Entourage 2004 [added screen shot]

Michael Dale

I was looking a purchasing Office 2004 for Mac as I would like Word and Entourage (email client). I mainly need Entourage 2004 as it can connect to Exchange servers (the older versions can't).

Anyway today I work I was handed a copy of Entourage 2004, they have a site license for it here. Cool!

So I'm going to install it and see how I like it. Hopefully it's good. I'm looking forward to it!

Pity it didn't come with Word :p

[ADDED]

Now here is a screen shot of the program

http://www.bluetrait.com/images/Entourage.jpg

Mac mini

Michael Dale

Apple released a low-end headless Mac, the Mac Mini. The newest Mac offers the following features:

1.25GHz G4 or 1.4GHz G4 for $US499 (listed at $AU799) or $US599 (listed at $AU949)
6.5 inches wide and 2 inches tall
2.9 pounds
Up to 1GB of Memory supported (comes with 256MB)
ATI Radeon 9200
iLife '05
Keyboard, Mouse, and Monitor sold seperately

It can be found on the apple site here: http://www.apple.com/macmini/

They have also released the ipod shuffle, a flash based mp3 player. Found here: http://www.apple.com/ipodshuffle/

The Mac mini looks pretty sexy, and I know of a friend who really wants one. I might look at getting on too. Although it isn't any faster than my ibook. Still it is a very small sexy little computer.

These things will also run linux and other unix operating systems. Quite a few people are looking to turn these things into mini servers.

IPv6 connectivity

Michael Dale

When I installed FreeBSD onto my server it setup an IPv6 address, funky I thought although I'm never going to use it. Anyway my Mac is also built on BSD and it too has an IPv6 address. So I tried a normal ping but it only supports IPv4 so I tried typing ping6 and it worked! Cool!

So anyway I now have two computers talking to each other with IPv6.

electra:~ michaeldale$ ping6 -I en1 fe80::200:e8ff:fe6c:557b
PING6(56=40+8+8 bytes) fe80::211:24ff:fe2a:f1b3 --> fe80::200:e8ff:fe6c:557b
16 bytes from fe80::200:e8ff:fe6c:557b, icmp_seq=0 hlim=64 time=1.365 ms
16 bytes from fe80::200:e8ff:fe6c:557b, icmp_seq=1 hlim=64 time=1.338 ms
16 bytes from fe80::200:e8ff:fe6c:557b, icmp_seq=2 hlim=64 time=1.382 ms
16 bytes from fe80::200:e8ff:fe6c:557b, icmp_seq=3 hlim=64 time=2.111 ms
16 bytes from fe80::200:e8ff:fe6c:557b, icmp_seq=4 hlim=64 time=1.433 ms
16 bytes from fe80::200:e8ff:fe6c:557b, icmp_seq=5 hlim=64 time=1.379 ms
16 bytes from fe80::200:e8ff:fe6c:557b, icmp_seq=6 hlim=64 time=1.346 ms
16 bytes from fe80::200:e8ff:fe6c:557b, icmp_seq=7 hlim=64 time=1.354 ms

--- fe80::200:e8ff:fe6c:557b ping6 statistics ---
8 packets transmitted, 8 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max = 1.338/1.463/2.111 ms

Also that connection is running over my wireless, pretty fast I thought. :)

Thoughts on the new mac. [now with screen shots]

Michael Dale

Well I got my mac yesterday, about a week before I was expecting it so it was in time for Christmas, excellent. This is the first mac I have owned so it has been a bit of a learning experience.

As I’ve said many times before I decided to purchase an ibook 12”. I wanted a small laptop that I could move around without any problems. Everyone I talked to said that a 12” laptop would be the best thing to do.

I didn’t get a powerbook for a few reasons. Firstly a new model is thought to be out in the next few months and most people don’t recommend you get the current model as it is getting a bit old. Although it is still great. Secondly the ibook is a lot cheaper, about $600. And finally the battery life is much better in the ibook (5.5hours vs 3.5).

This model ibook has only been out for about a month here in Australia too, so it is nice and new.

The ibook comes standard with 256mb ram but everyone said that OS X really needed at least 512, I got a good deal on ram and added an extra 512mb (now 768) so that is nice.

Anyway I booted up the ibook for the first time and was greeted with a setup wizard. All pretty standard stuff, although it was a bit longer than a normal Windows one. Here I setup my user account and Wireless internet connection. Straight away the wireless connection worked, that was a good sign.

Anyway it logged in (very quickly might I add) and told me about some software updates for the OS and the Wireless. So I downloaded 150mb of patches. Then I did something wrong and cancelled the whole thing! damn. Anyway I redid the download with no problems. So I am now running OS X 1.3.7.

The first thing to check out was internet access. The mac comes with Safari as its standard browser. It has tabs and seems to work nicely. Although it uses KHTML and not Gecko as its rendering engine. It doesn’t make stuff look as good as Firefox although it is still a nice browser (I’ll talk about IE in a sec).

So off to download Firefox. I downloaded some .bin file and opened it. The file mounted itself as a hard drive and I could run firefox straight away, no install or anything. Odd. It seemed to work fine but I wanted to INSTALL it! So you just end up dragging the firefox icon out of the .bin file to your computer. Some programs do come with an installer, others don’t. I’m still getting used to that.

Now for IE. The mac came with IE 5.2 installed. Now when I think of IE 5 (or any version) I think yuck. But no! IE on the mac is good. It renders stuff almost the same as Firefox, holy crap! IE on mac is better than IE on Windows! DAMN. But there is no tabs so back to Safari and Firefox.

The funny thing I’m running both Safari and Firefox at the same time, I just switch between the two. Unlike windows changing between apps doesn’t really feel like changing between apps, its just like changing to a different IE window or something. Safari and Firefox just seem to go together. So I’m using both.

And now for the seriously cool OS X feature. Expose!! Wow. I love the F9 button! It brings up all your application windows in a minimised size and you can select a program or window just by clicking on it. So much better than alt+tab (although the mac has that too, apple+tab). F11 is like the show desktop button in the quickstart menu on windows. F10 just shows the windows from the program you are currently running. Very cool!

I’m really glad I got the ibook, the battery life is great. About 4.5 to 5 hours with the wireless turned on (bluetooth off). Speaking of Wireless, Damn! It is so good. Very fast and I can walk half way down the street without it dropping out. The netgear AP seems to be doing its job very nicely.

Oh the suspend on this thing is great. The laptop hasn’t been switched off since I got it. Just close the screen and it goes to sleep, open the screen and it is ready.

Michael-Dales-Computer:/ michaeldale$ uptime
17:34 up 1 day, 1:50, 2 users, load averages: 0.16 0.12 0.19

My poor PC hasn’t been switched on since yesterday (after I copied all my music across). The mac does windows shares very nicely too.

I installed Remote Desktop Client so I can access my windows server. I can run that in full screen so it feels just like a PC, scary!

There are still some things I need to learn about the Mac but I’ll get there. I love it!

I just need to get a C compiler for this thing.

Anyway I’ll upload some pictures later.

Merry Christmas again, have a great day :)

[added]

Here are some screen shots of my mac.
http://blog.dalegroup.net/images/site/mac1.jpg
http://blog.dalegroup.net/images/site/mac2.jpg
http://blog.dalegroup.net/images/site/mac3.jpg

more photos to come later...

Laptop ordered

Michael Dale

I've decided to go with the ibook as it is cheaper and not all that much slower (plus it has a better battery and wireless).

The specs are as followed:

12” ibook combo
1.2GHz G4
768mb DDR Ram
60gb HDD
Blue Tooth
DVD/CDRW

Should take about 2 weeks to ship. It is taking this long as it isn’t a standard model ibook. The base model has a 30gb HDD, 256mb ram and no Blue Tooth. Should be good.

With the money saved from buying this I’m going to get a wireless access point. Funky.

Spam by $_POST part 2.

Michael Dale

Spam sucks. I talked briefly about spam by $_POST here: http://blog.dalegroup.net/archive/blog/newsid/142

Stuart (http://smkz.is-a-geek.net/) has been receiving vast quantities of spam on his wordpress site. This is because the system is standard across all wordpress installs making it easier for bots to target these sites.

The bots have customised settings that randomly send $_POST information directly to the wordpress (or other) site, in this case to the file wp-comments.php.

I tried to help Stuart with his problem by writing an htaccess rule that blocked direct access attempts to this file (and a few others).

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://smkz.is-a-geek.net/(.*)$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} .*wp-comments-post.php$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} .*wp-comments.php$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} .*wp-comments-popup.php$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} .*wp-comments-reply.php$
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]

Although it didn't take long for the bots to work around this.

I have now modified his wordpress install to have a hidden input field. What this does is sends a value to wp-comments.php when the user submits a comment. It is then checked to make sure it is correct, otherwise the comment isn't posted.

So it looks something like this:

wp-comments.php (and popup one if used)



wp-comments-post.php
//Start Dale's spam block here
if ($_POST['the-dale-spam-block'] != 'same random number here') {
die('spam block');
};
//Finish Dale's spam block here

If people really wanted to spam his site they could just take this random number and modify the bot settings. Although I don't think they will (too much effort for one website).

Although I've developed a new system that is currently working on this site which is much better. I do plan to port this to wordpress, but it currently doesn't make use of sessions (except in the admin panel) and therefore doesn't support what I am doing on this site.

Think of this system as one like those random image number generators but without the user needing to enter anything extra in.

I randomly generate a string that is entered into a hidden post field. This string is also stored in a session. When the user posts this string is sent to the post file. The file then reads the sent string (from the user) and the string out of the session. If both are the same the comment can be posted.

This is good for two reasons.
1) The number changes every reload and thus a bot cannot be customised around this
2) The use of cookies is needed, almost every user has cookies turned on but bots don't and thus cannot store the session id.

Cool. So I'll look into wordpress support later but use the system I've done above to block stuff for the time being.

To be continued...

A laptop.....a....mac laptop?!?!

Michael Dale

A laptop.....a....mac laptop?!?!

Right well I’ve been a bit absent from the old web site lately.

I had Physics last week on Wednesday which was surprising not too bad, considering I only started doing work in physics after we’d finished our school classes ;) But yeah I was fairly happy with it. I’ve been pretty happy with all my exams, there hasn’t really been anything that I wasn’t expecting and everything seems easier than the trials. Nice. My last exam is on Friday (last day of the HSC), which happens to be ITF (crappy computer course) so I’m not planning on studying until latterrrr.

Tomorrow ucosty is having a lan party so I am looking forward to that. A good way to start the holidays, even if I’ve got an exam left! :p

In two weeks time I will be 18, which is pretty scary. But birthdays are good because you get free stuff

So I’ve decided I think I’ll be getting a laptop. But it isn’t all that easy to find something that is exactly what you want. I’ve got about $AU2000 to spend. You can get a pretty beefy laptop if you spend about $2500 but that is a bit too much for me.

I am looking at two laptops currently. A Dell Inspiron 8600, a Centrino based PC
(http://www1.ap.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/inspn_8600_au?c=au&l=en&s=dhs&~ck=mn) or an Apple iBook 14” (http://www.apple.com.au/ibook/)

Both seem to be about the price I want. I can get a student discount of about $200 so that would be good.

I just really don’t know what I want. I would be able to get a Radeon 9600 in the PC where as the Mac would only have a Radeon 9200. But I’d get a bigger hard drive in the mac. I’d also get Bluetooth in the Mac.

Both come with a CDRW/DVD, Wireless, working battery (big plus), colour screen (not used to that), 512mb Ram. The PC would be a 1.4GHz Pentium-M and the Mac would be a 1.33GHz G4.

I wouldn’t really be using it for games so I suppose the video card doesn’t matter. I’d like a Mac for OS X. It’s built on BSD plus has all the nice mac features.

But I’ve been a PC user since DOS 5.0 and the PC laptop would be able to do games (better video card than my PC).

I was talking to one of my friend’s dads yesterday and he is a big mac fan and that I’d really like it. He is a power user so he knows stuff about them, not just point and click. I also like the look of the mac better.

Microsoft is going no where with Windows at the moment. I’d probably end up installing Windows 2000 on it. I’m not a fan of the XP bloat. Apple is releasing OS X 1.4 Tiger next year, but also OS X 1.3 is really nice. I love the look of Exposé (http://www.apple.com.au/macosx/features/expose/).

Argh. So yeah. Fast PC or sexy Mac. Software really isn’t an issue. I do web development, email, music, web browsing. Both have all the software I’d need. I’m leaning for a mac just because I like change. Plus the whole niche groupie thing that comes with being a mac owner.

Does anyone have a Mac laptop? Are they funky? There is an Apple shop in Balmain so I might head over there today.