Category Archives: Software

Archive, Software

First Steps Cocoa Programming

Well, if you wonder why my blog has
some gaps recently, it’s because of me doing my first steps towards
Cocoa
programming on MacOS with XCode.
I didn’t do programming for a longer time, and a friend of mine
gave me that great book, that helps me a lot now to get into the
Objective-C slang, used for Cocoa.
In short terms, its really amazing how simple and structured Cocoa
programming with XCode actually is. And the best thing is,
objective-C has already implemented reference counting as this was
one of the best features of the Crystalspace 3D
Framework, for which I contributed to for 3 years.
These are some screenshots of applications of my first steps
programming with the previous mentioned book.
A lottery application:
lottery
More or less, the same application in a GUI frontend:
randomapp
A letter counting GUI application:
lettercount
And my latest finished training chapter, a speaking text
application, with choose-able voices.
sayit
Really, really, big fun… stay tuned for more within the next
days.
Further I’m really looking forward to see all the great new
features of MacOS
Leopard’s XCode 3.0, which is said to have graphical instant
performance tuning of running code…. wow… I really wanna see
this…
So far,
Kobaan.

Archive, Operating System

Mac Mail application speedup,cleanup

For those of you experiencing
slowdowns on Mac OS’s Mail application over some time, this might
be a cheap trick for you to get back speed and disk-space.
Mail, is keeping track of mail message subjects in a database, to
quickly scan, search and organize threading in your
mailboxes.The good thing is: once you delete a mail, it is also gets deleted
in the database…
The bad thing is: a database needs to be maintained, and this is
not done automatically…

What does this mean now….
…your database deletes items by reference, but it does not free
up the allocated disk-space, thus blowing up your overall database
size which leads to longer access times as more (empty) data needs
to be parsed through.

The solution:

While your Mail application is NOT running…
…use a terminal and go into “cd ~/Library/Mail”…
…open the database with: “sqlite3 Envelope Index”…
…and free up the already deleted database disk-space using:
“vacuum subjects;”…
…et voila, quit sqlite3 and you’re done.

Mail will be quite fast again, and your disk capacity should show a
few more free blocks.

Archive, Operating System, Security

Mac – Eve of destruction

So less bytes and so deadly:
maceve
524946464407030057415645666D7420
1000000001000100007D000000000000
000000006461746120070300

I’m starting to get angry now, as I filed in this bug 1 year ago,
and there’s still no fix for such a trivial bug.
Also I filed it in as a security issue since you can crash every
Mac from remote with these little numbers, but Apple degraded it to
be cosmetic only as it is not possible to alter or execute
code.
I guess they’re not anymore interested in fixing Tiger, as the
Leopard is waiting for its victims…..

Hint: Check for zero values before dividing…..

Archive, Operating System, Security

Good news, it works. Bad news, it works.

Bad awakening for Mac users, Apple
fixed a bug.
andy-scared
It took almost 2 years for Apple to release a security fix so that
it’s not anymore possible to hijack the builtin or even the
external USB camera from within a webpage.
At least everyone believed that this issue has been fixed in the
security update 2006-008, and people became already sad about
missing the feature to preview realtime effects on local video like
on this page: (only works for Mac people.)

But there’s also good news. It still works.

Oh wait, or is it bad news ?

Anyway the good news is, that the bad news of a killed feature is
not true, and that the security fix works, as your realtime video
cannot be sent via ajax/javascript or a java applet to someone you
don’t even know by just accessing someone’s evil website.

How do we check that ?
Apple doesn’t say anything about it.

So the real good news is, enjoy the feature as long as you’re not
sitting naked in front of your mac. Winking

Oh, uhh, aehh did I mention the bad news is, we don’t know if its
really fixed, or apple became so much interested in your homevideos
that they patched something in your system to get much sharper
pictures of you than anyone else does. Winking

Archive, Operating System

Beryl, a fork of compiz 3D desktop for Linux

Yeah, me again, and again 3D desktops,
I’m sure you’ll ask yourself where’s the difference between compiz
and beryl.See it this way, what options do you have if you want to check
something on your desktop or another window, if a window is already
placed on top of it.

Sure, you can minimize the window, move the window or even close
it. You may use taskwitching, window transparency might work as
well.
But how about, just taking a quick look behind a window border or
corner, like what you would do if it’s just a piece of paper. Watch
this:

Beryl is a fork of the compiz 3D
desktop composition manger for Linux.

Archive, Operating System

Linux with Compiz + Xgl – beating the Apple desktop

Apple’s Aqua graphical user-interface was the absolute leader in
eye-candy desktops for home computers. Now Linux can offer a quite
similar but also further extended desktop environment like on
Mac’s. The new XServer with integrated OpenGL support Xgl, enables
owners of 3D graphics cards in their computers to use the new
compiz
framework to draw their favourite desktop like Gnome or
KDE in a
3D context. Thus enabling beautiful window-effects and workspace
usage-features never seen before. Check it out here:

WARNING: The only distribution at the moment which enables compiz
by default on supported hardware at the moment is the latest Fedora
Linux. Although you can easily enable compiz on Gentoo Linux,
Ubuntu and others, there’s still some things to do by hand which
requires a lot of reading howto’s, especially if you want to
fallback to your old “working” configuration.