheless, it got me 90% of the way there:

  • On the (Linux) VMware Server:
    • Configure SSH and X11 forwarding (my original post used a Windows client and public/private keys but the principles are similar – this time I used password authentication, making sure that the PasswordAuthentication yes and X11Forwarding yes lines were present in /etc/ssh/sshd_config and restarting the SSH daemon with service sshd restart).
    • Locate an appropriate keyboard map in /usr/lib/vmware/xkeymap/, edit the map if necessary (there is a VMware article about keyboard mapping on a Linux host that may be useful – don’t worry that it’s a VMware Workstation document) and edit ~/.vmware/preferences to include xkeymap.language="keyboardmap" (I used gb101 for my Apple UK keyboard).
  • On the Mac:

At this point VMware Server Console ran successfully under X11 on my Mac; however whenever I powered on a virtual machine all I saw was a black screen and a message in the xterm window which read:

X11 connection rejected because of wrong authentication.

After trying a remote VMware Server Console connection to localhost and restarting the Linux host (I’m not sure which, if either, of these made a difference) I found that the virtual machine was actually starting but that for some reason the display wasn’t being repeated in the X11 VMware Server Console on the Mac; however this time there was a different message displayed:

Unable to connect to the MKS: You need execute access in order to connect with the VMware Server Console. Access denied for config file: /var/lib/vmware/Virtual Machines/virtualmachinenname/virtualmachinenname.vmx.

After setting execute permissions to the virtual machine configuration file chmod +x virtualmachinenname.vmx (changing the permission set from 640 to 751), I was able to successfully view the VM on the Mac (and simultaneously on the Linux host) – the only (very minor) issues are that the mouse pointer is solid white when accessing the virtual machine (so sometimes I lose it) and that the sound is not forwarded (no big deal). Now my notebook PC is docked on a shelf away from the desk, with the lid closed, and I’m running the VMware Server Console from the Mac, having reclaimed some space on my desk.

What was that password again?

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 19 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

In the course of my daily computing activities I have to remember hundreds of username and password combinations. Literally. Just at work there are two (yes two!) timesheet applications, then there’s my corporate domain credentials, remote access, mobile phone billing portal, etc., each with their own username and password complexity/expiry policies; then there are all the systems at home; and finally the plethora of websites at which I have an account.

There are those who say that writing down credentials is a bad idea, whilst others say that using a single username and password combination is bad practice – these people are absolutely correct as, once compromised, an attacker has access to all the systems that use those credentials but we also need to be pragmatic – how can any user seriously be expected to remember all the usernames and passwords for the multitude of systems that they access? Indeed, many of the credentials I used are stored in my browser’s password manager – I haven’t a clue what my password is and I just open up the page and let my browser auto-complete the fields for me.

If we cast our minds back a few years to the launch of the Microsoft.net Framework, Passport.net was supposed to take away a lot of the hassle for web service authentication and we all know what a failure Passport was (outside Microsoft) – people just didn’t want Microsoft holding the keys to all their systems – InfoCard could well succeed where Passport failed but I have an identity crisis right here, right now!

One of the systems that I access regularly was recently moved to a new server – hence to a new URL and so the stored username and password didn’t work for me. This is where one of the handy system utilities that I wrote about a while back came in useful – I went to the old URL for the application, let the browser auto-complete the details and Nirsoft AsterWin IE was able to scan for the stored password, which I could then manually enter at the new site.

Of course, this advice comes with all the usual caveats when using third party applications to probe for security details… I haven’t checked for any unwanted side effects of using this application and you have been warned!

Creating a FAT32 volume in excess of 32GB

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 19 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

A few months back I wrote about some of the issues I was having with using FAT32-formatted disks for data transfer between Windows, Mac OS X (and Linux) PCs, because although FAT32 supports file systems up to 2TB in size, the format utilities within Windows support a maximum partition size of 32GB and FAT32 only supports files up to 4GB (which doesn’t sound like an issue until you start copying .ISO DVD images and digital video files around).

Even though I use MacDrive for reading OS X disks on Windows XP, I still find it useful to have a FAT32 disk to back up the VMware Server virtual machine which I use to run Windows XP on a Linux notebook PC for my daily work. I did find a great utility a few weeks back for reading ext3 disks on Windows (I think it was Explore2fs), but it’s the universal acceptance of FAT32 that makes it so easy to use everywhere. The trouble is that my virtual machine is about 31GB in size and growing – consequently I needed to create a partition larger than 32GB.

In my original post, I mentioned that FAT32 volumes in excess of 32Gb can be created – Windows is able to read or write larger volumes it just can’t create them natively (the workaround is to use another operating system or third-party tools). In my case, I used the Mac OS X Disk Utility – the important point is to ensure that the disk options are set to use as master boot record (not a GUID partition table or an Apple partition map) after which MS-DOS File System becomes available as a formatting option, allowing me to create a FAT32 disk which filled my entire 55.89GB disk – plenty of room for my virtual machine files and more.

ThinkBook? MacPad?

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 19 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Firstly, let me point out that I am not publicly condoning software piracy. To run Apple Mac OS X 10.4 on anything other than a properly licensed Macintosh computer would be very, very naughty.

If, however, you did have a spare copy of OS X and you wanted to install it on a well-built black notebook PC (say, for example, an IBM ThinkPad T40) without shelling out extra cash for a black MacBook, this is how you might do it. I’m not sure if the end result should be known as a ThinkBook or a MacPad…

Following Profit42’s advice for installing OS X 10.4.x on a “normal” PC (and assuming that all data on the target computer’s hard disk can be wiped):

  1. Make sure that the target computer supports at least the SSE2 instruction set (if you are running Windows then CPU-Z will help).
  2. Obtain a pre-patched OS X install DVD image (available to Apple developers… although I understand that googling for JaS OSx86 may help out a little…).
  3. Burn the OS X install image (e.g. 10.4.6.install.dvd.iso) to DVD.
  4. Boot the target computer from the DVD and press a key when prompted to install OS X.
  5. After the grey screen with the Apple logo, follow the installer prompts until there is a blue screen and a menu bar at the top. At this point select Disk Utility from the Utilities menu.
  6. Create a single partition on the disk formatted as Mac OS X extended (journaled). Then close Disk Utility.
  7. Continue with the installer prompts, customising the installation after selecting the target hard disk and ensuring that all appropriate patches are selected (e.g. 10.4.6.Combo.Update, Intel.SSE2 and 10.4.6.Radeon.Mobility.Support).
  8. Continue until the installation is complete and reboot into OS X.

If presented with a b0 error message, then there are a couple of methods to work around this. The basic problem is that the partition has not been set active (bootable). Live CDs such as GParted (or even an MS-DOS boot disk with FDISK) may help but one method is to boot from the install DVD again but this time don’t press a key. OS X should boot and once set up it should be possible to launch Terminal (from the Utilities folder, under Applications) and set the appropriate partition to be active, following the advice from Rammjet at Insanely Mac:

  1. Type diskutil list and verify which disk holds the OS X partition.
  2. Assuming that the disk is disk0, enter the command sudo fdisk -e /dev/rdisk0 (note the r in rdisk) and enter your password when prompted.
  3. Ignore the fdisk: could not open MBR file /usr/standalone/i386/boot0: No such file or directory error.
  4. At the fdisk: 1> prompt, type p and verify which partition holds OS X.
  5. Assuming that it is partition 1, type f 1 – the response should be Partition 1 marked active and the prompt should change to fdisk:*1>.
  6. Save the changes with write then enter y to confirm that a restart will be required, followed by exit.
  7. Remove the install DVD and reboot.

Finally: