Month: November 2006

OS X

Apple releases patch for some, not all flaws

On Tuesday Apple released Security Update 2006-007 for OS X which addresses some 31 flaws, including the well-known AirPort issue. The fixes cover both Mac specific and third-party components, including Perl, PHP and OpenSSL among others.

However, ZDNet UK reports that the patches fix none of the vulnerabilities found in the “Month of Kernel Bugs .” (The AirPort vulnerability was actually part of the MoKB, so it would be correct to say that at least one of them were covered by this patch.)

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Java

Sun Releases Java under GPL

Found this over at InfoQ:

Sun today is releasing Java SE, ME and Glassfish under . This is in combination with an early release of the SE 7 Hotspot JVM, javac compiler and JavaHelp.

Sun has more information about the Java open-source project, as well as a press center.

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Alaska

Decisions

It seems that Alaskans have made their decisions. Let’s just see how this plays out …

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Alaska

Waiting Impatiently

While watching the national election results I am torn between thoughts:

  1. The national networks (like CNN) sure are willing to stick their necks out on guessing who is winning elections where the entire vote count is unfinished. Sure, when you have 99% of the vote for one seat and one candidate is leading by 35%, yeah. But they were calling for Democratic control of the House when there were still 80 or so seats left undecided. Wha . . .?
  2. I want to know what is going on in Alaska, RIGHT NOW!!!! Yeah, the polls have been closed for over an hour and I want to know NOW. So does that make me just as guilty? Anyway, Alaska doesn’t release any poll results from any precincts until 9:00 PM (2 hours after the polls close)

Waiting . . .

Update 9:22 PM: First results have shown up on the State Elections website. So far they are disappointing.

Update 9:29 PM: Alaska results are starting to show up on CNN finally. So I can put my laptop to bed now.

We’ll see where it all goes by tomorrow morning I guess.

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Gentoo

Kororaa – Gentoo with (Xgl) Eye Candy

While the debates carry on over what can be done to make Linux more feasible in the desktop market (in other words desirable enough that average users say “I want that!”) the one argument that seems to rise to the top is eye candy. Does it affect how an OS works? No. Does it change the way programs behave? Maybe superficially. Does it change the way users interact with the OS and the programs? You bet!

I had a chance to play with , a Gentoo-based live CD with AIGL/Xgl and a great install-to-disk tool. And while Xgl is not quite ready for prime-time (I encountered a couple crashes where xdm would completely exit and restart) it is getting close. And the eye candy features (adjustable transparency on windows, the rotating cube desktop, the “liquid-ish” movement of the windows) add a certain amount of “ooh factor.” But the biggest thing I found myself using were three very handy tools: [Ctrl+Shift+Alt+ left or right arrow] to rotate the desktop cube with the active window following, the hot-corner to display all the open windows as tiles, and the [Ctrl+Alt+PgDown] to “flatten” the cube, allowing you to see all the sides at once and use the arrow keys to select one of the desktops to switch to. While many will consider this to still be nothing more than eye-candy, I found it so utile that I am (a little too) eagerly awaiting the next Xgl implementation.

So who, besides me, thinks that these are as useful as they are eye candy-ish? Well, Apple, for one. They already have the hot-corner to display all the open windows, the ability to show all the open windows of one application, and (with Parallels at least – and rumor has it in the next OSX version) the cube concept of the multiple desktops.

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