OSX Stuff

Since yesterday, I'm using Adium X as instant messenger client unter Mac OS X. Adium X is based on libgaim, and so I can finally throw away all the other IM clients I had running before as Adium X connects to Jabber, ICQ and MSN (and many more, but these are the protocols I use). It perfectly integrates into the OSX GUI, supports tabs, it looks really cool, and the duck logo is cute. And it calls itself "the best IM client ever". Well, I'm still missing some bits and pieces, but it's definitely better than the other clients I've used before, so I think I can agree on that.

Oh, one more thing: for a huge pile of nifty add-ons and extras, have a look at www.adiumxtras.com.

The good thing: iTunes Austria is finally available, with lots of cool shit. The bad thing: you need a credit card for it. gna Why can't I simply pay with my ec card?

That's what the Danish "security" company Secunia asserts. Since I already had to do with Secunia, I can tell you one thing: Secunia is trying to make as much publicity as possible, with as many security advisories as possible. In my case, they asked me about a minor fault in MySQL authentication of akpop3d that could have probably led to an incorrect login (an SQL injection that would have led to another record returned than desired, but the attacker still would have to know the other record's password) which I mentioned in akpop3d's change log. I told them what the actual problem was, and that the vulnerability is verytheoretical.



A few days later, they issued a security advisory. And it contained exactly the information that I gave to them! And they make money off this service, by informing people about this "security hole". My case is only an example, but most of their advisories look this way. I wonder whether they counted this advisory as "Linux" security hole in one of their statistics, solely because akpop3d runs on Linux (and FreeBSD, and OSX, and a few more).



This is so ridiculous. What is even more ridiculous are all the trolls in the ORF FutureZone forum. ts Kiddies. All the losers complaining that OS/400, z/OS, Trusted Solaris (muhahahaha) and whatnot were all soooo much more secure than Windows, Linux, OSX and everything have no f*cking clue.

Finally, I had some time to play a bit with GarageBand, the new program by Apple that is said to make creating music a lot easier. First of all, you can download my very first test here. It's a simple drum'n'base like tune, nothing special, and only constructed out of samples that are delivered with GarageBand.



About GarageBand itself: it is really easy to use. Although I have virtually no experience with doing music on the computer, I was able to create my own song very quickly. GarageBand allows totally unexperienced people to easily create own songs, by simply creating a new file and adding music sample from a pretty big high-quality collection of samples for all kind of music. GarageBand cares about the rest, e.g. transposing the samples and adapting their speed to the current file's speed.



But GarageBand also offers functionality for more professional musicians, e.g. it allows adding own samples by playing them via a software keyboard (which sucks, because you can only play it with the mouse) or a real (music, not computer) keyboard attached via MIDI. And last but not least, real instruments can be easily recorded and added. But since I neither own a MIDI keyboard nor some real music instrument (well, my brother has an e-bass, but my iBook doesn't provide proper input interfaces), I wasn't able to really test these advanced features so far.



Anyway, playing with GarageBand is fun, it's easy to use and the samples and software instruments that come with it are pretty good. The only thing that irritates me is that GarageBand closes when I close the currently open file. This is absolutely not OSX-like, the behaviour that I expect is that the file closes, while GarageBand keeps running, and I can then select "File -> New".

Yesterday evening I built a Linux jukebox server that is automatically accessible via iTunes using only my Linux fileserver, using daapd and howl. First, you need to install daapd. daapd is a free implementation of the DAA protocol, some proprietary streaming protocol developed by Apple and used by them, too (e.g. for iTunes). After installing and configuring daapd (which may be a little hassle unless you have the exact version of the libid3tag library, i.e. I had to comment out a few unimportant pieces in the source code), you could actually start. But iTunes doesn't automatically detect the streaming server, so you would have to manually enter the address into iTunes.



Now, howl comes into play. What you have to do now is to announce the daapd via Rendezvous. You can simply do this by running mDNSPublish "My Jukebox" _daap._tcp. 3689. The "My Jukebox" string can be freely chosen, the _daap._tcp. 3689 indicates that a DAAP server running on TCP port 3689 is announced. As soon as you run the command, iTunes sees your daapd running on Linux, and can immediately access it. This is plug'n'play computing how it should be.

Finally, I found a "good" way to handle not only reading mail from everywhere, but also sending mail. First of all, all my mails are stored on my mail/news/fileserver, where I access them via IMAP. From outside, they're accessible via IMAPS (for the usual security reasons, you know, unencrypted protocols are evil). That's not that weird, because it can all be handled smoothly with some imapd, stunnel (on the server side) and mutt (on the client side). But now the setup for sending mail: first of all, when mutt sends a mail, it runs the sendmail binary provided by nullmailer. When nullmailer-send is being run, it connects to localhost:5000 to send the mail. On this port, stunnel in client mode is listening, which then connects to my machine home. On the machine home, another stunnel in server mode received the connection, and hands over the data to a local SMTP server, where it is then transmitted to my ISP's smarthost. This is really the weirdest mail setup I ever had. But so far, it's the only way to communicate securely (or at least more secure than usual) and using mutt at the same time. I had a similar, but simpler setup with Mail.app from Mac OS X, but this mailer sucks, compared to mutt.

boehm-gc, a garbage collector for C and C++, is partially broken on OSX, i.e. it works most of the time, but sometimes it does not. I, for one, triggered a bug in boehm-gc, totally fucking up a linked list in the 'scheme0' interpreter. I was searching for this bug for quite some time, until I tried it under Linux, and there, it worked perfectly. I just don't want to touch a garbage collector's source. Even a few glimpses at the code revealed that this is highly obscure software. So, boys and girls, don't rely on boehm-gc when you have to write a program for OSX/Darwin.

Today, after almost one year of using Mac OS X as operating system on my iBook, Mac OS X crashed the first really hard, where really hard means the equivalent of the well-known and feared Blue Screen of Death of Windows or the Kernel Panic of Linux and other Unix-like operating system. Mac OS X paniced a lot nicer, you can see it on the picture below. Anyway, I'm surprised that it took so long to crash once. IMHO it tells a lot about the real stability of OSX (and I use the system every day, with the iBook and thus OSX running 24/7). For a higher resolution image showing the whole scene of the iBook with the panic screen have a look at this picture (warning: over 900 kB!).

Because of regular crashes when reading certain emails (Hello Paula! :-), I compiled mutt 1.5.5 under Mac OS X 10.3.1, since fink doesn't yet provide anything more recent than mutt 1.4. Before I started using fink, I compiled mutt (1.3.28 IIRC) for OSX by myself, which was always quite tricky, and never went smoothly without any tinkering with the source. Anyway, mutt 1.5.5 compiled out of the box, without any changes, which is really fine.