Category: Apple and OS X

I’m posting this on a blog entry, not because I think my loyal blog readers are going to be interested by it, but someone out there on the web might run into this issue, and some googling suggests that nobody has reported on it.

There were two strange software failures going on recently, both of them quite troublesome, and it took until today to realize they were directly related.

On the one hand, I noticed that three people (who now work distantly together) were having problems with iChat on their G5 computers. Basically, an attempt to initiate a video chat would die with a cryptic—and misleading—message: Disconnected from Video Chat because: Can’t get video from the camera. The problem could only be solved by rebooting the computer.
Continue reading “iChat/iSight and Postgres Memory Bug”

Arguably my website owes a lot to the iBlog application. When Apple released a free license of iBlog to all .Mac subscribers I downloaded it, played around with it, and quickly discovered a glaring security hole.

I wrote a warning article about the security issues and posted links to my article on a few Mac news sites. Thousands of visitors flooded my site and ever since I’d say it’s been “on the map”. Even though I have hardly done anything since December (until now) the site still draws dozens of people per day.

Later on I decided that if I was going to write an unpopular article about the application, I should really be fair and give the package a good shake-down and ended up writing a review of the package and got another several thousand visitors.

I would say the review was mostly favorable. The application had a couple bugs, particularly when publishing the blog, and especially if I tried ever jumping from one computer to another. Really I was forced to pick one computer and use it exclusively for my blogging activity. But otherwise I though the design was nice, the templates were customizable… enough. Of course, I wasn’t a blogging expert—I had just started about a month previous—so I didn’t have much of a comparison.

Time to return and write the epilogue, or more specifically, the post-mortem.
Continue reading “Postmortem, iBlog”