Ramble On

My first personal Mac was a 12″ Powerbook. It was purchased for testing purposes but it quickly became my computer of choice for the majority of work. The only reason for keeping a PC was my requirement for Domino Designer. I loved the 12″ form factor. The size was perfect for travelling and it had a full size keyboard. The new MacBook Air is it’s natural successor

I’ve purchased the base 128GB 11″ model. I did consider the 4GB version or the 13″ model, but I’m buying this purely as a travel companion (along with an iPad) and it’s not meant to be a replacement for my 17″ MacBook Pro. After playing with one in an AppleStore it seemed far more responsive than my current travel computer, a Window 7 based Samsung netbook. It didn’t feel like I was compromising like it usually does when I use my netbook, it did feel like a laptop. I managed to play with a few applications in store. Powerpoint (Office 2011) and Keynote, worked with out any issues and didn’t feel slow. Editing photos in iPhone didn’t appear to cause the base model any issues and the most surprising thing, it was even responsive editing small video clips in iMovie. So as a travel companion, it should be fine. The only thing I couldn’t test, was Domino Designer running from a Window bootcamp partition. So hopefully this will be at least as quick as my netbook for those times when I need to fix something back at work.

As you would expect from Apple. It looks and feels amazing. The aluminium uni-body design exudes quality and class. It feels strong and I’ll have no issue throwing this into a bag.

This thing is amazingly thin. In fact, it’s not much thicker than an iPhone.

But despite it’s size, it manages to pack a full size keyboard, two usb ports, and display port, a full track pad and an iSight/Facetime camera.

It doesn’t include a SD slot, but this isn’t a negative for me, since my SLR uses Compact flash. But I know for many, this is a negative for a product this expensive.

So far I’ve only used it for light use and it’s been very responsive. I’ve yet to install Aperture and I need to create a small Windows partition for Domino Designer. But I’m very happy with it. The only issue I’ve experienced so far is a problem connecting the Air to my ‘N-spec’ network at home and I’ve had to switch it back to ‘g’. But I guess this will be fixed with improved drivers.

Size comparisons

The size is similar to 12″ Powerbook

Compared to a 13″ MacBook

Compared to an iPad

Edit:

I’ve now managed to install Windows 7 in a small partition, although it wasn’t as straight forward as it normally is due to issues with the bootcamp trackpad driver which I had to disable, update Windows and then reinstall the bootcamp drivers. From early testing, the performance is reasonable and significantly better than my Netbook.

Posted in Apple

You’ve been hacked and it appears the hack could effect your users computers. What would you do?

1. Do you tell your users that your site has been compromised and point them to tools to fix any problems?
2. Do you investigate the hack to see if it has compromised end-users and decide the risk is small, so you keep quite. After all, why undermine the integrity of your website, if everyone’s safe?
3. Do you keep quite no matter what?

I ask this because a page on a very big website (that’s in the top 100 most accessed websites in the world) was flagged up by my browser as containing malicious code. Being curious and working on the fact that I’m a Mac user and the exploit would most likely target unpatched versions of IE, I switched off my security and ventured on to the site.

Looking at the source, the site contained a hidden iframe which linked to an external website. Following the link, this website redirected to a second site. This second page contained a meta refresh that redirected to a php file. I’m assuming this file was intended to deploy the malicious code. But by the time I checked the site, the php file had been replaced with a 301 redirect to Google’s homepage and the top-level domain reported that the account had been suspended. I suspect the offensive site had been shut down long before the hack was introduced into the website and I don’t believe there are any security issues for the end-users.

Since it was clear to me that this wasn’t a false reading, I posted feedback to help the provider identify the problem. The next day the problem still existed and users were reporting layout issues caused by the hack in the website’s forums. So I added some info about what had happened. Soon afterwards, my post and the hack were removed. But so far no warning about the security issue has appeared on the website and it appears that they’ve decided to keep quite.

I know in the early days of the system I’m responsible for, we went live without a Domino virus checker. All the University machines had virus checkers so it didn’t seem important. Within a month we had a member of staff post a file from home that contained a simple non-destructive macro virus. So although it wasn’t serious, we very quickly implemented virus checking and provided students with links to virus checkers. We felt the potential risk to our users was more important than protecting the integrity of our new system. But if I had millions of users, would I have taken the same decision?

So if your website potentially harmed your end-users, even though it’s very unlikely, what would you do? In the case of this nameless website, are they right to hide the problem for the sake of ensuring the millions of people who use the site daily have confidence in their service?

Posted in Reflection

We’ve just upgraded one of our Helix servers to the latest version (V14). The latest update includes support for streaming H264 video to Flash players via RTMP as well as the bonus of streaming to iPhones. Unfortunately the latest Flash player update breaks RTMP streaming. After much head scratching, I finally gave in and contacted Real who provided a quick fix.

To re-enable Flash streaming add the following lines to your rmserver.cfg


<list Name="RTMP">
<list Name="Scheme2>
<list Name="Versions">
<var v1="0x80000702"/>
</list>
</list>
</list>


Posted in Video