Lyle Schofield's Technical Journal

From Yahoo news we hear that there is a “Rickrolling” worm hitting iPhones:

iPhone fear as ‘Rick Astley’ worm spreads – Yahoo! News.

This is a ittle misleading on two counts.

First, the worm can only stick to the phone if it has its operating system modified to allow unauthorized software to be installed (commonly referred to as “jailbroken” in the tech community).  This process removes the mechanisms which protect the phone by design.

Second, the number of people who do this is very small making the opportunities to spread the malware very small.

So, it’s not really an “iPhone worm” as much as its a “modified (to remove security measures) iPhone worm”.  We’ll have to wait and see if there’s a real security hole out there.

Recent disasters and recovery of a failed video chip on a Mac Book Pro restore my faith in regular backups and leave me impressed with Apple Care.  This is a quick accounting of events and resolution.

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Is this a common problem?  You are in a book store, or a record store (yes, I still go to record stores), and you see something you like but you’re not sure if you bought it before?  Probably not too common, especially for a modern music purchaser who downloads from web sites and doesn’t go into stores anymore.  But, for an old geezer like me who still likes physical copies of what they purchase, it happens.  For proof, I’ll show you my multiple copies of Miles Davis’ Milestones.

I tried a running list which I copied to my Palm Pilot, but this wasn’t satisfying and a lot of work.  More recently, I discovered Delicious Library 2 from the software company Delicious Monster through an article.

This software is in the category of “inventory management”, optimized for books and CDs.  A more recent upgrade adds other categories so you can use the software for tracking tools, software, and any other categories you can think up.  Side note: the company could not be any cooler to contact for support or questions as I found out when the v2 upgrade was announced right after I purchased the original v1 software.

Snapshot of HTML Export page

The software UI design is clean and unique, using a bookshelf metaphor to show you your books or CDs with various sorting and display options.  Where it really shines is when you initially load your library into it.  Delicious Library 2 is able to use the iSight camera (or any camera) as a bar code reader.  You just hold up the item so the camera can see the code (a preview window helps this), it beeps when it recognizes a code, and it looks up information on the item over the Internet using Amazon.Com’s web services.  If the item is recognized you get reviews, categorizing information, cover art, and even reseller information.  It will also announce the item using the creepy software driven voice to confirm it found the right thing.

If it can’t find the item, you can manually search for it.  And, if its really old and not in the database you can enter everything by hand – useful for your bootleg home recordings.  There is also an option for a real bar code reader if you think you’ll use this a lot.  I do have occasional problems with using the camera for the bar code reader, mostly due to lighting conditions or unusual bar code printing (small codes on reflective CD cases, for example).  But, its not enough trouble to purchase a reader.

So, how does this help the original problem?  You can export the libary to HTML (and other formats), which I’ve done and published to my web server.  Now, if I’m not sure I have something I can quickly look it up on the server, even from my phone while I’m in a store.

Final verdict; love the product, love the company, been using it long enough that any warts have been exposed and they are very minor.  And, it allows me to search through my library from anywhere with an Internet connection, which these days is just about anywhere.  Very nice.

OS X has a couple of ways to bypass the normal starup process from your main boot device.  One extremely useful one (for reasons discussed in a later post) is to start up OS X in “Firewire Target Mode”.  If you hold down the “T” key when powering up, the machine will start up as a Firewire drive.  The screen displays an extremely large version of the Firewire logo on the primary display and you can connect a Firewire cable from the machine to another machine’s Firewire port.  The computer should mount like any other external Firewire device, turning your computer into the world’s most expensive external disk drive.

This can be extremely useful for copying files off a machine to another one, and in my case what made it especially useful is that it is easy to boot up a machine in Firewire mode even if the video is not working.  You can easily hold down the “T” key while booting, even if the screen isn’t visible (more on that in a later post).  Any other transfer off a machine usually requires either physically removing the hard drive, or interacting with the operating system to turn on network sharing of one kind or another.  This is quite impossible when you can’t interact with the video.

This also brings up the importance of encryption of sensitive information, since anyone getting physical control of your machine can boot it up and attach another computer to it.  One encryption approach uses File Vault to encrypt your whole home directory.  This is very good encryption for someone that doesn’t want to think about it.  I personally don’t use it for a few reasons.  One, I don’t feel the need to waste my computer’s time encrypting iTunes songs, temporary internet files, and other trivia in my home directory that I don’t care about and that will lengthen a back up process.  And two, it complicates the ability to pull off files like with this Firewire trick.

Another encryption approach uses Disk Utility to define encrypted file shares of my choosing.  I define a dynamic file share and set encryption for it as needed for some of the categories of documents I store (like “Admin”, or “Financial”) and treat these file shares like top level folders on a drive.  There are multiple encryption choices and only the files I want encrypted are placed in the file shares.  These partitions are mounted or dismounted as needed for my work.

So, with the mounted Firewire computer I was able to drag off and backup the encrypted and unencrypted files from the soon-to-be-shipped-off-for-repair computer.  This made me feel safe about my data, and safe to ship off my computer with the sensitive files locked up.

A mass of cables.

The little weekend project last week was in the pile of electronics we now call a “TV”.  Tivo has replaced the need for the VCR.  iPod has replaced the need for the jukebox.  The new TV has aboiut 5 signal inputs, so running everything to the receiver first seemed silly.  It seemed like time to recable everything after removing the now obsolete components.  And, those HDMI cables replace about 5 other cables in the wiring scheme (3 video, 2 audio) so I thought I’d give them a try.

HDMI cables were a big waste of time.  While the concept is good, the problem is the HDMI interface also includes some kind of digital handshaking between the components connected in an effort to prevent copying of content illegally.  While I have no need to copy illegally (plus, it’s illegal), I ran into some kind of problem with this digital rights management handshaking which shut down Tivo.  There are no tools on either the TV or the Tivo box to monitor or control the HDMI channels – if the handshaking fails it disables them.

In the end I dumped the HDMI cables and used the component video and stero audio.  The picture and sound are just as good so it isn’t worth trying to debug the digital channel.

Important Video insert test:

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Technorati says I need to have a post with the above important text in it for them to connect to my blog.  So, here you go.

Product: Western Digital My Book Home Edition 1 TB External Hard Drive
Link: http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=357

I’ve outpaced what I can back up on my original Accodata 160 G external Firewire drive, and went looking for a replacement.  I didn’t have a specific brand or model I was looking for since the Accodata drive, which I had never heard of, has given good, reliable performance for more than 4 years.  The only thing I cared about was Firewire and at least 500G storage.  I have done enough side-by-side use between the Firewire drive and a USB 2 drive to know that I’m not going to waste any time on a USB drive for important things.

WD MyBook 1 TB (on the left)

Western Digital has a series of drives called “My Book” in various sizes and interface options. They are all in a similar case, roughly the height of a paperback book in different widths depending on the drive capacity.  Best Buy had one on sale of interest, which I purchased on the web for in-store pickup.  It ended up being a minor debacle due to the product code on the web site not matching the product code of the product on the shelf.  And, of course the one I purchased wasn’t in stock.  So, the quick calculation showed that it wasn’t worth my time to come back or go to another store and I purchased a larger capacity drive with the same interfaces.  This is a 1TB My Book with Firewire 400, eSATA, and USB 2.0 interfaces.

There is not much to tell about installation.  You plug the drive in, and the operating system sees it and makes it available.  The only thing I did for preparation is to reformat the drive to use OS X native formatting.  The cross-platform FAT-32 formatting the drive comes with was not of interest since I’ll only ever plug the drive into my main iMac.  It’s use will be for backup – currently using the Apple Backup utility but migrating to Time Machine when I get some time to set that up.

The drive is fast – transfers are very quick – and 1TB is the most amazing amount of space anyone will ever need (until about 3 or 4 years from now, the standard disclaimer for any drive purchase).  The drive also has a very sexy LED display on the front that shows you the relative amount of space used (fills up like a thermometer), and the display does a lot of dancing and chasing when there is data transfers in progress.

My only complaint is that there seems to be some unknown dependency of actions to recognize the drive.  The drive is not recognized on power up/down sometimes.  There seems to be a specific sequence of power up drive – wait for ready light – power up computer to get the drive recognized.  And, the drive does not seem to enter power-down-state when turning off the computer.  However, I should upgrade OS X from Tiger to Leopard to determine if this is a drive issue or the OS.

This install of WordPress is 2.8 – a number of minor versions from where I was.  The work done on this product is pretty impressive, the Dashboard and management tools behind the scenes are slick, well designed, and easy to use.  The plugin and widget implementation have removed almost all my desire to tinker with the raw theme editor tools.

Of particular interest is the “import” capabilities.  You can now import content from old blog implementations, which is nice for someone like me that has reimplemented and somewhat abandoned installs over the years.  There are some rough spots.  My personal page import from Blogger only grabs 16 posts for some reason, leavin me with a cut & paste job on dozens of pages.  I found my old notes on “modblog”, another experiment long since died, but the Internet Archives had most of the articles and I’m pulling them over manually.

I also found a database backup from an old WordPress install on my home machine.  Able to load the data into MySQL, but alas, no WordPress install old enough to use it.  So, more cut & paste.

Hardly worth it for my little musings, but I’d rather load the content and get it onto this one server.

Google Voice – Full Review – Reviews by PC Magazine.

I’ve been using this for a few weeks – interest increased once they added the transcription service.  Agree with much in this review.