Geek Bits – Page 25 – The Wacky World of Chris Knight

2007/01/04

Using Macs to sell Winblows-Only software

I can’t speak for you, but I think that Apple makes the damn sexiest laptops around. Obviously, it works for Apple. They are 60% awesome computer and 40% fashion accessory. Style sells a lot of computers for Apple. Other companies recognize this. What is amusing is when a windows-only software company recognizes this, and uses an image of a Apple Powerbook G4 laptop to promote themselves; despite the fact that the software they sell will not run on a Mac.

In this particular case I am speaking about Main Street Software, Inc. They sell a Mary Kay specific accounting system, which my mother happens to use. I’m planning on buying a new computer for my mother, and I would like it to be a Mac; so I went to their site to see if they are offering a Mac OS X version of their software. When I saw the home page image my hopes soared, since the plainly visible Mac laptop would seem to indicate to me Mac support. Alas, their product requirements indicate otherwise. They just like the style.

What, you suggest that this is a MacBook Pro booted into Windows? Nope. A close inspection of the image shows a ‘discolored’ area on the side of the screen near the top. In the PowerBook G4 series this was rubber cover over the AirPort and Blue Tooth antennas. Also, the MacBook Pro has a built in iSight camera and would not need the external iSight that is shown in the picture.

I know, it’s probably just some stock photo they bought from Corbis. Still, you would think that someone at the company would actually look at their website and notice the oddity. They are a software company after all, so you expect them to be somewhat aware of the misleading nature of their home page.

Chris Knight

2006/12/282007/03/01

Government may not need warrant to search your e-mail

First off, I hate snake-oil salesmen. Whether they are dubious Search Engine Optimizer specialists, or greedy buggers selling bogus penis growth pills on late night television. That said, I also don’t like seeing the freedoms of the majority eroded in the pursuit of the few bad apples.

Government may not need warrant to search your e-mail
At issue is the Stored Communications Act, a law that gives the government easier access to material held by third parties than to first-party documents. In this case, the government claimed that Warshaks e-mail was stored on servers belonging to Yahoo and other companies, and that this meant it should be easier for them to access than if the e-mail was stored only on Warshaks personal computer. According to court documents seen by Ars Technica, Warshak argues that the act is unconstitutional and that users should have the same expectations of privacy regardless of who is storing their e-mail.

No decision has yet been made on the email issue. Once it is, Warshaks case will proceed in a lower federal court.

The crux of the matter is that the government feels your email is ‘more accessible’ because it is stored on someone else’s server. That should send a chill down your spine, because there are only a couple of people I know who own and run their own email servers, and I don’t think they read my weblog. I’m betting you, the reader, have at least one Yahoo or Gmail account; and the government wants the court to rule they can read it without a search warrant. (As a side note, if they win this one how long will it be until they argue mail at a non-USPS mailbox service is not protected under the 4th Amendment either?)

Should the government win this round, law enforcement will be allowed greater freedom in regards to access to email on third party servers in order to fish for reasons to get a real search warrant.

Should this happen, I see a perfect business model for defeating their lame ‘material held by third parties’ justification: co-op mail servers. Set up a mail service business under the co-op model, where every user is in fact part owner of the service and servers. Charge a buy-in fee when they join the co-op and a monthly membership fee for upkeep. The upside is that the users do own the server, and would be exempt from this new loophole the feds are trying to use to get around the 4th Amendment. The downside is that they will eventually find a way around it and perhaps put at risk all the members if one is a bad apple. It might not be a perfect solution, but I would prefer to have my mail on a server I own, or at least trust, than on a random Yahoo or Google/Gmail server.

-Chris

2006/12/012008/11/10

SecureCRT on OS X – The best of both worlds!

Update: Apparently VanDyke is embarking on a project to port SecureCRT to OS X! I have some more information in this post: http://www.ghostwheel.com/blog/2008/10/28/securecrt-on-os-x/

I’ve been using SecureCRT since version 2.2 (beta 4), and on the Windows platform it has consistently been the best terminal emulator and ssh client I have ever used. One of the hardest things I had to deal with when I switched to an Apple OS X PowerPC based laptop last year was losing the functionality of SecureCRT. Apple’s Terminal application is OK, in the way that the Cygwin ssh client is on Windows: It works, but it isn’t something I recommend. SecureCRT had recently added tabbed sessions, to which I quickly became addicted; and the loss of that was painful.

JellyfiSSH made life bearable. JellyfiSSH is a ssh configuration manager that allows you to store connection details and quickly access them via the Dock or the JellyfiSSH menu. As a SysAdmin, this made it a lot easier to quickly connect to the dozens of servers I access on a daily basis. Still, without tabbed sessions, my digital workspace can get pretty cluttered. For all my google’ng I still haven’t found a decent tabbed ssh client for OS X.

Last week I purchased one of the new Core 2 Duo 17″ MacBook Pro laptops, and a new world of possibilities has been opened up to me. Yes, it can boot to Windows, but that is only useful to me in extreme circumstances. Yes, I have Parallels, but I am I finding that little things like USB flash drives don’t work with it and that annoys me.

Then there is CodeWeavers CrossOver Mac. While not a perfect tool, yet, it does let me do something I have craved since making the switch: I can run SecureCRT on OS X and get my tabbed sessions back! Not only that, but I can copy over my session files from my WinBlows desktop and be pretty much set up in minutes.

CodeWeavers CrossOver Mac is an Intel-based Mac only product; so this option wasn’t available to my PPC laptop or desktop. It installs itself much like any application, and upon installation seems to create a default Windows 2000 ‘bottle’. A ‘bottle’ is a directory hierarchy containing all the files for an instance of their virtual environment. Bottles are smaller than Parallels virtual environments because they are not a full virtual disk volume, they are simply a directory containing the necessary libraries and your installed software. For example, the XP emulation bottle I have SecureCRT and SecureFX installed within is only 29M whereas the Parallels XP virtual environment I have is 2.8G. A difference of two orders of magnitude; or 100x as big, to the less scientifically inclined. CodeWeavers CrossOver Mac has a software installation wizard with a large list of known supported applications. SecureCRT was not on the list, but it installed quite easily as an unknown application. One of the things I like about CodeWeavers CrossOver Mac is the seamless keyboard emulation for the X11 environment that is used to run Windows applications. A while back I tried the X11 port of Visual SlickEdit for OS X and I found there to be annoyances with copy-and-paste, as well as other difference inherent with it being a X11 application running on OS X. The folks at CodeWeavers seem to have conquered this, and all the Windows keyboard shortcuts seem to work flawlessly for SecureCRT under CrossOver Mac.

There is only one real problem that I have discovered so far. SecureCRT uses crtl-insert and shift-insert for copy and paste, in so that the standard Windows shortcuts do not interfere with applications inside the terminal emulation window. So, what’s my problem? The MacBook Pro laptop keyboard doesn’t have an insert key! While SecureCRT does support mouse copy-and-paste, it is disabled by default. I’ve enabled it, but after eight years of being used to shift-insert and ctrl-insert it may take me a while to adapt. 🙂

Both CrossOver Mac and SecureCRT have trial versions. If you are on an Intel based Mac, and are hungry for a tabbed window ssh solution, I strongly encourage that you give them both a try. It isn’t as slick as a native ‘Carbon based’ Mac application, but it is functional and easy to use; and isn’t that the real goal?

Should you happen to purchase CrossOver Mac could I ask a favor? Could you list me as the referral for the purchase? I don’t get a commission, but they will extend my product support. The email address to list is cknight@ghostwheel.com

Happy geeking!

-Chris