what architectures in your Mac OS ? « /home/kOoLiNuS

what architectures in your Mac OS ? « /home/kOoLiNuS

I found this yesterday. Kind of a fun super unix command. Interesting to see what architectures the executables on your mac are built for.

Leopard firewall problems

A few days ago I started to have an issue with Skype on Leopard. Skype worked fine for me on Leopard for a number of days and then stopped working. When I would try and start the application up, it would bounce in the doc a couple of times and then quit.

Due to time constraints I didn’t pay much attention to the problem for a couple of days but had to go back to figuring out the problem as I was scheduled to go to Germany for work. I wanted to use Skype to make inexpensive calls back to the family in the states while in Germany.

I started to research the problem and discovered that the problem was Leopard’s new application firewall. Leopard ships with its firewall disabled by default (thumbs down to apple for this one). While this in itself is bad, it gets worse. I had recently turned the application firewall on in Leopard and this was when Skype stopped working. Some research discovered that Apple is modifying application binaries when you set firewall rules against the application. What in the world was apple thinking?

I have been using a firewall on my Macs for a few years now called Little Snitch. Little Snitch alerts you when an application tries to send out data. This in conjunction with Apple’s standard firewall is a great way to protect your computer from applications phoning home, trojans, viruses, etc..

Another problem that I have seen with Apple’s new firewall is that it does not report on certain “Apple Related” activity. There is a nice writeup on this here.

More information on the firewall and application modification is here.

Leopard first impressions

With all the buzz lately about Apple, Macs and of course the new release of MacOS 10.5 Leopard, I figured I’d write my first post on my initial thoughts of Leopard.

I have actually been running Leopard for a few months now (as a member of developer connection) and am overall very pleased with the release. Apple made a lot of progress in stability in the last few builds that they made available to ADC members.

My favorite new features are spaces, quicklook, the new dock (yeah, yeah, I know that a lot of people don’t like it) and the new help and spotlight features.

Spaces seems to have a few quirks such as odd selection of application windows when changing spaces. Overall, I find it to work as well as virtual desktops under linux XWindow managers and as well as virtue on previous versions of OS X.

The dock changes have received a lot of criticism in the last few months. I always run my dock on the left side of my main desktop and keep it rather small. I really like the change that was made to side mounted docks in the final release. It looks great on a dark background.

The spring folders don’t really work all that well. I find that I usually end up clicking on the “show in finder” link after clicking on the spring folder. Oh well. It was a nice try.

Overall, I’m very pleased. I’ve had very few applications that don’t work after the upgrade. I miss the Entourage integration for searching email with spotlight, but I’m sure that will be available once more when the next release of office comes out.