If you find that securityd is suddenly eating all your RAM when you try to do a keychain operation, Rosyna has already figured out how to fix it.

(This post is mostly so I can find the fix if it happens to me :-))

Posted by alastair at 10:57 AM Digg It | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I’m currently pondering the merits of the two common designs of inspector window, i.e. these two:

Finder-style “segmented” inspectors use disclosure buttons to show or hide individual segments, whereas the iWork-style inspectors use a toolbar or a strip of buttons to control which page is visible. There are some applications (such as OmniGraffle, which used to use a fancier version of the Finder-style approach) that use a combination of the two techniques.

I’ve started a new page on Cocoadev if anyone would like to express their views on the matter.

Posted by alastair at 6:39 PM Digg It | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This made me laugh. The people at info-pull.com (probably LMH) have apparently tried to use their firewall to block me from seeing their site (see the last post on that thread; it’s a firewall rule from their server).

The only reason I can think of for doing this is that they don’t want me to see the bug reports they’re publishing on MoAB, perhaps because they’re worried that some of them might not be accurate and I might pick them up on it.

Of course, I can still see the entire info-pull site, no problem at all, so the only effect of their attempt to block me is that they look childish. Without any proof, LMH will probably claim that I’m lying and can’t really see his site, so here’s a screenshot from today (this hasn’t been edited at all, and came from behind the connection that they’d tried to block):

Incidentally, whilst we’re looking at this page, has anyone else noticed how LMH/info-pull/MoAB are asking for “donations”?

Posted by alastair at 11:24 AM Digg It | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)

When I bought Quake 4 for the Mac, I found that it didn’t work from my normal user account. Why? Well…

If, after you first try to run the game, you look in ~/Library/Application Support/Quake4, you'll see a folder called q4base. Inside this folder is a bundle, game.so.bundle. The trouble is that Aspyr, who put it there, clearly think that a bundle should contain a folder called contents. It shouldn’t. The folder should be called Contents (note the capital letter ‘C’). And inside it should be a folder called MacOS, not a folder called macos.

Before you say “well you shouldn’t be using a case-sensitive filesystem”, which is exactly what Aspyr said when I reported it to them, my Mac is not using case-sensitive HFS+. My home area is on a server, however, and that server is using a case-sensitive filesystem. Aspyr tried to claim that this wasn’t supported by Apple, but of course it is… Apple make a big song and dance about how good Mac OS X is at integrating with other systems, and most Unix-like server systems use case-sensitive filesystems.

Anyway, you’d hope that they’d fix this problem, as it’s only a case of renaming a couple of files, right? But no, it’s still not fixed in the just released Prey Demo. So, if you want to get Quake 4, or Prey, or either of the demo versions working and your home area is case sensitive, here’s what to do:

• Run the game once. It will display its splash screen and then terminate (because it can’t load the bundle, because the bundle is invalid, because the names of the internal folders are wrong).
• Go to ~/Library/Application Support/name of game/q4base.
• Right-click game.so.bundle.
• Choose “Show Package Contents”.
• Rename “contents” to “Contents”.
• Open the “Contents” folder.
• Rename “macos” to “MacOS”.
• Run the game.

The most stupid thing about this entire business is that the one case-sensitivity bug in these games was added by Aspyr! The Windows programmers involved with them got it right, but the Mac programmers, whose operating system does support case-sensitive filesystems, got it wrong.

(By the way, if you use this technique, you’ll need to re-apply it if you download an update for either game.)

Posted by alastair at 3:55 PM Digg It | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

From an article on Newsweek:

“You don’t want your phone to be an open platform,” meaning that anyone can write applications for it and potentially gum up the provider’s network, says Jobs. “You need it to work when you need it to work. Cingular doesn’t want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up.”

I’m not sure I really understand this remark. There are other programmable smartphones, and you can get GSM adapters for some PDAs as well. None of those seem to worry network operators.

Posted by alastair at 11:40 AM Digg It | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Well the new Apple iPhone is certainly a thing of beauty. Of course, there are lots of rumours flying around about it already, though the release has at least killed off some of the previous rumours about the device by giving us some of the facts.

The fact that it’s running OS X is interesting, to say the least, especially as it seems likely that it’s uses an ARM family CPU. With luck, Apple will let some of us third-party developers write software for it, but we’ll see.

The news that Cisco is suing Apple over the trademark, which the two companies were apparently negotiating, is also interesting. If I had to guess, Apple probably decided to take its chances rather than paying up when it noticed all of these:

http://iphone.com/
http://www.comwave.net/CDN/iPhone/index.htm
http://linkstochina.com/RingChina/iPhone.html
http://founderna.com/iphone/
http://www.iph.net.nz/
http://www.taptarget.com/products/iphone.html
http://www.teledex.com/index.cfm?page=LP_3&crid=9

It only took me a couple of minutes to find that lot. I’m sure there are many more as well.

The thing about trademarks is that they’re only worth anything if you actually defend them. If I were Apple’s lawyers, I’d have to ask why we should be paying Cisco to license the name when quite clearly there are plenty of other companies who haven’t licensed it from Cisco either, many of whom (unlike Apple) are actually competing with Cisco’s products.

Update: it seems that Cisco may not actually have complied with USPTO regulations and as such the trademark registration may have lapsed. Even if it hasn’t lapsed, the article makes it sound even more likely that Cisco only started using the iPhone name because they knew Apple would want it.

Posted by alastair at 11:11 AM Digg It | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Yes, it’s Saturn again :-)

This time though I’ve got a much better picture of it—and I only processed this quickly; I think I could make it better still if I spent more time on it.

For comparison, I've put my previous effort side-by-side with this one

I think you’ll agree, the difference is obvious.

Posted by alastair at 2:40 PM Digg It | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)