A Man and his Penguin

Apple has released their second biggest security update of the year, covering 25 vulnerabilities in 20 components.

Most
of the vulnerabilities could allow an attacker to execute malicious
code, although no exploits have been reported so far. Components at
risk include iChat, fetchmail and Libinfo. Apple has also addressed an
issue with the Login Window that would allow the local user to obtain
system privileges and execute arbitrary code. You can learn more about
the vulnerabilities here.

Early indications suggest that the update is safe to run on OSX86 installations.

———
From insanelymac.com. Happily, I don’t have to worry about when my OS vendor is going to drop another set of security updates. Whenever security problems are found with Ubuntu’s supported programs, and patches are available from the developers, Ubuntu packages them and pushes them immediately to users, rather than waiting until they’ve got a big set and releasing them all at once.

EDIT: Apple has got a terrible security record; I just checked the list of what this update entails:

1. A fix for an installer bug found in the Month Of Apple Bugs. The MOAB was Janurary. It is now April.

2. THREE bugs from last year, two of them with "arbitrary code execution". Actually, it seems that all the security patches this time are for arbitrary code execution, except for the third 2006 bug - that’s one which conveniently sends passwords over the Internet in cleartext. And THIS bug was fixed upstream in November 2006!

What the fsck is Apple thinking? This security hole is bigger than the Goatse Man’s anus, and they’ve taken 5 months to distribute the fix!

lol

There’s a novelty-dispensing game machine at Hillarys and Kingsway called Stacker. Easy to learn, difficult to master as it requires split-second timing of pushing a button.

Tonight I decided to play it, even though I was really tired. On my second go tonight, I got to the minor prize.

Then I got an idea: How many goes would it take to get good enough to reach the Major Prize section? Surely not more than 30. That’s $30, and you can win an iPod Shuffle worth at least $100. You could sell the iPod on ebay for probably more than $50. Do you see where I’m going with this?

As I sometimes do while waiting for the filesystem to squash, I use Google to search for what people are saying about Copland.

Here’s what I’ve found:

My initial Wikipedia entry has had some wiki links added to AIFF, HFS, Apple Computer and more. It is also listed on the "List of Linux Distributions" in Wikipedia.

And much more excitingly, some people at the German Macuser forums are talking about Copland! (or rather, they did briefly talk about it

Original thread in German
Google’s lacklustre translation into English (whenever it says "copilot country", it means Copland)

My recent idea has been vindicated - one of those people says that he’d prefer a small window manager as it will be more lightweight. Also, I guess my next CD image will contain the German language packs

From Ubuntuforums.org:

OK, I managed to install finally, restarted and everything booted ok.
Downloaded all the updates, went to Desktop effects to check something,
enabled the driver and restarted and now it doesn’t work at all. A blue
screen appears (not even Windows has that anymore =P) asking me about
my graphic display or something and if I want to see the server for it.
If I click yes, it gives me a list of text and if I click now, it asks
me to Login but not through the normal screen, just a pure text screen.
After I put in my name and password (which keeps flickering), it just
says "stephen@Stephen: $" and let’s me type but I don’t know the hell
is happening.

The man needed online support just to install Ubuntu. Once he gets it installed, he goes to the Desktop Effects control panel, disregards the warnings about it possibly causing breakage, and clicks the button.

Newbies, please listen to me: Until you know a bit about the command-line, heed all warnings about things possibly causing breakage. Desktop Effects is an experimental feature of Ubuntu; a couple of months ago that program didn’t exist, and it is provided to you as a technology preview.

You wouldn’t open up an appliance while it’s still plugged in, would you? No, because there’s a warning label telling you that you could get electrocuted. Heck, for old-style TVs and monitors you can get electrocuted even if it isn’t plugged in; there’s a warning label for that too. The implication that everyone understands with those warning labels is "Don’t do that, unless you know how to fix it safely".

There’s a warning label in the program. It’s there for a good reason. Use your wetware.

From Ubuntuforums.org:

OK, I managed to install finally, restarted and everything booted ok.
Downloaded all the updates, went to Desktop effects to check something,
enabled the driver and restarted and now it doesn’t work at all. A blue
screen appears (not even Windows has that anymore =P) asking me about
my graphic display or something and if I want to see the server for it.
If I click yes, it gives me a list of text and if I click now, it asks
me to Login but not through the normal screen, just a pure text screen.
After I put in my name and password (which keeps flickering), it just
says "stephen@Stephen: $" and let’s me type but I don’t know the hell
is happening.

The man needed online support just to install Ubuntu. Once he gets it installed, he goes to the Desktop Effects control panel, disregards the warnings about it possibly causing breakage, and clicks the button.

Newbies, please listen to me: Until you know a bit about the command-line, heed all warnings about things possibly causing breakage. Desktop Effects is an experimental feature of Ubuntu; a couple of months ago that program didn’t exist, and it is provided to you as a technology preview.

You wouldn’t open up an appliance while it’s still plugged in, would you? No, because there’s a warning label telling you that you could get electrocuted. Heck, for old-style TVs and monitors you can get electrocuted even if it isn’t plugged in; there’s a warning label for that too. The implication that everyone understands with those warning labels is "Don’t do that, unless you know how to fix it safely".

There’s a warning label in the program. It’s there for a good reason. Use your wetware.

From Ubuntuforums.org:

OK, I managed to install finally, restarted and everything booted ok.
Downloaded all the updates, went to Desktop effects to check something,
enabled the driver and restarted and now it doesn’t work at all. A blue
screen appears (not even Windows has that anymore =P) asking me about
my graphic display or something and if I want to see the server for it.
If I click yes, it gives me a list of text and if I click now, it asks
me to Login but not through the normal screen, just a pure text screen.
After I put in my name and password (which keeps flickering), it just
says "stephen@Stephen: $" and let’s me type but I don’t know the hell
is happening.

The man needed online support just to install Ubuntu. Once he gets it installed, he goes to the Desktop Effects control panel, disregards the warnings about it possibly causing breakage, and clicks the button.

Newbies, please listen to me: Until you know a bit about the command-line, heed all warnings about things possibly causing breakage. Desktop Effects is an experimental feature of Ubuntu; a couple of months ago that program didn’t exist, and it is provided to you as a technology preview.

You wouldn’t open up an appliance while it’s still plugged in, would you? No, because there’s a warning label telling you that you could get electrocuted. Heck, for old-style TVs and monitors you can get electrocuted even if it isn’t plugged in; there’s a warning label for that too. The implication that everyone understands with those warning labels is "Don’t do that, unless you know how to fix it safely".

There’s a warning label in the program. It’s there for a good reason. Use your wetware.

From Ubuntuforums.org:

OK, I managed to install finally, restarted and everything booted ok.
Downloaded all the updates, went to Desktop effects to check something,
enabled the driver and restarted and now it doesn’t work at all. A blue
screen appears (not even Windows has that anymore =P) asking me about
my graphic display or something and if I want to see the server for it.
If I click yes, it gives me a list of text and if I click now, it asks
me to Login but not through the normal screen, just a pure text screen.
After I put in my name and password (which keeps flickering), it just
says "stephen@Stephen: $" and let’s me type but I don’t know the hell
is happening.

The man needed online support just to install Ubuntu. Once he gets it installed, he goes to the Desktop Effects control panel, disregards the warnings about it possibly causing breakage, and clicks the button.

Newbies, please listen to me: Until you know a bit about the command-line, heed all warnings about things possibly causing breakage. Desktop Effects is an experimental feature of Ubuntu; a couple of months ago that program didn’t exist, and it is provided to you as a technology preview.

You wouldn’t open up an appliance while it’s still plugged in, would you? No, because there’s a warning label telling you that you could get electrocuted. Heck, for old-style TVs and monitors you can get electrocuted even if it isn’t plugged in; there’s a warning label for that too. The implication that everyone understands with those warning labels is "Don’t do that, unless you know how to fix it safely".

There’s a warning label in the program. It’s there for a good reason. Use your wetware.

1. The thing I followed to try to get xorg-profiles running on startup doesn’t seem to have worked. But then, I can’t really tell as xorg-profiles doesn’t even manage to create its log file (see 3 below).

2. When I copied over the xorg-profiles script from my internal hard drive to the chroot to ensure that I had the latest copy, I actually overwrote the latest copy with an earlier copy.

3. After I did that, I forgot to make it owned by root, and also forget to setuid it. So it was running as ordinary user, failing to create a log file in a root-accessible area and of course failing to replace the faulty xorg.conf file with the good one.

What a complete waste of time. Oh sure, I learnt a lot (like "think before you squash"), but this is ridiculous. I need to document things a lot more; otherwise how are other developers going to take over maintanance of parts of the distro?

1. The thing I followed to try to get xorg-profiles running on startup doesn’t seem to have worked. But then, I can’t really tell as xorg-profiles doesn’t even manage to create its log file (see 3 below).

2. When I copied over the xorg-profiles script from my internal hard drive to the chroot to ensure that I had the latest copy, I actually overwrote the latest copy with an earlier copy.

3. After I did that, I forgot to make it owned by root, and also forget to setuid it. So it was running as ordinary user, failing to create a log file in a root-accessible area and of course failing to replace the faulty xorg.conf file with the good one.

What a complete waste of time. Oh sure, I learnt a lot (like "think before you squash"), but this is ridiculous. I need to document things a lot more; otherwise how are other developers going to take over maintanance of parts of the distro?

1. The thing I followed to try to get xorg-profiles running on startup doesn’t seem to have worked. But then, I can’t really tell as xorg-profiles doesn’t even manage to create its log file (see 3 below).

2. When I copied over the xorg-profiles script from my internal hard drive to the chroot to ensure that I had the latest copy, I actually overwrote the latest copy with an earlier copy.

3. After I did that, I forgot to make it owned by root, and also forget to setuid it. So it was running as ordinary user, failing to create a log file in a root-accessible area and of course failing to replace the faulty xorg.conf file with the good one.

What a complete waste of time. Oh sure, I learnt a lot (like "think before you squash"), but this is ridiculous. I need to document things a lot more; otherwise how are other developers going to take over maintanance of parts of the distro?