I must humbly confess that I do not remember who wrote such wise words but these are among the first I saw when first playing around with Netscape Navigator on Mac OS 9, a long, very long time ago — that was about the same time my eyes went teary with joy at the thought I had successfully sent a mail with an oh-so-unpatched version of Outlook.

It is however one of the few guiding principles that I tried to always keep in mind. Indeed, even though there are nowadays encryption software that guarantees almost perfect secrecy and loads of sharing communities — from del.icio.us to flickr — that each provides us with tight control over what we upload, information keeps leaking, from all over.

Why is that? Because people make mistakes. Even the best of sysops can, on Thursday morning at 3, enter addresses in the “CC” and not the “BCC” field, even the best of system administrators cannot spend his time riveted to his keyboard, waiting for some user to mail his password to a friendly stranger on the other side of whatever ocean happens to be in the vicinity. Humans fail, computers fail and information spreads, one way or the other.

In that light, why on earth do we keep putting things on line that should never be? Most of us upload our family photos on .Mac or on Flickr, our calendars on some syncing platform and our archives on a GMail account. If someone steals a picture of you in a Speedo, that won’t be the end of the world — and, if you play your cards well, it may even contribute to your success. That’s all fine… But why do some companies keep uploading user credentials, social security numbers and confidential documents on the Internet? Most of these files are never used and, when they are, it is usually within a very restricted group of people — even if your definition of “very restricted” means a couple thousand for the largest of corporations. Why make them potentially available to all the inhabitants of planet earth?

Sure, there are immediate reasons to do so. The call center in Dubai needs to access the same data than the guys in Sacramento. The marketing folks in Malmö want to know what the engineers in Madrid are up to… But in the vast majority of cases, these people just need one file, one record, not the whole SQL database… Couldn’t we imagine a system that sends information when it is of vital importance, piece-by-piece, step-by-step?

We live in a world where networks go faster than people. Information travels round the clock while we, mere mortals, still need between 5 and 10 hours of sleep every day to function properly. Getting overnight deliveries is great but aren’t we willing to sacrifice just about any form of control for the convenience of receiving pet medication to our doorstep in less than 48 hours? The old system of “Ask-Wait-Receive” might be a lot more cumbersome than what we are used to nowadays but it went hand in hand with “Acknowledge-Control-Send”, that holy grail of privacy and security we are now striving to find back — although this time with shell scripts and IPv6 networking.

B.R. emailed me a question on an all-too-common topic:
Getting a Bluetooth enabled phone working with a Bluetooth enabled Pocket PC.

B.R. writes:

I guess I don’t know much about bluetooth file transfer. Can you refer me to a step-by-step somewhere on sending my T610 pics to an IPAQ?
I can link them via bluetooth, and pair them, but I can’t find anything to use to send the pictures from one to the other.

B.R. My opinion is that the various Bluetooth stacks out there are not all equal.
And, that can get we gadget geeks into all kinds of configuration contortions.
However, as you can see in the photo from my review article about the Sony Ericsson T610
it is possible to get the T610 syncing with a HP iPAQ 2215 (I have not tried it with other iPAQ models, however).
Fortunately, you have two things in your favor:

1. IMHO, the Sony Ericsson T610 has a good Bluetooth stack
   
2. There are people who know a lot more about Bluetooth than you and me and they are are willing to share their knowledge with us.
   

Here’s the first place I go when I get stuck trying to get phones and PDAs working together with Bluetooth.

The Geekzone Bluetooth Guides

Take a look at the step-by-step tutorials there.
If your exact iPAQ model is not listed, try a tutorial focusing on a Pocket PC with the same release version (e.g., Pocket PC 2002, Windows Mobile 2003, etc.).

Have a favorite Bluetooth resource/reference site? Let us know about it here.

The problem

Since Mac OS X first saw the light of the day, some Mac users have had a love-hate relationship with the Finder. On the one hand, it’s the application without which nothing would be possible — icons wouldn’t be displayed, windows could be forgotten and we would be back to a weird combo between Windows 3.1 and a UNIX command line. On the other, it has some idiosyncrasies that, at times, make it harder to hug and love.

Does this mean that the Finder is a poorly written application that should be discarded and replaced? No, certainly not. Given the sheer complexity of the tasks the Finder has to perform, it actually performs very well. There are however some basic procedures and precautions that should allow you to avoid most glitches.

What is often at play

Mac OS X is, as many of you know, a UNIX system with a wonderful interface. This means that the Finder constantly needs to draw a link between what the UNIX reality of things is and what you see. For example, let’s assume you perform a “rm” operation in some folder — i.e. you delete something through the command line: Finder needs to immediately realize that and get rid of the icon that corresponded to the file.

While that sounds simple enough, there can be times where it isn’t. For example, a recursive “rm” command can get rid of thousands of files in a matter of seconds… The Finder obviously will have to play catch up. Also, open windows can sometimes be cached to speed up the display and, unless it is brought to the Finder’s attention that something happened there behind its back, it may not immediately refresh the window.

Of course, such glitches are relatively uncommon and cosmetic. Tiger users will have without doubt noticed that the Finder is now kept informed of what’s going on in a much more robust fashion and that the “cached window is out of sync” problem is almost entirely a thing of the past. Never the less, in some circumstances, it can still happen.

The solution

The solution in most cases is to force the Finder to redraw the contents of the window. A quick trick is to click on the icon or icons you think should be updated — this usually takes care of refreshing the dimensions of an image, number of elements, family or visibility status. Should an entire window be behaving strangely, try creating an empty folder in it and deleting it — Command-Shift-N-Apple-Tab will do that in one swell swoop. By forcing the Finder to rearrange icons in the window, it causes it to think about its contents, so to speak, and correct any issues.

Also surprising but entirely harmless are the ghost drives that can remain on the desktop after a CD-R is burnt. Burn your CD-R, eject it and, voilà!, a CD icon stays on the desktop. Dragging it to the trash will cause the Finder to ask you whether you want to burn or eject that non-existing disc… Simply click on “Eject” to dismiss the dialog and you’re done — your optical drive shouldn’t even bother to open, as it is well aware that there is nothing in it.

Finally, in one rare case, you might notice that unpacking .sit archives leads to a fully empty folder. While it is not yet clear whether that is an Expander or a Finder issue, it has been making some noise in the Mac world as some applications are still packaged in .sit format. Don’t worry, the folder trick will serve you well and cause your unpacked files to magically appear, in perfect shape.

All in all, these glitches are uncommon — you really have to spend your day organizing and sorting files on your Mac to encounter them — and harmless. Nevertheless, as they can sometimes be surprising, it can be good to know a couple quick workarounds.

None of what follows is fact. Most of it is wild speculation, some of it pure fiction. But I enjoyed musing on it.

Take the following facts:

• The iPod shuffle is a tiny, stripped-down music player
• The Mac mini is a tiny, stripped-down personal computer
• Both were launched at unexpectedly low retail prices, heralding renewed interest in Apple products from people who had not previously been Apple customers
• iTunes has helped Apple to conquer the digital music business; iTunes now supports video download and playback

And add the following, um, non-facts:

• The video thing in iTunes suggests that Apple might like to conquer the digital video (TV/movie) business too. Well, they’d be dumb not to try, right?
• Some say we should watch Airport Express; what else could it do? Wireless video distribution around your local network sounds like a reasonable sort of thing it could do. Anything else?
• What if there were tiny, stripped-down portable computer that people could use to benefit from these mythical new capabilities?

Mix it all up. Add the Nokia 770 handheld internet device, just announced. It’s a tiny, stripped-down browsing device with WiFi and Opera running on a Debian variant.

If Apple is working on a tablet computer, I wonder if it might follow the shuffle/mini line of thinking. Make it tiny, strip it down (no hard disk, no optical drive, no keyboard, etc) and make use of all the cool stuff that’s already floating around - video iTunes (vTunes?), Airport Express, HD everywhere. What have you got? Something perhaps a little bit like the Nokia 770; but also, as with the iPod shuffle and the Mac mini, entirely unlike anything any of us were expecting.

OK, enough crazed imagining. Normal, fact-based reporting will resume shortly.

What do you want from an Apple tablet? Do you want one at all?

The
Nokia 770 Internet Tablet
is a Linux based handheld device (stylus input).
At 230 grams, it is lighter than the 280 gram Sony Playstation Portable.
Its LCD screen is a bit smaller at 4.13 inches vs the PSP’s 4.3 inches.
It supports Bluetooth and both 802.11b/802.11g giving it a leg up on WiFi enabled PDAs that are 802.11b (at least the one’s I know about).

The embedded application list looks good: Web browser, playback support for most of the popular formats (AVI, MPEG1/4, MP3 3GP, WAV, Real, etc.), note & sketch pad, etc.

The only question is when (if) it will hit the shores I live on (vs. only being available in Europe and Asia as so many of the cool devices are) and how much it will cost.
If it comes in under $600 ($499 would be the sweet spot, I think), it is something I definitely would consider buying.

Got more info on the Nokia 770? Let us know.

A few years ago, using a Mac was an act of faith: every newspaper and magazine was claiming Linux would take over the market in a matter of months, that Windows mobile would simply make it impossible to use a telephone without relying on Microsoft software and that the low-end MP3/USB drives combo would make anything else outdated.

Somehow, though, people kept using their Macs, they kept using Open BSD on handhelds, some even switched to these platforms or embarked in even more esoteric choices. The iPod was at the time at the beginning of its career and started to be followed by an enthusiastic crowd… Why?

Despite my many attempts at finding a rational explanation, I must admit I still haven’t found one that satisfies me entirely. After all, these arguments about Mac OS X having a small market share, Open BSD not having an interface and the iPod lacking an FM tuner were all valid and it was sometimes hard to justify a choice.

Things fell into place when I sat up an IBM laptop for someone last week — a someone who has since switched to the Mac, a mere 3 days later — and realized that, despite the high-end designation of that machine, I still didn’t want to use it. It somehow, felt wrong, felt cheap. The plastics were nice indeed, the thing was not too poorly designed overall and I couldn’t really find anything wrong with it but it just didn’t click. The OS? Well, seeing an IBM boot screen followed by an Intel Inside one, then a DOS prompt and finally a Windows logo didn’t give a feeling of high consistency either — kinda like when you buy a jacket and realize that all the pieces are sewn together in different ways that won’t last past cocktail hour.

We have accepted there is such a thing as a luxury brand in cosmetics, leather goods, fashion. And we have even accepted that sometimes, investing in a luxury good is less expensive in the long run than purchasing junk in bulk — ask many men how much they invest in their shavers / blades / … and the reasoning behind it. So, how come we cannot accept this for computers and, generally speaking, electronics? Why do we need to dissect every device or every piece of software feature by feature, reducing them to a spec sheet that does not take into account the overall idea, the attention to detail that, in the end, make more difference than anything else?

Of course, I am not equating expensive with quality here. I would without doubt call some very expensive applications “cheap” and some open source projects “luxurious”, as it is the attention to detail and the quality of the craftsmanship that is of interest here, not the price tag. Regardless of price, there seems to be a very clear gap in the computing market today: There are the cheap brands that knock you over with tempting specifications but somehow keep producing products that won’t go anywhere and another group that cares about what it does and wants to use their tools for the best. Thanks to the work of many, we have made the internet a financially very democratic space (which I can only applaud) but it would be hasty to think we have put the divides of the past behind us.

Related link: https://www.irobot.com/consumer/scooba_sneak_preview.cfm

I’ve written before about my indispensable robotic floor vacuum, the Roomba Discovery. Now the folks at iRobot have a new product that is sure to get top billing in my letter to Santa this Christmas. It’s the Scooba — a robotic floor washer.

The timing of this announcement couldn’t have been better for me. My new place in Chicago is a loft-style condo, and it has plenty of wood floors that need cleaning. Our current Roomba does a good job of sweeping, but nothing beats a good scrubbing, and it looks like Scooba does that nicely. The demonstration movie at the Scooba website is woefully short, but the animation of how it works is convincing enough for me. I love that it cuts a clean, and dry, swath across the floor as it goes.

One-pass robotic mopping, now we’re talking 21st Century Living!

Can Rosie the Robot be that far behind?

The My Yahoo! personal portal has a couple of features in beta testing that you, like me, may have decided to try.
The two features I tried are: (1) Subscribing to RSS feeds on the personal page; (2) Creating a second page for My Yahoo.
I placed all the RSS feed lists on that second page.
This worked fine on my desktop.
However, when I tried to see this page of RSS feeds on my Yahoo Mobile personal portal on my phone or PDA, I was thrown to this URL and saw the screen below:

https://wap.oa.yahoo.com/raw?dp=myrssnws&act=lst&pt=0

This URL probably works ok if you have a single My Yahoo personal page.
However, if you created a second page like I did,
you need to change the pt value from 0 to 2 to see the page on your mobile device.

https://wap.oa.yahoo.com/raw?dp=myrssnws&act=lst&pt=2

If this works for you, bookmark this modified web address in your mobile browser so you can quickly see it after logging in to Yahoo on your mobile device.

Found any other Yahoo Mobile quirks?

There is something so irritating and pathetic about these «advertising sites» big hosts now put in the place of placeholder pages for domains that have been bought but somehow never used…

Last week, I was browsing the web looking for information on a band called «The Isotoners», which someone had introduced me to — my work requires me to gather as much information on as many topics I humanely can, so here I went Googling to my heart’s content. Somewhere on a site, I clicked on a link that had been misspelt and ended up on one of these advertising sites.

Note how sneaky these have become? The title page of that domain had automatically become “Everything about the Isotoners” and a quick lookup of the source code confirmed that, indeed, the page was customized depending on what words were to be found in the link I had followed to arrive there.

I was about to go back and shoot a friendly mail to the site’s webmaster when my attention was drawn to a very unusual promotional offer to purchase… Minolta supplies. What had Minolta to do with an independent New York-based band? And most of all, why was there, right below that offer to purchase bulk photocopier supplies an offer to rejuvenate my skin with some Paraben-infused lotion?

Oooo… Toner! But of course! Incapable of finding anything relevant for the word “Isotoner”, the site thought I wanted to buy “toner”. Then, incapable to decide which kind of toner, it proceeded to present me with offers related to both kind of toners… I appreciate the thought, of course, but given that these two are about as incompatible as one can get, I’m not convinced it was the best way to lure me into clicking onto a link…

Now, of course, there is an upside: I thought the mishap was so sad and funny at the same time I spent 10 minutes contemplating my very mixed feelings and completely forgot about being mad at the advertisers… ;^)

What about your advertising mishaps?

Related link: https://www.google.com/ig

Google seems to work pretty hard to make their web products mobile device friendly.
I noticed that GMail, for example, started working with my PDA’s and Smartphone’s browser a few weeks ago.
So, I decided to try the new Google personal homepage beta
on some mobile devices released in 2003 and 2004.
Here’s what I found…

• Dell Axim X50i Pocket PC running Microsoft Windows Mobile 2003 Second Edition.
  The page looks pretty good in the One Column reformatted mode. Thumbs up!
• Motorola MPx220 Smartphone running Microsoft Windows Mobile 2003 Second Edition.
  The browser errored out completely claiming the web page could not be found. Thumbs down.
• HP iPAQ 2215 Pocket PC running Microsoft Windows Mobile 2003.
  Windows Mobile 2003 does not have the One Column web page formatting option available in 2003 Second Edition.
  And, its Best Fit mode never really fit anything properly to the 240×320 screen.
  So, I had to perform a lot of horizontal scrolling in addition to vertical scrolling to see the page’s contents.
  Thumbs sidewards…
  

How does the Google personal home page look on your PDA or phone? If you test it on a Treo 650, LifeDrive, Nokia Series 60, Sony Ericsson, or any other mobile device, let us know how it works for you.

I’ve previously written about Insteon, a new home automation technology from the folks at Smarthome, Inc. As I said nearly a year ago, it holds a lot of promise because it’s the first technology that aims to supplant X10 by working with it, instead of replacing it. Personally, I think this is a good strategy since it allows established home automators to keep their investment in X10 going, while gently switching over to a more robust solution.

What makes Insteon appealing is that it’s wireless. While X10 technology cleverly piggy-backs its signals on your AC electrical lines, doing that has always been problematic because certain devices are known to “pollute” the power line with electrical noise. (Yes, I’m looking at you, Mr. ThinkPad Power Supply.) By moving the control signals over-the-air, devices should be more responsive and less prone to error.

The Insteon Starter Kit sells for $99 and includes a remote control, two lamp modules, and two repeaters that bridge your power line signals, which will improve the reliability of your old X10 devices too. What’s not included is a computer-to-Insteon interface, so at this point you’re really just making it more convenient to control the lights and not really automating them, but the Insteon SDK and interface was also recently released, so things in the software world should improve soon.

Perhaps at the Smart Homes session at WWDC we’ll have some more Insteon news to discuss. If you’re already an Insteon user, come by the session and share your experiences. I should also have an update about how I’m making out with another wireless automation contender, Z-Wave.

Does Insteon have what it takes?

The US$499 PalmOne LifeDrive Mobile Manager with its 4GB integrated microdrive is stirring a lot of interest in the PDA world.
It doesn’t appear to be available for purchase quite yet, but there are a bunch of preview reviews available:

• bargainPDA: PalmOne LifeDrive Review


• Brighthand: palmOne LifeDrive Mobile Manager Debuts


• First Look: PalmOne’s Lively LifeDrive

And, of course, you can also visit the
PalmOne LifeDrive Mobile Manager product page.

Even a Microsoft Windows Mobile fan like me has to be at least a little interested in this new PalmOne offering.
Its integrated WiFi (802.11b) and Bluetooth (1.1) adds to its attraction to mobile multimedia geeks.
I’m a little surprised that it does not have an integrated digital camera given its marketing skew as a photo and video viewing device.

I wonder if its $499 price tag will have potential device consumers (like me) wondering whether something like an Apple iPod color with a 30GB (vs. 4GB) hard drive for $349 might be a better buy for listening to music and viewing photos (but not videos).
Or, if you want to watch video with millions of colors instead of the 65K colors available on the LifeDrive (or Pocket PCs for that matter), perhaps the Sony Playstation Portable is a better choice.

Nintendo’s announcement of its
Gameboy Micro
and the increasing popularity of micro-sized phones, MP3 players, and even digital cameras (see my
Canon Powershot SD200 review)
makes me wonder if anything larger than a mobile phone has mass appeal these days.

Buying a PalmOne LifeDrive? Let us know what PDA you use know and how the LifeDrive will change your daily PDA habits.

I’ve been working with Mac OS X Tiger since its release — at first on my developer machine, and now on my everyday production PowerBook. (You know, it just gets to a point where I don’t want to work in Panther anymore…)

There were a few gotchas in the first release of Mac OS X 10.4. A curious one was that my Tiger didn’t want to roam. I have two APs in my studio — an AirPort Extreme and an AirPort Express — and if I moved out of range of one and into range of another, Tiger would get lost. Fortunately, the Connection Doctor works very well and would get me reconnected quickly. BTW: I haven’t read much out there about the Connection Doctor, but it’s a very cool feature that deserves some praise.

Also, I had a cell phone version of a buffer overflow with iSync. When I synced my SE T637, iSync would try to upload every ToDo I had every written resulting in a full memory message. That was a bit frustrating.

Last night I downloaded Mac OS X 10.4.1 via Software Update, and have been using my Mac gleefully ever since. So far, the update has addressed the issues above, and everything else seems fine too. iSync works really well now, and it’s quite fast.

If you’ve been waiting for the first wave of bug fixes before upgrading to Tiger, it appears that the coast is clear. And I think you’re really going to like this release of Mac OS X.

(Side note for those already using Tiger: have you noticed that you can tell who has Tiger and who doesn’t by looking at their phone icons in iChat? Those with Tiger have layered phone icons representing the ability to group chat. Panther users still have the single layered icon.)

Oh, one other thing. This evening on Mac DevCenter we’re publishing a cool article on the new Migration Assistant. This tool will really help you make the jump to Tiger, whether as a single user or as a sysadmin for a group of Macheads.

The problem

Mail, also called “Mail viewer” (by developers) and Mail.app (by uh… many people including myself) is a wonderful little application on which many of us rely for our daily workflow. Mail 2.0, included in Tiger, is a big step forward from the previous versions and its many new features have been acclaimed by heavy users — including its new found love for search capabilities.

For some users, however, the upgrade hasn’t gone as smoothly as they hoped: seemingly lost mails, crashes and the inability to send or retrieve messages have lead them to think that Mail was no longer to be trusted. Luckily, the solution is usually one little step away.

The solution

In issues like these, there are often as many solutions as there are causes — pretty precise, uh? Generally speaking, though, the best way to start is to ask yourself what could potentially interfere with Mail, which includes haxies, bundles, services and enhancers of any kind. Should you have any applications of this kind running, you might want to follow these steps:

1. Quit or force-quit Mail, keeping in mind that force quitting it might cause some settings to be lost and could leave your mailbox indexes in a somewhat unstable state — Mail sometimes takes a long time to quit if you interrupt it in the middle of a server-related process, in which case patiently waiting is the best policy. Then, immediately backup your “Mail” folder, located in your “Library” folder.
2. Perform your
   
   regular maintenance
   
   steps, in order to ensure that no minor disk issue or permissions problem could interfere with your work. Sure, permissions issues have almost no chance to be, by themselves, the cause of a Mail problem but, as we are dealing with third-party installers here, it is better to be on the safe side.
3. Navigate to your various “Library/Mail” folders and remove any folders called “Bundles”. “Bundles” are commonly used third-party “hacks” that add functionality to Mail and, since the application first appeared, enjoy some kind of love-hate relationship with it — everybody knows they exist and work but nobody really says so officially.
4. Navigate to your various “Library/Services” folders and temporarily remove any third-party components you might see here. As services are constantly available from within your applications, a misbehaving service can cause unexpected trouble.
5. If all this remains ineffective, you can delete (at a later time) your various “Library/Caches/Mail” folders.
6. Update your Mac in order to ensure that you are using the latest available version of Mac OS X. Mac OS X v. 10.4.1, for example, improves Mail’s handling of misbehaving add-ons and plug-ins.

Once this is done, simply relaunch Mail and select your mailboxes one by one in the left hand side. For each one, use the “Rebuild” command of the “Mailbox” menu, which will force Mail to purge and re-create the indexes it keeps for the mailbox. Damaged indexes can lead to strange symptoms like “ghost” messages, messages that do not appear or general sluggishness — and while you are at it, try to delete as many attachments as you can (mail servers hate attachments) and ensure that you have purged any deleted messages from any POP server you might have.

Keep in mind that some of your accounts (such as Hotmail accounts) that are not natively managed by Mail and require third-party plug-ins might no longer work since the corresponding files have been removed. In that case, simply ask the developers whether an updated version is available and install it with caution. The best policy, of course, is to avoid these accounts or set them to “forward” any mail to an account you can check through officially supported standard methods but one does not always have the choice.

Should you have had issues with importing messages from your old installation, you can use the “Import Mailboxes…” menu item of the “File” menu in order to force the re-import of any potentially misbehaving mailboxes.

As you can see, these steps are pretty straightforward and basic. They should however help you work around most Mail-related issues and allow you to enjoy that great little application!

Have you found other troubleshooting techniques for Mail?

Related link: https://www.apple.com/macosx/features/automator/

A week has passed since my upgrade to Tiger, and I think I’ve found a new friend — Automator.

Hardly a day goes by without me thinking: “Hang on! Perhaps I could use Automator to whip up a simpler way of doing this!”

I’ve been really enjoying toying around with workflows, trying to find new ways of doing things. Or in some cases, new things to do. Nothing terribly complex or world-changing; in fact, usually very simple and basic. But useful.

“Examples, give us examples!” you cry. OK, here’s some:

Simpler weblogging

I try to post regularly on my weather weblog, Rising Slowly but find the process of grabbing images then resizing them to a specific width tedious and overly time-consuming. (In other words, I know it only takes a few seconds, but every time I have to do it I feel like it’s just that little bit like too much hard work. Hurrumph.)

So I created two workflows, one for turning an image dragged out of my browser into a 100×100 thumbnail, and another for resizing images dragged in the same way to 394 pixels wide.

As yet there are no actions for MarsEdit, the editor I use to maintain that particular site; but as soon as any appear, I can see both these workflows being further amended to make life even simpler.

Use Markdown in TextEdit

You may well have heard of Markdown, a chunk of Perl that does an excellent job of converting suitably-marked-up text into valid XHTML. I use it all the time in BBEdit (in fact, I’m writing this very post in this manner).

Using three very simple Actions, you can now make use of Markdown in a TextEdit document too: Get Contents of TextEdit Document -> Run Shell Script (point this to markdown.pl) -> Set Contents of TextEdit Document. Save in your Applescripts folder for easy access, any time.

One thing that has bothered me during all this noodling around in Automator, is that there’s no pre-installed Action along the lines of ‘Get contents of clipboard’. I keep wanting to use this in many of the workflows I play with, and if it existed then my Markdown example above could be used in all sorts of other text editors and word manglers.

With a bit more time, I might be able to sit down and make such an Action myself, but no doubt someone else has already created it, or will do so much sooner than I can.

What simple little workflows have you been cooking up? Or, what’s the craziest, longest, most complex workflow you’ve created?

Related link: https://www.believermag.com/issues/200505/article_newitz.php

For a few weeks now, I’ve been noodling around the idea of some kind of Eats, Shoots & Leaves meets Chicago Manual of Style cum writing style guide and technical publishing primer, all wrapped up into a collection of tips and tools under the banner of the Hacks series. I even mocked up my dream cover for the book I’d tentatively titled Syntax Hacks: Tips & Tools for Better Writing and Editing.

Though such a book ended up striking me as overly ambitious and more than a little bit daunting, and thus remained in the purgatorial state of an idea that exists in name only (I really liked the title, though I found myself forcing content into it that would really better suited by the more boring but more accurate title of Writing Hacks), it took a walk by my local comic book store to realize exactly how small time my idea actually was.

The cover of the May issue of The Believer (a magazine I’ve raved about elsewhere) caught my eye with a story on “DIY Semantics” by Annalee Newitz. The story inside, actually titled “The Conlangers’ Art” (excerpt available here) is given this description in the magazine’s TOC: “Over eight hundred Klingons and other inventors of language are overhauling the DNA of consciousness.” Now this is the description of a Syntax Hacks worth getting excited about (or humbled by, if you’ve been trying to fit more banal, pedantic content under the same rubric).

Why would you want to create your own language? Perhaps your goal is political and humanitarian, to allow people of different languages to form alliances and understand each other through an auxiliary language such as Esperanto. Perhaps you want to create an imaginary fantasy world to populate with a unique native tough, such as Elvish or Klingon. Whether they’re creating a computer scripting language, such as Perl; a langauge of which they’re the only speaker and chronicler, such as Doug Ball’s Skerre; or a perfectly logical language that removes all ambiguity, such as Lojban, Newitz argues that inventers of language share one crucial trait: they’re idealists.

So, for whatever reason (and, as I’ve briefly summarized, there are many), you’ve decided to create your own language. Exactly how do you go about doing so? In as droolworthy a centerfold as I’ve ever seen in an issue of The Believer (this is a magazine primarily devoted to book reviews, after all), Newitz outlines the steps necessary for creating your own language (she expands on each step with rich description in an eye-catching and nicely laid-out chart):

1. Pick a Syntax

2. Generate Phonological Features
3. Create a Lexicon
4. Make Your Own Writing System
5. Develop a Speaking Community
6. Determine How Your Conlang Will Handle Ambiguity
7. Contemplate Adding Emotional Markers to Your Language
8. Pick One: Artlang or Auxlang
9. Determine Whether Your Conlang Has a Political Purpose
10. Determine Whether Your Conlang Presupposes 2000 Years of Historical Development.
11. Pick a Name for Your Language and Post it Online.

Make each of these steps a chapter title and fill each chapter with hacks, and you’ve got yourself a more compelling Sytax Hacks than the one I’ve been noodling, though with an admittedly much smaller audience. If these steps, or the article I’ve inevitably done an injustice by summarizing too briefly, interest you, do check out the May issue of The Believer before it’s replaced on news stands by the June Music Issue.

Got a hack?

I feel moved to publicly declare my thanks to Brent Simmons for releasing NetNewsWire 2.0. Not only is it packed with plenty of well-designed features, it also makes one very important difference: it’s fast.

Since upgrading to Tiger, I’d noticed how slow and slumpy my older copy had got, but version 2.0 is extremely zippy.

And zippy in more ways than one. NNW now includes a built-in browser element (in common with many other RSS reader applications), which turns out to be impressively fast. There’s nothing quite like tearing through a long list of subscriptions, using NNW’s second-nature keyboard shortcuts to read, move on, and open for browsing.

Everything else is faster too; downloading feeds, and moving about between elements of the GUI. Great work.

I particularly like the use of the lower portion of the window for a handful of control widgets and info panels. This is where you can see the number of remaining unread items, or quickly change the stylesheet without opening up the prefs panel.

The selection of built-in stylesheets for displaying feeds is another impressive bit of work. Most of them are just plain functional, but the BeOS style made me laugh out loud, just for the sheer delight of seeing those quirky yellow window widgets all over again.

The NNW + MarsEdit software bundle is good value for anyone spending a lot of time reading and writing on the web. The only thing I’m waiting for now is an update for the latter, which still runs pretty slowly on my iBook. If MarsEdit’s future releases make it as fast as the new NNW, I shall be a very happy bunny indeed.

Your thoughts on NNW, or any other RSS reader

The security hole in Dashboard is a little wider, following some further investigation of the issues by Aaron Harnly and Rixstep.

Things start to go wrong if a user leaves Safari’s “Automatically open safe files” option checked.

If checked, it allows Safari to automatically download, unzip, and install a Dashboard widget on your computer.

But: widgets installed in this manner are put in your user widget directory, ~/Library/Widgets. The default widgets supplied by Apple are in the system widget directory, /Library/Widgets.

And: when Dashboard starts, it first loads up widgets in the system directory, then loads the ones in the user directory. There’s nothing to prevent one of the user widgets having the same bundle identifier as one of the default ones.

The upshot is that if someone were to ‘embed’ a malicious widget in a web page, it could be designed to call itself Stickies - over-riding the Apple-supplied Stickies widget with something else.

Simply by looking at the Dashboard widget bar, a user would have no way of telling the difference.

A series of screenshots on Aaron’s web page explains this very simply. It’s surprisingly easy for a potentially harmful widget to get into your computer, and for you to execute it regardless.

The Rixstep analysis goes one step further.

Imagine a mail message arrives from a friend, with an attached file. “I found this great Dashboard widget!” it says, “Try it out!”

User double-clicks. A widget is installed.

But: this widget has a plug-in. Which copies itself everywhere. Which delves into the Mail Delivery API and sends copies of itself to people in your Address Book.

Dashboard is supposed to ask the user if it’s OK to run a new widget for the first time. But that doesn’t always happen. Aaron puts it simply:

However — incredibly, amazingly, stupidly — Dashboard does not present a prompt before running a privileged widget that is one of the Library/Widgets folders, including our auto-installed widgets. So now your auto-installed replacement look-alike widget has complete access to your system, and could do nasty things like delete your home folder.

As I said a few days ago, I’ve been smugly telling every Windows user I know how much safer and secure my Mac is. Maybe I should just shut up.

Have Aaron and Rixstep found something we need to worry about? Or is this a storm in a teacup?

I frequently receive email asking questions regarding my favorite mobile platform: Microsoft Windows Mobile Pocket PC and Smartphone.
I usually answer these questions in a Q&A blog on my personal website. But, since the blogging modules on the web host I use have broken my blogs after a recent upgrade and since the information might be of interest to readers here, I thought it would be ok to respond to the question here.

Susan V. asks:

I am creating Excel Checklists using the form toolbar. The lists include a checkbox. I want to convert these files (such as saving as .csv files) so that the checkboxes still work on the PDA. Any ideas?

My Response:
Susan: I don’t know what kind of PDA you are referring to.
But, I will assume it is a Microsoft Windows Mobile based Pocket PC since most people associate me with that platform.
If this is the case, you will not be able to perform that kind of function using Pocket Excel.
Pocket Excel and Pocket Word are very small subsets of the full Microsoft Office applications you use on the PC.
Many functions are missing in the Pocket versions.
There are some third party spreadsheets for the Pocket PC that you can look at to learn if they provide the functionality you want.
You can find a list of these third party spreadsheets a Pocket Excel QuickFAQs page I maintain at:

MobileViews QuickFAQs: Excel

I also maintain a page of QuickFAQs that covers common desktop applications and their Pocket PC analogs (when available) at:

MobileViews: Where Is It for the Pocket PC QuickFAQs?

Is a spreadsheet the appropriate application?
I once heard a Microsoft Excel product manager joke that
Excel is the most widely used database in the world.
Excel is so powerful and widely available that many many people use it as a flat-file database when, perhaps, an actual database application may be more appropriate.
Looking at the brief description of your problem,
I wonder if this might be the case here too?
If so, you might want to refer to a blog I wrote here a while ago titled:

Pocket PC Access Database Alternatives (Missing Apps Part II)

• 
  DDH Software HanDBase.
  HanDBase is a simple database application I use nearly everyday on my Pocket PC.
  I wrote some how-to articles about HanDBase years ago.
  They still have information value today.
  You can find these articles listed at:
  
  Pocket PC How-To Articles
  
• 
  Ilium Software ListPro.
  ListPro has been part of my mobile toolkit since the old Handheld PC era.
  It does one thing and does it extremely well: Maintain lists.
  

Have some favorite productivity apps for the Microsoft Windows Mobile Pocket PC or Smartphone? Let us know here.

Related link: https://www.shapeofdays.com/2005/05/more_h264_demon.html

While we’ve all seen Chris Adamson’s work on QuickTime 7, Jeff Harrell has also done some amazing demonstrations of the H.264 codec. His explanation of the differences in encoding are some of the best I’ve read, and include side by side comparisons of Star Wars footage, as well as Saving Private Ryan and West Wing ripped at varying bitrate levels. It’s amazing how well this codec scales.

Better still:

When you increase the resolution by a factor of three, it’s common practice to increase the bit rate of the encoded file by a factor of three. So rather than this being a one-megabit-per-second clip, it’s gotta be a three-megabit-per-second clip, right?

Wrong. This clip, this one you see right here at broadcast resolution, is encoded at 768 kilobits per second. With audio — which you’ll notice sounds substantially better since I used the MPEG-4 AAC audio encoder — it comes to exactly 980 kilobits per second, or just hair over nine megabytes total. Yeah, I know. This file is bigger and smaller than the other clip. More pixels, fewer bits used to describe them.

Oh, I just can’t wait to see the Bit Torrent crowd get down with H.264. Just in time for Battlestar Galactica’s summer run, too…

What do you make of all this codec wonderousness?

Related link: https://www.cellphedia.com/

Cellphedia is an interesting graduate school project by Limor Garcia at Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU (where Clay Shirky teaches).
Limor describes her project this way:

I have created Cellphedia for the curious mobile phone community (which is almost all of us). It is an application that enables its users to send and receive up-to-date encyclopedia-type information amongst each other, on the go, through SMS. I call it: ‘The first ubiquitous social encyclopedia’.

I haven’t tried it myself, but it looks like an interesting project with practical considerations such as allowing participants to limit the number of SMS messages per day or not allowing messages for a specified time period.

What’s next for the mobile social networking world? Let us know.

Three days after installing Tiger, I’m starting to feel quite comfortable in the new environment. I’m glad I made the decision to upgrade, and I think on the whole things are slightly better and faster than they were in Panther. Here are some random notes and thoughts.

• Tiger runs pretty well on my 600MHz G3 iBook, with 640MB RAM. I’m surprised, but very pleased, that hardware this old can cope so well with a brand new OS. Anyone got Tiger running on any lower-spec machines?
• I took a long look around what Dashboard has to offer, and decided that most of the time, I simply won’t need it. There’s only a few widgets that I imagine I might use often, such as the world clock and the converter. But the information they provide is easier and faster to find with my web browser, which is always open and doesn’t require me to switch to a virtual desktop environment. It bothers me that widgets have to be viewed separately from everything else. And the security concerns have yet to be addressed.
• Spotlight has not ousted Quicksilver as my main file and application launcher. That said, I’ve been using both for different purposes, and think they work just fine together. I’ve found myself using Spotlight to find stuff I’ve created in the last few hours, things that Quicksilver hasn’t had a chance to index yet. Spotlight’s instant update is very nice.
• Automator is by far my favorite new feature. I’ve spent hours fiddling around, trying out ideas for new workflows. I’m really excited by the possibilities, especially once more third-party developers get round to releases their own Automator Actions.
• Camino seems to have slowed to a crawl, even though I’ve downloaded the latest stable release, 0.8.4. I’m back with Firefox again for the time being, it seems to be behaving itself.
• The Finder is working faster than in Panther, and Get Info panels are nice and swift (about time too!). As with Automator, I think Smart Folders are going to be really useful for me; so far, I’ve not spent enough time exploring them. I created one to find about a hundred photos scattered across my drive that had the wrong date (the camera had come back in time from the year 2016, just to take photos of that party!). That made it really easy to hunt down all the offending files and deal with them swiftly.
• I’ve not seen any system crashes, although a few apps have frozen unexpectedly. Nothing terribly troublesome, though.
• The Spinning Pizza of Doom is appearing more often than of late; I suspect this is something that will be dealt with in coming Tiger updates. Again, this has been occasional and not too annoying.

I consider my installation a ‘no frills’ one; I can’t get rid of Dashboard, so I just choose to ignore it for the time being. On this G3 machine, the eyecandy isn’t even very eye-catching, so I don’t need to bother with it. I’m happy with Tiger and look forward to watching it develop and grow over the coming year.

Happy with Tiger?

Last week, in the Washington Post’s Fast Forward column, reporter Rob Pegoraro took some pot-shots at Mac OS X Tiger in his column, “Mac’s Tiger Gives Panther Owners Little Reason to Pounce”. What you’ll find below is Rob’s original article, which I’ve annotated with my comments. With some things, Rob was accurate, and with others, he didn’t quite hit the mark. Read on…

Washington Post
FAST FORWARD

Mac’s Tiger Gives Panther Owners Little Reason to Pounce

By Rob Pegoraro
Sunday, May 1, 2005; F06

Since the debut of Mac OS X in March 2001, Apple has been cranking out new versions of its operating system as if they were movie sequels. Its new OS X 10.4 release — which Apple also calls Tiger — took longer than any other OS X update and still showed up barely 18 months after its predecessor, Mac OS X 10.3 Panther.

This pace of updates can’t have been good for the sleep cycles of Apple’s developers, and it certainly has taken a financial toll on users who have kept up with them all. With a purchase of Tiger, $129 ($9.95 if you bought a Mac after April 12), the total bill for OS X updates tops $500.

Each of those earlier releases justified its price with added features and functions. Tiger should as well. But Panther is already very good on its own, while this release exhibits a few rough patches — meaning Tiger doesn’t quite have an immediate, must-buy-now appeal.

For one thing, it can’t be loaded on many computers that could run 10.3 — Tiger requires a Mac with a built-in FireWire port and 256 megabytes of memory. Given how halting and sluggish Tiger ran on a 256 MB Mac Mini, doubling the memory seems wise.

For another, while Tiger features some remarkably powerful capabilities, they’re not all provided in the most effective manner.

Tiger’s highlight is Spotlight. This search tool provides most of the capabilities of such add-on Windows programs as Google Desktop — except that Spotlight’s integration into the operating system lets it index your files as they change, not minutes or hours later.

It also makes Spotlight searches easier to start; click the blue magnifying glass <…snip…>

…icon in the top right corner of the screen or use the search form included in every Finder window and file dialogue box. It even pops up in the System Preferences window; instead of wondering which control panel affects what setting, just type what you want to do and Spotlight will find the right one.

Out of the box, Spotlight already indexes the contents of nearly every file on a Mac — e-mail messages, Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents, PDF files, address-book entries, calendar appointments, digital music, and even comments embedded in digital photos. (Spotlight’s vocabulary can be expanded with downloadable plug-ins.)

But Spotlight is missing one of the most useful options of other desktop search utilities: the ability to index the contents of Web pages you’ve visited.

While Spotlight is Tiger’s most sweeping change, Dashboard is its flashiest addition. This array of small “widget” programs for such quick tasks as address and weather look-ups whooshes into view at the tap of a key, then whisks itself out of sight when you’re done. Tiger includes 14 widgets, with more offered online by Apple and others.

Apple’s three core Internet programs — Mail, the Safari Web browser and the iChat instant messenger — gain new roles in Tiger.

Mail now runs much faster, incorporates Spotlight searching and lets you create “smart mailboxes” that function like iTunes’ Smart Playlists, grouping messages by matching preset search terms. But the criteria available to build a smart mailbox are oddly limited; for example, you can’t have Mail show only unanswered messages. (You can create similar automatic-search folders in the Finder and in the Address Book program.)

Mail works outstandingly well with IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) accounts, but remains clumsy at managing more widely used POP (Post Office Protocol) inboxes. It also lacks the screening for fake “phishing” messages now offered by the Eudora and, soon, Thunderbird mail programs. Finally, the space-wasting, pointlessly quirky toolbar slapped onto Mail’s windows needs to go.

Safari’s major addition is support for the “news feeds” many Web sites publish; it usually finds them automatically, allowing you to subscribe to one with two clicks then easily sort through its headlines. A “Private Browsing” option ensures Safari will store no records of your use, handy if you’re borrowing a stranger’s computer.

But other parts of Safari now look a bit creaky. Although this browser will block pop-up ad windows, that option is turned off by default. Its notification of the secure encryption used at real financial sites (but not at the fakes set up by phishers) is way too subtle, compared with the obvious cues offered by Firefox and Opera.

Apple’s iChat instant messenger now allows group video conferencing, but you’ll need a high-end Power Mac desktop to host one.

A more consumer-relevant feature, support for the MSN and Yahoo IM networks, goes missing.

Tiger expands Panther’s limited parental-use controls with options to restrict a child’s online use to designated Web sites, e-mail addresses and IM chatters.

One of Tiger’s most promising components is easy to overlook. Its Automator program makes it drag-and-drop simple to instruct your programs to perform repetitive tasks. Not having to master programming syntax makes this a huge advance, although many programs can’t yet be orchestrated by Automator.

Tiger is prey to as many viruses and spyware attacks as Panther — none. But Apple missed a chance to augment OS X’s already strong defenses: When a program’s installer asks for an administrator’s password, Tiger still provides no details about what will happen next, leaving users to hope for the best.

Stability has always been a core virtue in OS X, but I did see one serious system crash in five days of testing on three Macs.

I also spotted several bugs, some merely cosmetic (overlapping controls in a Mail window) and others more serious (a new .Mac synchronization utility failed to copy all of the e-mail settings to a second Mac that it said it would). And Apple neglected to address such long-standing OS X issues as the runaround needed to erase rewritable CDs and DVDs and the painfully slow Finder performance when copying large sets of files.

Flaws and all, Tiger still beats Windows soundly, from its smooth, nag-free installation (save a brief but heavy-handed promotion of Apple’s $100-per-year .Mac online service) to its sleek, shimmering graphical interface. But it’s not such a huge leap past Panther to merit upgrading today. Some cleanup work from Apple could fix that.

If the management there can hold off on starting the next big OS X project, there should be plenty of time to do the job right.

So, what did you think of Rob’s article? Accurate and balanced? What are your thoughts on Tiger?

Promise me you are not going to try the following command: rm -R ~/

What will it do? Well, normally, it will dutifully and silently wipe out your entire home directory. That is bad, very bad. All your files will be lost, gone poof in a UNIX massacre that no self respecting cable channel would show before all kids are safely put to bed. However, would you expect Mac OS X to refuse to execute that command? No, certainly not: after all, you issued it and it is your responsibility to know what you do. Start, for a second, imagining that your computer asks you every minute or two for confirmation on your every gesture and you will see why one of the fundamental assumptions in computing is that you know what you do.

Let’s get this one step further. Let’s say I am doing my best to tempt you and entice you to download a new, super sleek application that will keep you updated on the status of your laundry and your baked potatoes — while my competitors still cannot check both the oven and the washing machine simultaneously. You obviously don’t know me and cannot be sure of my intentions. After all, maybe all my application does is wipe your home directory and play a little gloomy music… But let’s say you go ahead, download it and run it anyway… What would you expect to happen? Should Mac OS X display a very long alert dialog telling you that, yes, maybe there is no way for an application to talk with your non-bluetooth enabled washing machine and that this might just be an elaborate hoax or would you just expect it to run it?

The same thing happens with Dashboard widgets. Widgets, although they are web based and “are as easy to develop as web pages”, can do some pretty serious things, as shown by the Apple-provided ones but, more importantly, by the documentation published on the ADC website. A widget is an application and, therefore, running a widget from a non-trusted source means taking a risk — a real risk.

Of course, just like there are safeguards in Mac OS X (an application cannot gain root privileges without your expressly granting them, for example), there are safeguards in Dashboard but, ultimately, Mac OS X (like all operating systems) has no way to know what is good and what isn’t, as long as an application that you run affects only your files. So far, there isn’t anything new.

What is new in Dashboard, however is the heavy marketing that has been launched around it, potentially misleading users and creating a favorable ground for Dashboard-based social engineering. While I do admire some of the ideas that pop up at Apple’s marketing department, I have to deplore the lack of communication that seems to sometimes happen between engineers and marketers. If both teams could interact just a bit more, I dare not imagine how successful Apple would be!

Certainly, in a quest to make things easy for the user, Apple did implement some auto-install features for widgets and forgot to provide an obvious way to un-install them. However, in no circumstance (that I am aware of, at least), does Apple auto-launch a widget, meaning that a user still needs to click on it to open it.

Should you be concerned about the security of your Dashboard, simply set Safari to not automatically open “Safe” files — something I am sure most would consider a wise choice, even if Dashboard didn’t exist. This will make any attempts to force a download on you a lot more noticeable. Also, be sure that you only browse trusted sites when using a browser where JavaScript and other interactive components are enabled.

In a nutshell, there is no need to lose sleep over Dashboard. It is a powerful feature and, like most powerful features, it comes with a responsibility for the user — remember what Terminal now tells you when you sudo for the first time! While I agree that Apple could further improve the warnings that are already in place, saying there is a “security hole” in Mac OS X today is a bit of an exaggeration.

Related link: https://music.ign.com/articles/611/611637p1.html

A while back, I complained that the iTunes Music Store had too few independent or import titles, that I couldn’t find much to buy because my tastes are obscure, and its early catalog was Mainstream American Crap.

What a difference a year makes.

Lately, I have had better luck finding things on ITMS than at regular music retailers, even fairly big stores like Media Play or, for that matter, Amazon. I once tried to get Mary Prankster’s gleefully offensive Blue Skies Forever from Amazon and they didn’t have it and weren’t getting it. Oh, it’s there now… via anonymous resellers on Amazon. For $39. For a CD that is only 29 minutes long.

On the other hand, it’s on , and it costs $10.

Vancouver’s Janet Panic doesn’t even show up on Amazon, but she’s on

Heck, if you want rock (and some ska) songs about hockey, has you covered now.

But today’s news takes it to the extreme, since I never thought anything like this would happen: 15 soundtracks from the Final Fantasy video game series, previously available only in Japan, are now on iTunes. Not available in stores. And they’re cheap. Check out its page and you’ll find 4-CD sets for $25… stuff that I paid $50-60 for. Soundtracks to the earliest, NES-era games are $6. Possibly the best deal is the two-disc symphonic concert 20020220: Music from Final Fantasy (), for just $10, a nice warm-up to the US Dear Friends tour.

My only gripe is a few missed translations: “Suteki Da Ne” is usually translated as “Isn’t It Beautiful”, not “Isn’t It Wonderful”. And there’s the whole “Aeris/Aerith” thing when translating “エアリスのテーマ” (for the benefit of you normal people, there are two kinds of Final Fantasy VII fans: those who think the heroine’s name is spelled “Aeris”, and those who are wrong. See you in the talkbacks, kids!)

Sure, there are still significant holes in the iTMS catalog, and we can all name artists who are scandalously absent (I’ll start: no Zappa?!), but it really seems like there’s a nice Long Tail effect here, where iTMS is starting to be the best, if not only, way to find music beyond the feeble offerings of the usual retailers.

Could the iTunes catalog get any deeper? What else really needs to be on iTunes (OK, other than the Beatles, duh.)

A little while back I wrote up some notes about getting things done on your Mac, notes that were largely inspired by the thoughts and writings of the 43Folders community, and its ad-hoc Organizer-in-chief, Merlin Mann.

One of the big buzzwords in personal (and digital) organization these days is ‘folksonomy’; the process of adding keywords, or tags, to data in an effort to arrange it into loose ‘clouds’ of connectivity. The influence of web services like del.icio.us and Flickr has spread far.

If you want to use the same approach to your files and documents in Tiger, Automator offers the perfect solution.

My first effort with Automator was to create a workflow I named “@taggit”. It’s probably one of the simplest workflows you can imagine, consisting of just two actions: Get Selected Finder Items, followed by Add Spotlight Comments to Finder Items. This second action has the comments field left blank, and the Show Action When Run option checked.

I saved it as a workflow in my Scripts Folder, so it was in easy reach from the Scripts Menu.

When I run it with one or more files selected in the Finder, a little box appears asking me to type in some tags. Just like del.icio.us, I just separate them with spaces.

The Spotlight Comments field in a Get Info inspector

Spotlight Comments are a new addition in Tiger. Invoke Get Info on any file, and you’ll see a new text field at the top of the Info inspector, into which you can stick tag-like annotations. Spotlight sees these comments, so all files with the same tag will appear together in a Spotlight search window.

Better yet, you can create a Smart Folder using the criteria “Spotlight Comment” and “Contains” to keep all the “foo”-tagged files together in a always up-to-date “foo” folder.

A Smart Folder for auto-grouping files tagged with ‘flower’

If you wish, you could also save such a workflow as a Finder plug-in (hit Option+Command+S in Automator) which becomes available when you control-click (or right-click, two button mouse owners) on any Finder selection.

Now it’s fair to say that the process of tagging lots of files is going to be time-consuming, but I’m wondering about the possibilities.

Consider my (oft-mentioned here) aging iBook. Despite the 640MB of RAM installed, it struggles to run iPhoto 5 at any kind of acceptable speed. So perhaps I could use Spotlight tagging and Smart Folders to organise my photos in the Finder. Editing tasks can be left in the capable hands of Graphic Converter.

Only one way to find out if this will work. I’m off to do some tagging.

Tragic, or taggerific?

Related link: https://www.f-secure.com/weblog/

The May 9 entry in F-Secure’s blog titled
In-depth investigation of the “Cabir-in-Cars” myth
takes on the rumor about the ability of Bluetooth viruses like Cabir being able to crash an automobile.
The blog entry has lots of photos taken during the testing in a bunker-like environment and a description of their testing and results.

You can also find a discussion of this blog topic in Slashdot at:

Testing Out Cell-Phone Viruses on a Prius

Hmm…So, the Prius is safe. But, are there any cars running some other operating system, say, WIndows XP Embedded or an old unpatched embedded Linux distro, that might be at risk?

Tiger’s new Mail application adds many new features, including the ability to finally prioritize your outbound messages, but you’ve got to know where to look.

When composing a new message, there’s no obvious way to set a message’s priority from the new message window. What’s more, if you Option-Command-click on the toolbar button in the window’s upper-right corner, you won’t find a widget that you can add to a message window for setting the priority (see Figure 1). However, you can go to Message > Mark >, and then select either As Low Priority, As Normal Priority, or As High Priority (see Figure 2).

Figure 1: Look ma, no widgety thingy for adding a priority to an outbound email message. Crap!

Figure 2: Sure, I can use the menus to add a priority to a message, but should I really have to do that?

So, the solution I’ve come up for this is to simply add keyboard shortcuts for the priority menu items. To pull this off, first quit Mail then launch System Preferences and go to Keyboard & Mouse > Keyboard Shortcuts, and follow these steps:

1. Click the plus sign button (+) to add a keyboard shortcut.
2. In the Application pop-up, select Mail (or Mail.app, if you’ve got file extensions turned on in the Finder).
3. In the Menu Title field, enter “As Low Priority” (without the quotes).
4. Tab down to the Keyboard Shortcut field, and then give the menu item a shortcut of its very own (as you can see in Figure 3, I’ve used Control-Command-L for “As Low Priority”).
5. Click Add to save the shortcut.

Figure 3: Adding your own keyboard shortcuts is pretty easy, using the Keyboard & Mouse’s Keyboard Shortcuts pane.

Now go back and add keyboard shortcuts for As Normal Priority (Control-Command-N), and As High Priority (Control-Command-H), then quit System Preferences and launch Mail again. When you open a new message window, try using one of the keyboard shortcuts you’ve just assigned to Mail, and when you do, you’ll see the little Priority widget show up in the message window (see Figure 4).

Figure 4: Hey, how about that, now I can change a message’s priority from a new message window, but still only after I’ve used one of the keyboard shortcuts.

The one glitch with this that I’ve noticed is that if you’ve set up a signature file to use in your messages, the sigfile widget interferes with the priority widget. Maybe that’s why Apple didn’t include the priority widget as part of the customization set, but still, you’d think this would be a pretty easy problem to resolve. Regardless, I’ve got my keyboard shortcuts now, so I am — as Mojo Nixon would say — “A Happy Boy”.

I need your help.

I want to get my hands on a voice recorder. Something I can carry around in my pocket and whip out at a moment’s notice to record my thoughts, or some passing sounds.

I want the following features:

• Either USB-recharged, or AAA-battery powered
• Records as mp3, or some other widely-used format
• Plugs right into my Mac and mounts as just another drive
• Records up to an hour of decent-quality audio
• Costs very little money, and is as small as possible. About iPod shuffle size would be great
• A small speaker, and/or standard headphone output, so I can playback what I just recorded

OK, I realise it’s unlikely I’ll find all of those in one tiny unit, for the kind of low price I’d like to pay.

But if you’ve found a good voice recorder to use with your Mac, it would be great to hear from you.

Tell the world your Mac-compatible voice recorder recommendations!

Stephan “stephan.com” Nosurname has opened a can of worms with his post detailing the potential security hazards of automatically-installed Dashboard widgets.

When the first announcements were made about widgets some months ago, warning bells should have gone off in our collective heads. Applications made like web pages? Aren’t web pages sometimes a bit … dodgy? How come we didn’t see this coming a long way off?

(Perhaps some of us did; if you made a fuss about this at the time, I’d love to hear about it.)

Several people have contacted Stephan to point out that by disabling auto-install, people can avoid this kind of problem. Others have reminded him that it is possible to remove widgets, just with a simple Terminal command or a root around in the Finder.

But those people are missing an important point, I think.

One of the main reasons that everyone is getting so excited about Tiger is that it is better than Windows. Even some Windows supporters are saying so. Microsoft’s Longhorn development is delayed and even the work that’s been done doesn’t compare to the attractive ease-of-use offered by Mac OS X.

This is Apple’s chance to grab some market share, people are saying. It has the advantage, it has the momentum; go, Apple, go!

So imagine if you, or perhaps a member of your family, is one of this new generation of switchers. People pulled in first by the iPod, sold on the gorgeous user interface of Tiger; wooed by the eye-candy of Dashboard.

Imagine if your loved one starts using Tiger on their shiny new Mac, and is seriously impressed. And then hits a web page like Stephan’s, only this time with something far more malicious and unpleasant buried within it.

This imaginary newbie won’t know about killing widgets via the Terminal, won’t realise that changing a preference in Safari could make all the difference. They’ll just suddenly see Dashboard go crazy, and they’ll wonder what on earth is going on.

I’ve been spending much of my free time in the last couple of years telling Windows users I know to switch from Internet Explorer to Firefox.

“IE has too many potential security holes,” I tell them. “Firefox is much safer.”

I don’t want to have to start doing that for people who use Safari.

This sort of security hole is precisely the kind of thing that people have been criticising Microsoft for. Just as it is on Windows, if you’re geeky enough, you can avoid problems. But for most users, it’s a potential cause of serious trouble.

Let’s hope a fix — one for ordinary users, not power users — appears in Software Update soon. Otherwise Apple can kiss a decent chunk of that momentum for change goodbye.

Shocked? Horrified? Bemused?

The problem

During the Tiger demos, Apple always showed Dashboard under a US-centric light and never really highlighted the international features of this application — well, except for broadcasting a very questionable translation of the words “french fries” that is. Some unfortunate experiences with similar software in the past has led many Mac users to think that Dashboard is, indeed, only useful to users who live in the United States of America — I never thought I’d use that name in full but here it goes.

Luckily, Dashboard is very international-friendly. Indeed, all a widget does is pulling data from a web site so as long as this site can, in some way, provide you with some information about things happening outside the States, you will be able to access that same data from within Mac OS X. Also, contrary to Sherlock channels that required some more involvement from webmasters, releasing a widget for a site is relatively easy.

The Solution

Needless to say, there will be almost one solution per widget. However, the trick, generally speaking, is to understand the format in which the site expects the information to be passed and to translate it. Knowing which site is used as the backend for the widget is usually as easy as «flipping» it by clicking on the little “i” button — normally located in a corner — and looking at any logos or copyright lines that might be included.

Then, by using your web browser of choice, simply have a look at the site and try to find any patterns in the URLs or listings that you can use. Finally, enter your query into the widget exactly as it would appear on the site and it should then be available right from Dashboard.

Said so, that of course sounds like a magistral pain in the port. Luckily, most of the widgets that ship with Mac OS X will automatically adapt to your needs, with no further browsing required. Let’s take the weather widget, for example: simply enter the name of your city of residence (in my case “Paris”) and press return. The widget will then present you with a list of all the “Paris” it can find worldwide and you will just need to pick the right one in a pop-up menu. Easy, uh? Other widgets like the world clock will not be as lenient in the choice they offer but, in a case as specific as time zones, you are bound, by playing with the pop-up menus, to find a city in the same zone than you — just keep in mind that a city in your vicinity may not be in your time zone.

In some rare instances like with the default Yellow Pages widget, no amount of URL hacking will provide you with the information you are looking for. This is a relatively uncommon situation as more and more large database sites try to get an international reach but it does exist. In that case, a quick trip to the Mac OS X downloads site should get you what you need — keeping in mind all what you learnt about downloading and installing applications from third-parties on the web.

A side note

While Apple did not ignore international users with Dashboard, contrary to what some publications might have said, their marketing department certainly did not do the best of jobs explaining it. You might want to send feedback to the engineering team explaining what would have helped you better find your way around the international features of our beloved operating system.

Related link: https://www.oreilly.com/catalog/winxpunwired/

Ever wonder what becomes of the tools and objects that appear on covers for Hacks and Unwired books after they’ve performed their service? Sure, some of the cover images are stock photos from various archives, and we at O’Reilly have never actually handled or even seen the objects themselves. But some of the images we use are actually original photos our cover designers have taken of objects they’ve lovingly hunted down and selected specifically for the covers on which they appear.

Take, for example, the antique iron birdcage that adorns the cover for Windows XP Unwired:

Here’s a beautiful object that no longer served a need for O’Reilly after it had been photographed, but I was lucky enough to be around when it was about to be put to pasture. All it needed to become the perfect gift for my wife’s first Mother’s Day was a little love, some moss, and some ivy:

Check it out. There’s even a moss bird on a perch in there:

Though the gate is always open, this little guy shows no signs of fleeing any time soon. Happy Mother’s Day.

Where are they now? Anyone else have news of a retired cover image being put to new use?

In my previous Tiger life that I can’t talk much about, Dashboard was a nice new feature, but certainly not my favorite. Now in my current and open Tiger existence, I must say, I really like this new goodie.

I think part of my ambivalence before was because I was using the standard widgets that Apple provided. They’re nice, but who really needs another clock? Now that the cat is out of the bag, there are lots of new widgets available on Apple’s Dashboard page. And most of them are really cool.

OK, I’ll admit that one of my favorites is the TV Tracker widget by Monkey Business Labs. (I wasn’t that familiar with them before, but I sure am now. Widgets can make great promo pieces for your software company…) I hate using the on-screen channel guide provided by the cable companies. TV Tracker lets me find out instantly what’s on the channels that I care about. I’ll never miss the Daily Show again.

BTW: we have an article going up on Mac DevCenter today that shows you how to write your own Dashboard widget. And it’s really quite easy.

On the bummer side of the Tiger upgrade, I’m having real problems syncing my Sony Ericsson T637 to iCal. I walked through the set up wizard and ran iSync. It acted as though it was updating my phone, but at the end of the process, I got an error message that my phone was out of memory.

After many retries and adjustments, I still couldn’t get it to work. I had to go back to my Panther machine and resync. Thanks to Panther, I now have my data back on the phone, but still not sure what’s going on with the new version of iSync.

I’ve read other weblogs stating similar troubles. So I have a feeling this is not an isolated problem. If you have any suggestions, please post them in the talkbacks below.

Apple Bonjour for Windows runs on Microsoft Windows 2000, Server 2003, and XP.
Apple describes Bonjour as:

Bonjour, also known as zero-configuration networking, enables automatic discovery of computers, devices, and services on IP networks. Bonjour uses industry standard IP protocols to allow devices to automatically discover each other without the need to enter IP addresses or configure DNS servers.

You can find more information about it at:

• 
  Bonjour for Windows
  


• 
  Apple Bonjour home page
  

Got other Mac/Windows bridging suggestions?

Apple Bonjour for Windows runs on Microsoft Windows 2000, Server 2003, and XP.
Apple describes Bonjour as:

Bonjour, also known as zero-configuration networking, enables automatic discovery of computers, devices, and services on IP networks. Bonjour uses industry standard IP protocols to allow devices to automatically discover each other without the need to enter IP addresses or configure DNS servers.

You can find more information about it at:

• 
  Bonjour for Windows
  


• 
  Apple Bonjour home page
  

So after griping yesterday, I have to give some praise today, because I’ve found myself using a Tiger feature I never thought I’d use: smart folders.

Back up: two years, before I worked with O’Reilly, I dismissed the “smart playlists” feature in iTunes because it didn’t seem useful. After all, your music is already pretty self-organizing - by genre, artist, and/or album - in the iTunes interface. Is anyone really creating these “soundtrack music from the 70’s with 4-star or better rating” playlists?

Yet, when I was thinking about my editing workflow for ONJava and java.net, an idea occurred to me.

Figure 1 shows my editing folder. Most of the folders are articles I’m working on (these folders contain the original article and a history of edits, but that’s not important right now).

Figure 1. Chris’ O'Reilly/editing folder

My scheme is to append [oj] or [jn] to the name to remind myself what site the article is for. I use label colors to indicate state: no color for a new (untouched) article, orange for one that’s been edited and sent back to an author, yellow for a revised article needing my attention, and green for a finished article.

This allows me to see what I need to work on, but a smart folder makes it a lot nicer. Figure 2 shows a smart folder with the following rules:

• Look in the path O'Reilly/editing
• Look for folders that have “[oj” in their names
• …and have color==yellow or color==none

Figure 2. Smart folder showing ONJava articles to be edited

The result is a folder that always shows me what I need to work on for ONJava. And when I finish an article, changing its color label causes it to disappear from the smart folder.

I’ve only been using this for a day, but it seems like a neat trick and well worth continuing. Editor-in-chief Daniel Steinberg and I iChatted this afternoon about what other tricks we could get Tiger to perform, like whether we could create Automators to pull articles and their images out of e-mail and set up folders for us to work with.

Final thought: why do I like smart folders and hate smart playlists? Two factors I can think of: first, as mentioned above, iTunes is already pretty self-organizing, thanks to the tagging of MP3’s and AAC’s. But also, my iTunes collection is pretty static - I’m not gaining and losing content on a regular basis. By comparison, my editing folder is a constant hub of activity, with new articles coming in and finished ones going out. The smart folder is a good way to provide a consistent view of inconsistent data.

How are you using smart folders?

PC World’s article
PDA Sales Increase Sharply
summarizes a Gartner Group report on worldwide PDA sales for Q1 2005.
The article comments on Gartner’s conclusion that RIM Blackberry line is the #1 selling PDA worldwide with 21% of the market compared to PalmOne’s 18% share.
The article also mentions that
it did not count sales of smart phones, such as PalmOne’s Treo 650.
My question is why is a Blackberry considered a PDA but not a Treo 650?
Is, for example, the PalmOne Tungsten C’s PDA capabilities different from the Treo 650’s?
I can understand why smartphones like the Nokia Series 60 models or the Motorola MPx220 I reviewed recently in…
On the Go with the Motorola MPx220 Camera Phone
…are not considered PDAs.
But, I don’t understand why the Blackberry is a PDA if the Treo 650 is not.
I see an awful lot of Treo 650 devices used by lots of people around me (I use a Windows Mobile based MPx220 myself, btw).
So, I wouldn’t be too surprised if the Treo 650 accounted for a couple of percentage points of total PDA sales if it were included in this report’s statistics.

What do you think? Is the RIM Blackberry really a PDA like a PalmOne Tungsten C or Dell Axim X50v?
Isn’t a Treo 650 a PDA too?

With the lavish praise hurled upon Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger in the media — and not a little bit of scorn for Longhorn’s problems — you’d think that jumping in with both feet would be a breeze.

Let’s be honest. There are annoyances and bugs in this product, just as with any other. Denying that may be typical of some extreme Mac advocates, but it doesn’t help: it doesn’t advance the platform, it doesn’t make things better, etc.

What bugs you about Tiger? Where does Tiger not behave, where do you see change for change’s sake, and what from Panther (or Jaguar) would you like to have back?

This blog is mostly meant to collect your nits and gripes in the feedback, but let me toss out a few of mine:

• iChat drops the connection frequently - once every couple hours, at least. This didn’t happen in Panther. Watching in Activity Monitor, it doesn’t take long for iChatAgent to go red (ie, “not responding”). What’s up with that?
• iSync acts like you’ve never used it before - even if you used iSync in Panther, the Tiger edition promptly announces that it’s a new day and you have to re-add all your devices and give them an initial sync. WTF?!
• Runaway CPU use - I occasionally see some benign application start gobbling 40% or more of CPU time, on both of my processors. Both iTunes and BBEdit have done this. Weirdly, the grab is reported by Activity Monitor as happening in system space, not user.
• Mail got a pointless makeover - no more drawer, and the toolbar buttons are now rearranged, smaller, and less hittable. Where did this come from? Can someone tell me why the new way is better?
• iChat Groups - groups used to be in a drawer, with checkboxes to show or hide group members in the buddy list. Now the names of all groups appear in the main display, with a count of how many group members are online. Fire does it this way too. On paper it sounds good — in practice it means you either have a trivial number of groups, or an iChat window as tall as the screen. If you have 10+ groups like I do, you can fill the window just with group names.

This is where you list some of your gripes… or just attack me for saying that Tiger has a few flaws.

The Problem

According to Apple’s very own guidelines for developers and to its marketing literature, widgets should be a breeze to install and use. For a vast majority of users, that is true and nothing beats the convenience of clicking on a link on a site to find, mere seconds later, that it added that one long missed bit of functionality (from tracking subway trains to downloading pasta recipes) to your Dashboard.

Unfortunately, in some rare cases, widgets may fail to install themselves properly or to appear in Dashboard as expected. Curiously enough, this «issue» seems to be more due to a lack of information and detail in the help files than anything else — as we are going to see that the workaround is simple.

Installing a widget

Should Safari be set up to automatically open «safe» (notice the quotes) files, it should automatically detect that the file you just downloaded is a widget, move it to the appropriate folder (usually /Library/Widgets) and add it to your Dashboard tray, ready for you to use.

Should that function be disabled or should the widget be improperly packaged, though, the installation process will not happen automatically. In that case, you simply need to manually uncompress the widget (if applicable) and move it to the traditional “/Library/Widgets” folder — much like you sometimes need to create folders in your Library to add plug-ins to an application.

Widgets located in this folder will be available to all users of a computer and should be automatically picked up by the Dashboard tray whenever you open it. You might need to force the widget list to scroll twice (by clicking on the little arrow buttons) to clear any cached images but that should take care of it.

In some instances, a log out / log in cycle will be required in order to force Dashboard to refresh the tray — adventurous users will perform a “killall Dock” in terminal, as the Dock is the parent process of Dashboard but that is a bit like using a chainsaw to open your iPod socks package…

Uninstalling a widget

Uninstalling a widget is as easy as grabbing it through the Finder and deleting it like you would any other file. To disable a widget without deleting it, simply change its extension — “.wdgt.off” is a favorite of mine but you can get as creative as you wish.

The same “refreshing” tricks apply for the uninstallation than for the installation process. All in all, the Dashboard drawer is very good at reflecting the status of your system but might need a bit of help from time to time.

A word of caution

This does not strictly relate to installing and uninstalling widgets but the question seems to be asked often enough. Apple did build security safeguards into Dashboard but widgets are potentially powerful applications. You should exercise the same caution when downloading widgets than when downloading other kind of applications and executables from the internet. Always prefer trusted sources and, if at all possible, use checksums to ensure that the file is good.

The
Kodak EasyShare one
was announced back in January.
But, if you, like me, missed the press releases back then, the link in the last sentence will take you to Kodak’s product specification page for this camera scheduled for a mid-2005 release.
I found it interesting that the large (3 inch) LCD screen is touch sensitive and comes with a stylus.
Note that the WiFi card is a separate/additional $99 option.
It will be interesting to see how easy the WiFi option can be used with various network configurations (WEP, WPA, etc.) and Operating Systems.

Wifi…GPS…What else will digital camera firms do with their cameras?

Related link: https://www.afp548.com/article.php?story=2005041722220621

With all the Mac world focused on the new version of OS X Client, I’m glad to see that folks aren’t totally ignoring the new version of OS X Server that goes with. The fine people at AFP548 have a detailed review of what’s new for the newest version of OS X Server.

Included are ACLs for filesharing, which is excellent news for anyone who’s ever had to deal with cascading group membership under previous versions of OS X Server. They provide a much more granular level of control than the user/group/other model that had been in use before. You can define ACLs to apply not only to files and users, but also to services, allowing a certain class of users to have access to services that others will not.

Open Directory got a bit of a boost as well, adding the ability to fully backup your OD Config to a .sparseimage for later restoration. Anyone who has ever had to resurrect one’s Open Directory configuration from scratch can tell you this is an incredible thing. In addition, you can secure, further, all your LDAP bindings using SSL, and Kerberos now supports a number of new services under 10.4 Server.

And while some people think mobile homes would be a bad thing to associate with an operating system, Apple begs to differ, and brings back one of the last truly missed features of OS 9: Portable Home Directories. Sure, Macintosh Manager made this possible back in the day, we’ve missed it since the bad old days, but now it’s back and ready for action. It allows for full home directory syncing with the primary server, giving you the ability to check out, re-sync, and check in your home folder.

Also included are a Jabber Server (complete with audio and video chat capability, using iChat), a version of Rael Dornfest’s blosxom weblogging tool built for Java and OS X Server [note after the fact- I have been corrected by a few readers to note that blosjom is more than just a simple port, but also a radical redevelopment of the original. Though based on blosxom, blosjom is a beast of different stripes], a Software Update server, virus protection for the mail service, a replacement for cron called “launchd”. For more on those, give the folks at AFP548 a look, they’re the one-stop shop for OS X Server tips, reviews, tricks and other bits of tasty information.

Got your Tiger Server rolling?

The problem

After installing Tiger, some users might notice that their Mac is slow, very slow, as if it had discovered a bottle of Xanax in your medicine cabinet and decided to call it quits… Luckily, this temporary state of fatigue and pain in the joints can be easily fixable.

Indeed, should you have a remaining Virex 7.5 installation on your computer, it is well possible that the kernel extensions and background processes that power Virex are going nuts, using up to 95% of your CPU — which, as you can imagine, can lead to various issues from excessive heat or noise to slowness and crashes.

The solution

Luckily, the solution to this issue is straightforward: you simply need to uninstall Virex by using the uninstaller the McAfee engineers have written for occasions like these. This uninstaller is a shell script that automatically rm-s everything Virex-related for you, including the trouble-inducing kernel extensions.

Chances are that it is already installed on your Mac, as it is part of the default Virex distribution — Spotlight will, under most circumstances, allow you to find it easily. Should it be nowhere to be found on your drive, you can find a copy of it in the Virex Installation disk image that can be downloaded from your iDisk’s Software folder.

Simply double-click on the script, which will open in Terminal and, when prompted, enter your administrative password (it will not be displayed on the screen), followed by return, which will grant it the necessary privileges to roam through your system folders.

Once the script has completed, simply restart your Mac.

A word of caution

Needless to say, this disables your anti-virus protection and you should therefore exercise extra caution. .Mac members might also want to contact Apple and inquire about this situation, making sure that you outline the steps you have taken as well as the symptoms you were experiencing.

The problem

Mac OS X v. 10.4 Tiger now ships on a DVD by default instead of a suite of CDs like Panther used to. This makes for a much faster, smoother installing experience as no disc swapping is required. Unfortunately, it also raises new questions for users whose Macs are well within the system requirements but do not own a DVD drive.

While Apple offers a Media exchange program, users who have purchased the Family Pack and only have one or two incompatible drives will probably not want to revert to the old fashioned CDs.

Luckily, there are alternative ways to install Tiger onto your Mac, even without an internal DVD drive. Note however that they are not officially supported and that they might, under some circumstances, lead to a slightly less stable installation so, as the young people saw nowadays, your mileage may vary.

Use an external DVD drive

That might seem like an obvious solution but many Mac users are wondering whether this is possible. The good news is that it is, with most external DVD drives. Anything modern, self powered, FireWire equipped and using the latest firmware available for it has good chances to do the trick.

The difficulty here is that you need to be able to boot from this device. To perform the installation this way, connect the external drive to the Mac, insert the DVD into it and restart your Mac while holding the “Option” key.

After a while, your Mac should present you with a list of all the available boot volumes, which includes this external drive — you may need to wait a few minutes until you can click on it but that’s normal. From there on, simply follow the traditional steps and you should be all right.

Using FireWire Target Disk Mode

This installation method relies on the ability of modern Macs to boot into a special mode called “FireWire Target Disk Mode” that causes them to be seen by other computers are simple external FireWire hard drives. It will require that you have a spare Mac with a built-in SuperDrive or Combo drive (anyone knows why they aren’t called ComboDrive, by the way?) to play with.

Start by starting the DVD-deprived Mac into FireWire Target Disk Mode, by holding the “T” key down until you see a big FireWire logo dancing on the screen. Then, by using a thick, known-good FireWire cable, connect it to your other Mac and wait until it appears on your Desktop.

Finally, insert the Tiger DVD into the computer and restart it. From there on, simply follow the traditional steps. You will be able to select the external Mac in the Installer Window as the destination drive for Mac OS X. Your other volumes should be left intact.