1. September 19, 2009

      Snow Leopard: Outdated-software-R-us!

      I apologize in advance for the lack of coherency in this post; it’s late, and I’m tired.

      So, I have a custom backup script (mostly because I know I can do it better for my workflow than some off the shelf solution). It uses tar’s listed-incremental function to do, as you can guess, incremental backups over a monthly cycle. It’s been working well since I made it on Tiger, except today, the first time I’ve tried to take a backup since upgrading to Snow Leopard. It straight off failed, claiming it doesn’t understand listed-incrementals.

      I’m scratching my head as to why (it’s really not a complex script), before I realise it’s using an older version of tar than what shipped with Tiger and Leopard (or it’s using BSD tar as opposed to GNU tar… but I can’t verify what Tiger/Leopard had, all I know is it worked previously). Hmmm… ok. So I open Macports, install the latest version of gnutar, removed the crappy Snow Leopard tar and all keps going happily… except I now have a wiggling suspicion in the back of my mind that there is another disturbance in the force…

      I dig a little, and it’s not long before I discover that Apple also decided to ship bzip2 1.0.4, which has a security exploit that was fixed 1 year 6 months before 10.6 was released…

      WTF Apple? Is anyone paying attention to software releases over there? It makes me wonder, what other outdated, exploitable software is installed on my laptop?

    2. September 11, 2009

      Spam for Coffee…

      So, me and Bev like coffee. In the morning, in the afternoon, in the evening. We also like sleep, and so our coffee time in the morning often results in getting 2 to go. Which is fine, because BP’s Wild Bean coffee is actually pretty good, and as we have travel mugs, quite reasonably priced.

      We collect the free coffee cards, and enjoy it. Except this morning, we notice that they’re phasing out the paper system in favor for a keyfob barcode. It’s ok though, if you register your keyfob online, you still get 6 for the price of 5, contradictory to the way Subway did it when they introduced their Subcard, when Subway sneakily increased the cost of a free lunch.

      But the BP offer isn’t without a catch. To get the 6 for the price of 5 deal, you have to not only give them your email address, but also opt-in to their… well, it doesn’t actually say what I’m opting-into. For all I know I’m opting into daily advertising, or perhaps a free coffee on my birthday, or perhaps they’ll forget about it entirely and we’ll all just go about our days.

      Will people accept Spam for slightly cheaper Coffee? It’s an interesting concept, I wonder how effective it will be…

    3. September 10, 2009

      ACM Code Poetry + Pizza Night…

      … has been postponed.

      However, do not loose faith, it is happening. Unfortunately we just couldn’t do it in the first week back.

      Watch this space!