The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

By now, Firefox 1.0.1 has been out a while. Several friends and clients have called me, asking me why their copy of Firefox is acting weird. “Did you upgrade to 1.0.1?”, I’ll ask. “Yup!”, they’ll respond. “Did you install over your old copy, without uninstalling first?” is my next question. “Yup!”, they’ll respond again. Uh-oh. Not good. Clearly, I’m the only person who bothers to read release notes. But I’m a nerd, so it’s not a surprise.

For the complete instructions for upgrading to 1.0.1, read Asa’s “upgrading from firefox 1.0 to firefox 1.0.1”, an excellent, very, very detailed post on his blog. It looks scary when you first see his post, but it’s long & detailed because he purposely went through every single itty bitty step. Don’t freak. Just read it and follow along. There is no way you can screw up with these instructions. Best of all, he covers Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. Very cool. Now go upgrade!

In case you haven’t already heard, it’s over for Mozilla as far as future development is concerned. Oh sure, the Mozilla Foundation is going to keep maintaining the 1.7 branch, but that’s it. All future work is aimed at Firefox & Thunderbird. This was announced years ago, but it finally became final this week, and evidently some folks are (justifiably) p.o.’d at the Mozilla Foundation for not making things clearer, sooner.

(Of course, volunteers can still keep Mozilla going, and it looks like folks are trying to do just that. More news as it develops.)

I just found some really, really, really nice OpenOffice.org tutorials covering Writer, Calc, and the new Base. Even better, they’re for both OOo 1.1 AND the upcoming 2.0, so you can get an advanced look at the upcoming release. Even better than that, they’re in Flash, so you can actually watch the tutorial and see what’s being described (finally, a good use for Flash!). Even better than that, you can download the tutorials to watch ‘em on your machine. And even better than that, they’re packaged for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. And really, there’s nothing I can find at this point that’s better. I’m bettered out.

I’m on a mailing list for web developers, & recently one of the guys on the list told he was using Tomato Torrent (a BitTorrent client) on his Mac OS X box to download a 1.3 GB file, and it had taken almost a day so far, & he was less than half way there. His point: “I thought the whole point of Bittorrent was to make the process FAST. I could have FTP’d 1.3 gig much faster.”

Here’s my reply:

Read more →

If you don’t use SSH or SFTP, and instead use telnet or FTP, you’re asking for it. Big time. FTP & telnet send everything - passwords included - in the clear. Not safe at all. But, even if you use SSH (& it’s descendants, SFTP & SCP), there’s always more to learn. SSH offers an incredible amount of cool tricks that enable you to do an amazing amount of stuff. If you want to learn more, check out Brian Hatch’s series of articles on SSH at SecurityFocus. They’re well-written, & Brian definitely knows his stuff. Read ‘em, learn ‘em, live ‘em.

• SSH Host Key Protection
• SSH User identities
• SSH and ssh-agent

When you’re dual-booting (or triple-booting, or …), or when you’re sharing a portable USB2/Firewire hard drive among different boxes, all of a sudden, file systems become important. NTFS isn’t supported by Mac OS, to my knowledge, and while you can read it under Linux, writing is still iffy. Fat32 is supported by everyone, but that’s kind of a sucky filesystem. So what can you use?

Ext2 isn’t a bad choice, since it’s supported under Mac OS X, Linux (duh), and even Windows, to some degree.

Mac OS X - Ext2fsx

http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2fsx/

Windows - Explore2fs

http://uranus.it.swin.edu.au/~jn/linux/explore2fs.htm

Mac OS X & Linux can read & write Ext2; Windows, however, can only read. However, with all OS’s you get support for large partitions and large file sizes, which is great. Too bad you don’t get journaling …

Big news today: Firefox 1.0.1 has been released! Don’t look for new features - this one is mainly about bug fixes and security (especially the punycode/IDN debacle of a few weeks ago that I wrote about in SecurityFocus). OK, there is ONE new feature: better tab control, or, as the release notes put it, “You can now make links opened by other applications open into a new tab, reuse an existing tab, or open a new window”. Cool. People have been asking for that for a long time.

OK - so how do you get it? Head over to the Release Notes and follow the instructions. And fer gosh sakes, read the frickin’ Release Notes, OK? There’s some important stuff in there, like DON’T INSTALL THE NEW FIREFOX OVER AN OLD FIREFOX. There. I capitalized it so you’d see it.

(For those of you who use BitTorrent, head to the Firefox 1.0.1 Torrents page and grab those torrents! But read the Release Notes anyway, ‘k?)

Go get it!

(Or, if you’re like me and you use Debian, the one true Linux&tm;, wait ‘til it’s in the APT repositories)

The fine bloggers over at Lockergnome’s Linux Fanatics blog have written an excellent, detailed rant about the huuuuuuuuge PITA they experienced when they migrated web sites from one Windows/IIS machine to another. Reading it, my heart was gladdened anew that I use LAMP (and MAMP: Mac OS X, or just plain ol’ AMP, as Apple evidently wants to call it) for my client’s web sites. I’ve run client sites on Windows/IIS before, and it is truly a hellish experience. Read this one from Lockergnome if you want to feel his pain, and appreciate why it is that you use open source software so you don’t have to experience this stuff.

My buddy Robert Citek has been interested, over the last couple of years, in ways to kill Unix machines. In other words, he tries to create scripts that will bring *nix machines to their knees. His interest isn’t malicious - he’s one of the most honest guys I know - but he thinks that by understanding where the weaknesses are, it will better enable him to shore those up and turn weaknesses into strengths. Robert knows Linux really, really, really well (actually, he knows RPM-based distros really well; Debian-based distros are still something new to him), but he bought a Mac OS X laptop a year ago, so now he’s focusing on ways to kill Mac OS X (which is still Unix, remember). Here’s his latest report, from the CWE-LUG mailing list:

<Robert’s email>

I was able to successfully kill my Mac last night with the following script [Scott: remove the blank lines from the script; this blog’s wysiwyg keeps inserting them]:

perl -le '


   @foo=qw(hello) ;


   for (my $i ; $i<100 ; $i++) {


     push(@foo, @foo) || die "$i -- no more\n" ;


     print "$i" ;


   } ;


   print "size is $#foo" ;


'

By killed I mean that without warning the Mac just turned off. When I powered on, it took a long time (probably doing an fsck) and then the time was set to January 1970. So, this was the hardest crash I have ever seen on a Unix box.

So I figured this script would be a good test for ulimit (bash, ksh ; limit in tcsh, csh). But no matter what setting I used for the various ulimit options, the script kept running, sucking up more and more RAM, until I manually stopped it with a Ctrl-C.

I’m curious to know if the above script kills anyone else’s machines and if setting ulimit/limit options prevents it?

</Robert’s email>

Jon, another member of the CWE-LUG list, is a big FreeBSD user, and he reported that the script did nothing on his FreeBSD box. It ran for 10 seconds or so & things slowed down, but then a warning appeared in the terminal - “Out of memory during request for 1012 bytes, total sbrk() is 535257088 bytes” - and things resumed as normal! On OpenBSD, the script ran for 4 seconds, maybe, and then gave an “Out of Memory” error, but there was no slowdown in performance.

What about the rest of you out there? Try it - ON A NON-PRODUCTION MACHINE!!! - & let us know!

Don’t believe me?

IE’s market share is dropping, dropping, dropping, & guess who’s taking its place? Firefox.

Microsoft’s IE continues to be seen as insecure and buggy, but guess what browser has a much better security record? Firefox.

Guess which browser has people asking why it’s so gosh darn “compelling”? Firefox. (Note: ignore the first link in the referenced piece - it’s an incredibly stupid cartoon.)

What browser has folks in India, Boston, & Britain talking? Firefox.

Which piece of software has reignited the browser wars, which everyone, including Microsoft, thought were over? Firefox.

What’s getting really super-knowledgable IT pundits to write about it? Firefox.

Which browser’s popularity is enabling developers to make money supporting it & writing addons for it? Firefox.

What software is now at the vanguard of the FLOSS (Free, Libre, Open Source Software) movement?

Heck, if you don’t know that answer to that one by now, you just ain’t been paying attention.