Yes, it really is possible to panic your Mac by mounting a dmg file. Those of us who work with the filesystem have known that this is possible for ages; I know I’ve reported at least one instance of this problem to Apple in the past.

Of course, it’s more painful for us because it often happens when we’re trying to do something new on an external hard disk (yes, it’s possible to get things such that you can’t connect your external disk without the kernel panicking). When that happens, you have to send SIGSTOP to the Disk Arbitration daemon to prevent it from automounting the disk the moment it’s attached. (You can’t just kill it, because it’s automatically respawned if it dies.)

Anyway, this is hardly new. And as usual the reports in the media are distorted, for instance, Brian Krebs writes:

“the crash report generated after I used Safari to click on the file indicated that the exploit had indeed resulted in a “kernel panic,” which in most cases means that if someone wanted to use the exploit to install malicious code, they could do so regardless of the security settings or precautions already present on the machine”

conveniently ignoring the fact that this is still just a crash, not an exploit, and that not all crashes are actually exploitable anyway. (This complaint would be valid whatever operating system we were talking about.)

I was also amused to read on the Matasano Security blog comments that make it sound like the problem of user-mounted filesystems is unique to Mac OS X. That isn’t true, of course. Windows lets non-administrators mount all kinds of removable media, and Windows Vista apparently has similar disk image support to Mac OS X. UNIX and Linux set-ups also frequently allow users other than root to mount filesystems, and virtualisation products like VMWare commonly install drivers that allow their users to mount virtual disk images by double-clicking, just like a dmg file.

That said, it is true that Mac users are currently more vulnerable in this regard than people on most other platforms, because downloadable disk images are not nearly so widespread on the other operating systems (yet), which makes John Gruber’s advice to disable Safari’s auto-open feature an even better idea than it already was.

Over the past few months, I’ve been getting increasingly into astronomy. Initially I wanted to start with just a telescope, as I spend a lot of time during the day working on computers so I didn’t really want to spend more time as part of my new hobby.

Recently, however, I’ve started to get interested in astrophotography. My current set-up is pretty straightforward; I have an STF Mirage 7” telescope, mounted on an EQ-5 mount with the Skywatcher dual-axis drive system. When I’m taking photos, this is coupled to a Canon EOS 400D DSLR camera; currently I have adapters for eyepiece projection and prime focus photography (I realise that this is backwards; normally people start with piggy-back set-ups because they’re easier and you can get some good photos that way, but I don’t have a suitable bracket for that yet).

As my scope has a focal length of 1800mm, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that, at prime focus, the EOS camera gives almost the same field of view as my 25mm eyepiece (it’s a bit smaller, so I can’t quite fit the full moon into the frame in the camera whereas it does fit into the field of the 25mm Plössl eyepiece).

Anyway, I was quite pleased with my second attempt at photographing the Great Nebula in Orion:

This was generated from a stack of 50 or so photographs of around 10 seconds each at ISO 800. Some tweaking was necessary to get the image to look like this; my camera is a stock EOS 400D, rather than an astro-modified one, so it doesn’t capture the nebulosity as well as it might. That said, I’m very pleased with this picture.

I also had a go at capturing Saturn using eyepiece projection, but sadly I couldn’t seem to achieve good focus with the Barlow lens in the system. The CMOS sensor in the camera is definitely in the focal plane for some setting of the telescope’s focuser, because I can defocus on both sides (i.e. I can turn the focus knob until it looks focused in the viewfinder, and I can then continue to turn it in the same direction until it defocuses again). Of course, with a Barlow and the T mount adapter for the camera, it’s getting a bit silly with everything hanging off the end of the telescope, but I should still be able to take reasonable pictures of Saturn I think as it’s quite bright and therefore doesn’t need long exposures.

What with today’s weather consisting of sunshine and showers, it isn’t perhaps surprising that we’ve had a rainbow in the sky this afternoon. However, this is a particularly impressive rainbow… often they’re quite faint but this was really bright. Here’s a picture taken from the top of our house:

and here’s a slightly zoomed-in picture of the base of the rainbow:

You can see how clear it is in the close-up picture below, where you can even clearly see the violet end of the spectrum on the left of the arc. Often rainbows are so faint that this is nearly impossible to see, but it’s quite clear here (and I haven’t tweaked the image to make it any clearer):

I’d just got everything ready to go off to Clanfield, the observatory site run by Hampshire Astronomical Group, when I found that my car won’t start. It isn’t even turning the engine over, though the battery is fine, which leads me to suspect the solenoid.

I’m rather disappointed, because this was to be my first trip there as a member (well, almost a member anyway… they need to have a meeting to consider the new applications), and I was looking forward to meeting some of the other members as well as the chance to watch my first meteor shower (the Leonid shower, which should peak early on Sunday morning according to current predictions). Though I had been wondering if there was more chance of watching a rain shower than a meteor shower (but the weather men claim it will clear up later, which doesn’t look impossible from the latest infra-red satellite images from the Met. Office).

I’ve also missed a discussion about whether or not life is sufficiently unlikely to develop that it might be a rarity, which is annoying as well. Personally, I find it extremely unlikely that there aren’t many other civilisations similar to our own; indeed, I fully expect that we’ll even find life floating in deep space, between the stars, and I don’t just mean bacteria either. The universe is so stunningly, unimaginably huge, and life is so much tougher than everyone tends to assume—as, indeed, it has developed something of a habit of proving in recent years, what with bacteria in rocks, organisms at the bottom of the sea around the oceanic vents, and yet more organisms in streams of boiling water in volcanic regions of our planet.

We even have evidence that Earth-born organisms can survive vacuum, radiation exposure, deep cold and indeed launch. So how arrogant we would be to presume that nowhere amongst the billions upon billions of stars we see shining in the night sky could there be any organism that could evolve and live under such conditions.

Is it just me, or is the Zune tag-line “Welcome to the social” just irredeemably “chav”?

Here’s the box:

and there’s even a dialog box to prove that we aren’t missing anything:

Maybe this will work in the United States, but over here, “Welcome to the social” is usually voiced in a thick accent and tends to mean “Welcome to the Department of Social Security office”, or “Welcome to the social security system” (or possibly “welcome to the local working men’s club”, depending on the context). There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, but it probably isn’t the type of image that Microsoft want to project if they’re going to try to compete with an image-conscious high-value product like the iPod.

(The pictures are from flx-tech.net, where a user reports that the install program didn’t work on the Zune he managed to lay his hands on before the official release.)

Having recently taken up astronomy, I now find myself constantly wishing that the weather here were better. Tonight was frustrating for me, because it was pretty dark, but there’s a lot of moisture outside here at the moment, which means dew everywhere, and also some very irritating high cloud has developed. Irritating because it reflects light back down from street lamps, but also because the Moon is out, and illuminating half the sky.

On the plus side, I did practice the one of the more complicated polar alignment methods, and also (I think) managed to do a reasonable job of focussing my camera through its viewfinder. (For those who haven’t tried astrophotography, this is surprisingly tricky.)

According to the BBC, Iceland has broken the 21-year-old whaling ban by killing a fin whale.

Lots of people will, of course, object on conservation grounds, or on the basis that Iceland shouldn’t be breaking bans imposed by the international community. My objection is different and has to do with intelligence and sentience, two properties that are easily demonstrated in cetaceans. These creatures are clearly self-aware, are possessed of complex communication capabilities that are at least akin to human language, and clearly demonstrate emotional relationships amongst their own kind. It is also apparent that they find us at least as fascinating as we find them.

There have been various arguments about the relative intelligence of creatures with large brain masses. Often we assume that we are the most intelligent species on the planet, though it is important to realise that it is not much more than an assumption. It is very easy to conflate intelligence with (for instance) tool use, something that we are well adapted for but that whales by and large are not. There is also an element of vanity involved; it is pretty obvious why people might choose to claim that their own species were the most intelligent even in the face of really quite substantial evidence to the contrary.

It does not help that the evidence is far from clear. On the one hand, whales’ brain masses are several times ours (a sperm whale brain, for instance, according to Wikipedia, masses about 7.8kg, vs our 1.5kg), and it is certainly true that creatures with larger brains are generally more intelligent, but it is equally true that there are many exceptions to this rule and that intelligence can be quite focussed on the specific tasks that a creature undertakes in its natural surroundings. There have been experiments, for instance, where parrots have outperformed chimpanzees at tasks that most would regard as intelligence related (counting blocks, for instance). There are also justifiable arguments against simply looking at smaller cetaceans such as killer whales and dolphins and assuming that the larger animals are at least as or even more intelligent; it doesn’t necessarily follow.

What I’m getting to is that I think there is enough evidence already available that they are intelligent self-aware creatures that makes killing them unnecessarily (and I would specifically include killing for commercial purposes in this, as there are plenty of ways to make a living without killing whales) morally repugnant. At the very least, it is quite clear that we are dealing with entities whose sentience is on a different scale to that of other “food animals” such as cattle or sheep.

So I’m dismayed and saddened, though not surprised, at Iceland’s actions.

A while back, I bought myself a Matias Tactile Pro keyboard, which, I must say, is very pleasant to type on. I’ve been very pleased with it, though the general finish could be better, the USB ports are a bit stiff, and it has a very annoying shadow key combination that regularly turns Caps lock on for me when I don’t want it (and no, I’m not hitting the Caps key by mistake).

Anyhow, today, the ‘C’ key stopped working properly. Sometimes I’d type ten ‘C’s in a row and still nothing. As a software developer, that’s just impossible to live with. I’ve just connected the new keyboard that came with my Mac Pro, but in the time I’ve been typing this, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s a horrible spongy thing, so I will be reverting to the much nicer keyboard that came with my older 1.42GHz PowerMac.

And on that note, a plea to Apple: please make better keyboards. The ones you’re making now look quite nice, but they don’t feel nice to type on.

An antibacterial mouse. What a great idea!

Unfortunately, the remarks about how grubby a typical desk is prompted me to try to shake some of the muck out of my keyboard… eugh.

Seriously though, I’d like to see this feature a standard part of mouse (and keyboard) design. It’d also be good if the manufacturers designed input devices to facilitate cleaning. Most modern (i.e. optical) mice are OK, but keyboards, quite frankly, are pretty hard to clean; most of the time you find that you have to actually take them to pieces to get them properly clean, and it isn’t always as easy as it looks getting them back together.

I recently acquired another 23” display. Whilst this new screen looks superficially the same as one of the existing units, it clearly has a different LCD panel. Rather irritatingly, the new panel reproduces colours quite differently to the older one, and the Apple supplied ICC profiles really don’t do much to fix this.

Calibrating the two using the software calibration feature in Mac OS X didn’t help that much. It’s just too hard to get accurate—or even reproducible—results by judging colours with your eyes. If you only have one display, and don’t otherwise care about colour, you might not have noticed this, but believe me, with two it’s a real nuisance.

Anyway, I invested in a gretagmacbeth Eye-One Display 2. It’s made a big difference. Both displays now appear basically the same; you can still detect a subtle difference in between the two (due, I think to the native whitepoint difference), but it’s a whole world better than the default settings.

One other benefit of having a proper calibration tool is that it’s possible to get the two panels set to the same brightness, which is very helpful (again, it’s quite hard to judge if you’re trying to set it manually, although you will spot the difference during use, which can be annoying).