Phew. After a bit of bashing I got my scripts for my moblog back up and running. As things compile more cleanly in Panther I’ll replace the older versions of things I’m running. But for now it works well enough to have pictures showing up again. Yay!

Way back in July of 2002 Jon Udell wrote an article over on webservices.xml.com titled Control Your Identity or Microsoft and Intel Will that covered setting up your own mail client certificate. I remember liking the idea of digitally signing email and looking into getting one at the time, but I was using a mail program that didn’t support S/MIME at all. Fast forward to now. Apple releases Panther and the mail program supports S/MIME. After a bit of fiddling around I figured out how exactly to get a certificate and got it all set up. It was a bit confusing since I wasn’t sure if I was doing things right at all. Today someone pointed me at a page that has directions for setting it up, accomplishing what I’d planned to to all along. So, if you’re interested in setting one up, you should check out Using encryption and digital signatures in Mail. It’s actually not too difficult to set up with those instructions.

I actually think that Apple should offer secure certs for .Mac customers. It would be a kickass feature.

Being a bit of an anime geek I have a bunch of soundtrack CDs from Japan. iTunes handles them just wonderfully. Even CDDB seems to have pretty good results (many times in japanese). But every once in a while I run into a CD where the information in CDDB is in some strange character set that I can’t identify. When this happens I usually check over on FreeDB.org to see if they have better information (which they do much of the time). Today I discovered some great scripts for managing my track listings and looking them up on FreeDB.

Dave’s AppleScripts for iTunes has tons of useful scripts. I found one called something like FreeDB to iTunes via Safari that worked amazingly. It pulls the tracklisting from a FreeDB page and pastes it into iTunes.

Though what I’d really like is for iTunes to support using FreeDB, since they seem to be a big fan of open source projects.

matteimashita!

Everybody has been waiting for this one. The game is mostly text with a few static images and no voices, but the story is so compelling it pulls you along. And it’s doujinshi! Amazing how doujinshi is rising up to turn into a mainstream product, like Haibane Renmei did.

Since the game’s images were so static and sparse, it is very easy for me to be absorbed in the realtime motion and interaction and spoken dialogue that exists in the anime version. It seems to be sticking fairly close to the game’s story, with allowances for film-style storytelling versus book-style. It’s great to see the characters “alive” like this.

The opening song is reminiscent of Enigma, hee hee. Sneaky, without having to pay licensing or royalties. Ah, Megamisama did a similar thing in their soundtrack. I swear they just lifted songs from Windham Hill’s catalogue and tweaked them just enough to be different and royalty-free.

This is one of those shows where I know the story so I’m just enjoying watching how it folds out in another form of storytelling. Shingetsukan Tsukihime Official Site

Walt Mossberg had a nice article in the WSJ recommending Panther.

If You’re Getting Tired Of Fighting Viruses, Consider a New Mac

By WALTER S. MOSSBERG

For consumers and small businesses, the burden of using Microsoft Windows just keeps getting heavier. After growing easier to use for several years, Windows PCs have taken a giant step backward because they are so insecure.

Windows is riddled with security flaws, and new ones turn up regularly. It is increasingly susceptible to all kinds of viruses, malicious Trojan horse programs and spyware. As a result, Windows users have been forced to spend more of their time and money supporting their computers.

Almost every week, they are supposed to install patches to the already patchy operating system to plug these security holes. And every few months, it seems, Windows users must quake in fear as some horrible new virus is created by the international criminal class that constantly targets Windows.

But for consumers and small businesses, there’s a simple way out of this endless morass: Buy an Apple Macintosh computer. There are no viruses on the Macintosh’s excellent two-year-old operating system, called OS X. And the Mac is a terrific computer — as good as, or better than, Windows for the typical computing tasks important to mainstream users.

It isn’t impossible to write a virus for the Mac. The system isn’t impenetrable. Mac users should still use antivirus software. But any virus or security problem that does emerge on the Mac is likely to be much less serious than the Windows security crisis. “Mac OS X hasn’t had any viruses since the OS was launched,” says Bill Rosenkrantz, the head of Macintosh products at Symantec, the big antivirus firm. “It’s more difficult to attack the Apple system than Windows.” [Personal Technology from The Wall Street Journal]

It’s a nice article. I do like that he does say that the Mac isn’t impossible to write viruses for. But a lot of its user level security comes from not letting a user change major system files without putting in a password. In some ways that is the core of the issue. The Microsoft/PC world is one where people are used to there being one user. This has changed some with things like the NT and server product lines (and I think maybe XP too?), but even then so many people I know are logged in as administrator all the time.

OS X, with its roots in unix, is designed as a multi-user system. And people know by now that you just don’t do your day to day work as ‘root’ (the name of the primary admin user under unix). Because that’s just dangerous and you can do really bad things to yourself (ask any sysadmin for their best stupid thing they did as root story, we’ve all got one).

Also, I liked that Mossberg mentioned that the Mac and OS X may not be for everyone. This I certainly believe. I was in the Apple store a week or two ago and some woman wanted to buy an iBook because she’d been told they were great. But she had to run a few Windows programs on it that weren’t available for the mac so would have to get VirtualPC. Even though it would have meant losing a sale, I do think the sales person should have listened to what kind of software it was and seen if there was a good mac equiv and also how much she was going to use this software. If it’s what she’s going to be running 90% of the time, then she should really go the PC route. On the other hand, the Mac is a lot more compatible with the Windows world than most people think. You can connect to networked drives on a Windows box, join a Windows Domain, you can use Word. And there is a ton of software out there produced by smaller developers that just plain rocks.

Anyways, be prepared for a bit more Apple geeking from me in the next few days. I’m sure there will be lots of interesting news as more people start using Panther.

Even though I’m currently not working, weekends still seem to feel like weekends. Mostly because there are actually people around. This weekend I’m working on ripping/boxing up more CDs. I’ve got one box full already, pretty cool! I’m also taking the time to go and think of interesting playlists. For instance, I have one that picks 50 random tracks that I haven’t listened to since ripping. And then I have one that’s recently played tracks that I haven’t rated. This means I get to also go through and rank things and recheck their tag information as I listen to them.

Also, at the Apple store last night I grabbed the Sony cassette adapter they sell so I can listen in the car. It seems to work pretty well. At least it is much better than the FM tuner thingy I had before. Now I want to track down this cool doohicky from Belkin to hold my iPod.

Also, TechTV has been touring around the US with a home technology show that has been showing up in various malls. Today they’re in Worcester, so I’m thinking of driving out to take a look, since I love seeing new tech stuff. I actually really want to see any HDTV stuff they may have. And Morgan and Cat are going to be there. Oh yeah, and Adam too (but he doesn’t have a blog. Now, if I could just get my moblog code working everything would rock. I’m heading out around 1:15ish for this and will get back when I get back.

So I turn 35 in just over a week and I’m really not quite sure how I feel about it. I didn’t have a hard time with turning 30, so didn’t expect to think much about aging till I hit 40. But I’ve been finding myself thinking about turning 35 a lot. It’s actually been bugging me quite a bit. It feels like much more of a big step than turning 30. I’m sure everything will work out okay, but I am definitely fighting the whole getting old thing. I’m sure there’s a chunk of it that comes from various health issues. I have definitely been more aware of my own mortality of late.

And, to add a bit of lightness to this post, and in the spirit of internet begging, here’s some things I’d love to get for my birthday:

• A Shonen Jump Subscription
• A RadioShark
• Gift Certificate at the Apple iTunes Music Store
• Anything from my Amazon.com wish list
• Anything from my ThinkGeek wish list
• Either a new 15″ Powerbook G4 with a superdrive or a Powermac G5 (with a superdrive)

I’m still trying to figure out just what I’m going to do a week from Sunday to celebrate this year. I’m hoping to make it as childish as I can though. I hate growing up.

Been a kind of unmotivated few days. Though am slowly getting things done. I find myself distracted by my CD re-ripping a lot. I think once that project is done my brain may reset some. Of course, then I have my old picture scanning project. I’m wondering how I’m going to fare this winter. I kind of hate it when it starts to get too cold. It can be the perfect trigger for coughing.

Tonight I’m going to be uber geeky and swing by the Apple store for the release of Panther. Anyone else in the Boston area hitting the Cambridge store?