I recently wrote up an article on some of the new malware safeguards in Snow Leopard. Well, turns out some people want to disable some of it. So you know the prompt that you are downloading an application that then asks you if you want to open it since it’s been quarantined. Well, you can disable it (not that you should but I’ve seen a couple of cases now where I needed to. To do so you’re going to place an LSQuarantine key into the com.apple.LaunchServices.plist. To do so, run:
defaults write com.apple.LaunchServices LSQuarantine -bool NO
To set it back to normal:
defaults write com.apple.LaunchServices LSQuarantine -bool YES
One of the contributors to the success that Facebook has had in the social networking world is the ability for savvy developers to build applications. MySpace has been picking up scraps from the Facebook strategy for some time and has followed suit with the ability to integrate custom applications. Now that MySpace has more than 50 pages of applications, I wanted to do a 10 best MySpace applications post. But beyond the RSS feeder I mentioned earlier and a couple of interesting apps that were also on Facebook (and were better in the Facebook iteration) I just couldn’t do it. Therefore, let’s take a look at some of the high quality applications that have been introduced and what I found when I changed my quest from the 10 best to the 10 worst:
10. Football Scrapbook Frame, http://www.myspace.com/520993626
This application allows you to frame a photo of yourself in a football image. Now, I love football myself, but the quality of the frame combined with the model posing and the sad excuse for graphical editing makes me want to actually skip watching the Super Bowl. I am sure that the developer, whose name is TopRated funny enough, is just trying to get people to download the application by putting the word Football in the title. But this application does absolutely nothing, other than waste space on profiles, take a long time to load and best of all, show your friends that you like football but that you aren’t smart enough to find a better picture to show it (or for that matter upload that picture to MySpace, which is really hard to do apparently).
9. Lover or Loner, http://www.myspace.com/520671795
This application is yet another of the quizzes that have become so commonplace on Facebook and now MySpace. My initial reaction was that it would be bad, but who knew? My guess is that best case, if you are taking this quiz and installing this application on your profile that you are currently a Loner. There is a very high probability though, that the longer you leave this application on your profile, the higher the chance that you will always and forever be alone!
8. Flashy Pink Heart, http://www.myspace.com/518871148
This game is awesome in the very same way that <flash> was awesome back in the 1990’s, when the web was new and you could make things blink on the computer. This game does exactly what it says, it produces a pink heart that is flashy and displays your OMG can’t wait to see it, flashy text!!! But the best part of this application has nothing to do with the application itself, but with the fact that it is so prolific, with well over 1,000 users downloading it and installing it onto their profile!
7. Catch Thife, http://www.myspace.com/520715560
TopRated strikes again in this masterpiece where according to the developer you “try to hit the moving thief in order to send him jail.” I’m not sure what gave it away first: my experiences with this developers applications, the mastery of prepositions in the description or the actual game play. This game single-handedly showed me why Apple reviews all submissions for the iPhone App Store!
6. What Justin bieber, http://www.myspace.com/518694013
Did you ever ask yourself which Justin Bieber song most matches your personality? If so then this application will help prove to all of your friends that you are wearing that chastity belt and if you are over 17, that you are hiding something deeply disturbing with it. Obviously a ploy to get a bunch of email addresses to spam about the latest in viagra pricing, this application is really just another Quiz from the developer called Quizzes.. If it isn’t obvious to you that they are a spammer, then what do you think they are doing by spamming the applications list with so many Quizzes?!?!
5. BFf, http://www.myspace.com/518847077
As if the term BFF wasn’t so 2005, the graphics in this application seek to bring back design elements from clip art CDs that came with Microsoft Office back in the 1990’s. Your friends couldn’t just post something to your profile. No, they needed to actually post to an application. And in order to do so they have to use the application too! Maybe I’m just sad that no one posted to my BFF Comments box? I guess an emoticon is in order to indicate my disappointment here. 
4. Farm Town, http://www.myspace.com/474755864
This game probably has the best game play and some of the better graphics on MySpace (or Facebook for that matter). So why does it show up on this list? Because 671,665 people are active users. The amount of time spent could end most of the worlds problems? Want a cure for cancer, to revitalize run down neighborhoods or find the meaning of life? How about rewrite Windows so it doesn’t suck any more? Nothing will ever happen until all these people uninstall this game and move on to doing something useful with themselves!
3. The Farmer, http://www.myspace.com/445093191
As if Farm Town wasn’t bad enough, now we have to endure Farm Town copy-cats? Really? I don’t think that anything else need be said about this one. Having said that, many of the other applications from this developer are actually quite good. They just had a little moment where they wanted a few extra addresses to harvest!
2. Twitter Sync, http://www.myspace.com/twittersync
This application just doesn’t work. There’s obviously a lot of code and it’s one of the more mature applications on MySpace. But it doesn’t work. If you absolutely must have your tweets show up on your page then consider iTwitter, available at http://www.myspace.com/463617608
1. The API. Makes me wonder if MySpace was in a rush to put something out or what. The privacy controls are good, but the options are far behind what Facebook offers, making me wonder if MySpace just wanted to be able to say they had applications, but not care about the applications that were made (they’re kinda’ like a Palm Pre that way). But the best part is that almost every application out there is made by spammers. The account I setup to test these things is now getting well over 50 spam messages a day. Thanks MySpace!!!
I’ve seen a number of Xsan environments spewing tons of errors in regards to Spotlight this and Spotlight that. Yup, that is with Spotlight disabled on the volumes. You can use the mdutil command to help with this. If you have two volumes, then the script to do so would be similar to the following (assuming they are called A and B):
mdutil -i off /Volumes/A
mdutil -i off /Volumes/B
Later if you decide to implement Spotlight, you can use the following to re-enable indexing:
mdutil -i on /Volumes/A
mdutil -i on /Volumes/B
Xsan 2.2 is having a bit of a problem with serving up files with Extended Attributes over SMB volumes that are stored on an Xsan according to a recent knowledge base article. The fix (other than not using files with Extended Attributes on Xsan volumes that are shared up over SMB is to enable stream support in the /etc/smb.conf file.
To do so, open /etc/smb.conf and then change the stream support = yes setting to stream support = no. This isn’t to say that all of your problems will magically vanish, but it should help to provide some relief until the next update.
MySpace won’t die. Good. Competition breeds innovation and if social networks are to continue to become more and more useful then a somewhat healthy MySpace is simply going to keep the cog wheels turning in the otherwise spiderweb filled heads of talented engineers. MySpace introduced applications awhile back and there is now a pretty ample number, although nothing close to what Facebook has. I suppose there’s something to be said for being a day late and a dollar short, eh?
Most of the applications, as with Facebook, aren’t that useful. Games to help you waste time and quizzes to help you inform your friends and coworkers that you haven’t stepped out in the sunlight in far too long. But there is a specific application that anyone with an RSS feed that wants people to see it might find interesting (after all according to Alexa.com, MySpace is still the 18th ranked website in the world). The RSS Reader application, by Ideamesh, Inc can be used to add a blog or anything else that can be aggregated through a public RSS feed, to your MySpace page. It’s pretty easy to use and provides a quick and easy application box to show the feed.
This RSS reader isn’t everything you might want though. As far as I can tell, it only supports a single stream. It has options for reformatting text and links that are displayed, but not a lot. It doesn’t have any features for limiting feeds, although that is something you can usually do with the path to the feed if you want to.
But it is free, it is somewhat useful and the application framework that MySpace has introduced is a great step in the right direction to perhaps help MySpace to slow their slide into oblivion. Either way it’s nice to finally have a little more integration across all the sites out there, even if MySpace continues to drop in the rankings…
The iPad is leveraging the new A4 chip from Apple, the first time Apple has released their own chip. Running at 1GhZ, the A4 is an ARM-based chip. The A4 is similar, if not the the ARM Coretex-A9 MPCore processor with graphics brought to you by the ARM Mali 50, capable of 720p hi-def video. These chips are what are referred to as System on a Chip, which stands for SOC. An SOC has a processor, graphics and memory together on the chip. If this sounds similar to an Atom chip, such as Moorestown from Intel then you’re not crazy, it is. This is similar to the Snapdragon chips from Qualcom, the Nexus One from Google and the Tegra from NVIDIA.
<conjecture>
The speed of the chip and the power saving is probably the most interesting thing about the iPad. While the design is similar, albeit bigger than the iPhone and iPod Touch, the underlying chip allows it to remain snappy despite higher workloads, giving developers a little more to play with. What all this means to the consumer: expect development of tools the far surpass those available to the iPhone and iPod Touch. And with 10 hours of battery life it will be interesting to see how the product shakes out.
</conjecture>
When you are researching various property list settings for applications then you are likely to come across settings that start with kCFPreferences fairly often. When you do then you know that these are preferences for components of an application that are not necessarily unique keys to specific domains. These are constants that have been declared in the CFPreferences.h and apply as indicated here:
- kCFPreferencesAnyApplication: All Applications
- kCFPreferencesAnyHost: All Hosts
- kCFPreferencesAnyUser: All Users
- kCFPreferencesCurrentApplication: Only the current/defined application
- kCFPreferencesCurrentHost: Only the current/defined computer
- kCFPreferencesCurrentUser: Only the current/defined account
Once upon a time (all the way back in Mac OS X 10.5) you could add a bunch of useful icons into the toolbar of Screen Sharing.app using:
defaults write com.apple.ScreenSharing ‘NSToolbar Configuration ControlToolbar’ -dict-add ‘TB Item Identifiers”(Scale,Control,Share,Curtain,Capture,FullScreen,GetClipboard,Quaty)’
But alas, you can’t any more (NSToolbar still exists but I haven’t found a way to get the array to result in actual icons in the toolbar). I’ve done a few articles for other preferences so I thought I’d dig my heels in and see if there were any I missed (using gdb). Well, apparently, there’s still ShowBonjourBrowser_Debug, which was also in 10.5 but it doesn’t seem to do anything. But I did find that instead, debug (another boolean YES item) will bring up the Bonjour Browser for Screen Sharing. I had trouble clicking on some of the items so I’m guessing the reason this isn’t enabled by default is that it doesn’t work so great. So while one option was lost, another was not (kinda’). The other options are either in my other recent Screen Sharing articles or have been exposed to the Screen Sharing Preferences (encryptRFBDataStream and panControl). So to enable that Bonjour Browsin’ debug mode of Screen Sharing:
defaults write com.apple.ScreenSharing debug -boolean YES
And then to turn it right back off if you so choose:
defaults write com.apple.ScreenSharing debug -boolean NO
I have been known to occasionally ask what build number of Mac OS X that someone is using. The sw_vers command can be used to obtain this. Simply run:
sw_vers
And the BuildVersion will be listed. Or just to get the BuildVersion:
sw_vers | grep BuildVersion
Or to just get the number (useful in scripts that catalog such a thing:
sw_vers | grep BuildVersion | cut -c 15-21
As one comment just indicated, you could also just use `sw_vers -buildVersion`. I guess I should review these commands every operating system or 4… Thanks Allen.
When you search for files the Finder window with the results has what is known as the Path Bar. As you can see in the below image, the Path Bar allows you to click on any directory in the hierarchy up to the one you are on and open that directory in the Finder.
The Path Bar in Mac OS X
By default, the Path Bar is only shown in a search result, but if you like it then you can see it in every Finder window. To enable this feature, create a boolean key in the com.apple.finder.plist with a value of yes. To do so, you can use the defaults command:
defaults write com.apple.finder ShowPathBar -bool YES
To go back to having the Path Bar disabled:
defaults write com.apple.finder ShowPathBar -bool NO
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