Author: Dan Dickinson

Categories
Happened

Burnt Out

My [magic streak](https://vjarmy.com/archives/2006/09/the_incredible_invincible_hard_d.php) has not held up.

Buttons Checks His RSS Feeds

I came home tonight to a faint scent that I could not place. It smelled warm – perhaps my landlord had decided today was the day to turn on our heat. Our heaters are electric, and they always smelled a bit odd.

I did not take the hint that my iMac was off, even when I knew full well that it was still alive and online not 90 minutes beforehand. I rebooted without thinking.
The message struck home when I got up thirty minutes later and noticed that it, again, was off. This time, I sat and watched it reboot. The login screen appeared normally, but not a second after I attempted to type, *boom*. Darkness. I subsequently pulled open the casing and, while I could not locate any particular source of the damage, the burning smell was confirmed to be coming from somewhere on the motherboard; most likely, a blown capacitor.
There is some irony to this. I have been aware that due to my technolust, I have what has been deemed by others to be an absurd upgrade cycle for my hardware. Alternating every year, Katie or I have replaced our primary hardware:

*2000* – I purchase a Mac Cube. It actually held up terribly well.
*2001* – Katie receives her first iBook, a G3/500.
*2002* – I received my iMac G4 as a graduation present.
*2003* – Katie replaces her iBook with an iBook G4/800. This is the first Mac hardware we purchase on our own.
*2004* – I replace my iMac G4 with an iMac G5/1.8GHz.
*2005* – Katie replaces her iBook G4, which had now ground to a halt, with another iBook G4/1.42GHz. This happens enough in advance of the introduction of the MacBook that I don’t feel completely shafted.

This year was the year I had promised to break this cycle. The year I was sure my iMac G5 was not going to start feeling uncontrollably slow, even while I picked up a MacBook Pro at work and had a very direct comparison with the latest and greatest.

But no, the hardware had to die through natural causes. Now my hand has been forced, and I will be trekking to the Apple Store this weekend to take what has become a mandatory upgrade.

Categories
Disliked Found

My Heart Just Went Plinko

> LOS ANGELES – Bob Barker is heading toward his last showcase, his final “Come on down.” The silver-haired daytime-TV icon is retiring in June, he told The Associated Press Tuesday.
> “I will be 83 years old on December 12,” he said, “and I’ve decided to retire while I’m still young.”
> He’ll hang up his microphone after 35 years as the host of “The Price Is Right” and 50 years overall in television.

[Read more.](http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061031/ap_en_tv/tv_bob_barker_retires)

Categories
Found

Apple Reveals Some Of Leopard’s Spots

Apple has put up the first of their [Leopard Technology Series for Developers](http://developer.apple.com/leopard/overview/index.html). If you’re interested in some of the technological improvements to the next version of OS X, this is a must-read.

Some of these items were covered by the WWDC NDA previously, such as the formalization of resolution independence, major enhancements to OpenGL performance through offloading to another core, and Quicktime support for USB cameras.

But there’s also a few new pieces of information, or at least information I may have missed on my track:

>Leopard brings several new security enhancements to Mac OS X. The first of these is the adoption of the Mandatory Access Control (MAC) framework. This framework, original developed for TrustedBSD, provides a fine-grained security architecture for controlling the execution of processes at the kernel level. This enables sandboxing support in Leopard. By sandboxing an application, using a text profile, you can limit an application to being able to just access only the system features, such as disk or the network, that you permit.
>Also new in Leopard is code signing. This means that Leopard will be able to identify applications by using digital signatures and then use that identification to base trust decisions on.

It amuses me greatly that people continue to advocate that the only reason Apple hasn’t had a major OS X security exploit in over five years is because of market share, and not because they continue to make major advances in the security of the operating system.

As a colleague said after I pasted him this information: Sandboxing FTW.