current workspace
Posted by cordney* in development, Q on April 28, 2007
A nice saturday afternoon, sun is shining, 26°C outside and myself is working… 
btw: if you know a working solution for the trac ticket spam problem, say having a barrier for spam robots to create and comment tickets, please let me know! Having the ticket section disabled although it could be really helpful in collecting bugs is not very amusing.
Getting Windows XP [continued]
Posted by cordney* in development, study on April 23, 2007
Yes, it’s true. I have to get Windows for developing purposes. One of my courses in the 4th semester require the AVR Studio IDE, which requires Windows XP. In “Embedded Processors” we are going to program an Atmel microcontroller to play the well known song “Frere Jacque”.
Luckily my university takes part in the MSDNAA developer program which gives you free access to operating systems, IDEs and other stuff from Microsoft. So here we go: Drop by at the office with a study attestation and get your login data. Then simply download the iso and burn it. “What, a 404kB exe file? What the hell?” Yes, they have their own installer, really! So what do you do with an exe file if you don’t own Windows? Fire up Darwine! Thanks to Mike, who builds Darwine snapshots regularly and offers them for download I now have the installer working and downloading a mysterious de_win_xp_pro_w_sp2.sdc file. “What the hell is sdc?” Next step in the installer is extracting the file, so let’s see if we get a burnable iso for BootCamp.
To be continued…
[continue]
Coming home from buying food I found my MacBook at full fan speed telling me that the start volume is full. Great! And WinHelper crashed. Even greater! But the installer is still open and tells me to click to install the product. So let’s see if we have an iso now.
Yey! An iso file! 
What a heck to just get Windows, no mentioning of installing and RUNNING it! Yak!
[/continue]
Why I sometimes love Objective-C
Posted by cordney* in development on February 8, 2007
[thisPC setObject:[[NSMutableString alloc] initWithString:[NSString stringWithFormat:@"-m 256 -net nic -net user -cdrom %@ -boot d -localtime", (additionalHardwarePath) ? additionalHardwarePath : [NSString stringWithString:@"/dev/cdrom"]]] forKey:@"Arguments"];
samplecode: [Cocoa] Fullscreen Toolbar
This is the Fullscreen Toolbar I have written for Q. The version for Q is slightly modified to work with the host-cocoa part [see in svn: http://www.kju-app.org/proj/browser/trunk/host-cocoa/FSControls].
This code is public domain. Feel free to use, modify and redistribute it.
MOAB and Macworld Expo Keynote
I suppose most of you have already heard or read about MOAB – The Month of Apple Bugs, a project initiated by LMH and Kevin Finisterre (the guys that already held the Month of Browser/Kernel Bugs). They publish vulnerabilities of Mac OS X or other Apple software and other apps for Mac OS X (like VLC, OmniWeb) together with 0day demo exploits before informing Apple. There is some controversy about whether this is the right way to disclose serious security issues before Apple has a chance to react and provide bugfixes. I personally like it and think it’s a chance for Apple to strengthen security in Mac OS X and promote it as a feature. I can also understand LMH’s and Kevin Finisterre’s frustration about Apple reacting on bugreports, I also submitted several bugreports and one of them is still open – for 1 1/2 years by now.
Some of the vulnerabilities are really serious so some guys formed a group moabfixes to write patches for these exploits using the Application Enhancer utility which gives the ability to manipulate applications running in Mac OS X. Funnily enough, today’s MOAB vulnerability MOAB-08-01-2007 was found in even this app (Application Enhancer) and the authors of MOAB strongly advise users to stay away from it. Obviously they dislike the team of moabfixes surrounded by Landon Fuller to fix the bugs and steal some attention.
To refer to the post title and the keynote in about 10 minutes again: I am pretty sure Steve Jobs will mention the Month of Apple Bugs project as a sidenote (in the way he always mentions current news in the days before keynotes – making a joke about it), but I wish he will take it seriously this time and give a statement on Apple’s security measures and plans regarding software security and Mac OS X.
Lets see. cordney*