Mon - November 17, 2003

When is it Time to Surrender?


I have now spent so much time (and some money I didn't have) on trying to recover data from that damned hard disk. It has been the most exasperating process! (For those just tuning in, a bug in the new Apple Operating System caused a lot of peoples' external Firewire hard drives to lose a lot of data at the first several block of their disks, where much of the directory is stored. I had borrowed my roommate's Firewire drive to backup some data on both of my Apple computers while I rebuilt them with the new operating system, and before I had a chance to put the files back on the computers, the bug hit and I lost everything.

I downloaded the only utility people had reported success using—Drive Rescue X—and ran it to see if it could recover anything. The demo version I downloaded would scan the drive and recover one single file and then you had to pay $80 to upgrade it to the full version if you wanted to do any more. The program wasn't able to see a single file, so I figured I was out of luck.

There was one last thing to try before giving up. I'd read somewhere that someone had been successful at doing a "quick initialize" of their hard disk. That process had somehow created enough of a partition mapping (or something like that) that Data Rescue X was then able to find files. Since I had all but surrendered, I gave this a shot. Lo a behold Data Rescue X showed thousands of files. It showed the directories and files of everything I had backed up. So it was able to show that the files were there, although recovering their contents was a different matter.

Writing a full technical account here would take up a lot more space and few people would benefit, so I'll summarize. I blew the $80 upgrading to the full version of the recovery software, but it has proven completely unable to figure out the Allocation Map parameters of the drive and partition, so any time I "recover" a file I just get garbage. I can theoretically determine these parameters by finding two known files on the hard drive and reverse-calculating their directory positions, but "needle in haystack" doesn't even come close to describing looking for specific data on a 200 gigabyte drive. I can look at raw data blocks and scroll through them as fast as possible and probably spend 100 years looking for data. (There are about 380 million 512-byte blocks and I can look at them one at a time. See the impossibility?) I've tried a simple utility to search the hard drive for known strings, but it takes several hours per string, and I've still had no luck.

The frustrating thing is that I've already wasted so much damned time on this venture, and I don't know how much more I should invest before giving up. The fact of the matter is I have MOST of my important data backed up properly. My Quicken data for the past year is gone, as are a few work files I would like to have preserved, plus the September archive of this blog, but otherwise it's just looking like it isn't worth it.

Posted at 11:10 AM     Read More  


Tue - November 4, 2003

Results of the Article


It's coming up on 48 hours since I posted that article on iBlog on my site. The traffic has already started to taper off (in this medium, yesterday's news is really "yesterday's news"! I suspect today will bring in between a quarter and a half of yesterday's traffic. Not unexpected.

So if I interpret my web logs properly, I got 11960 "hits" of which 8748 were requests for "pages" (as opposed to images, stylesheets, etc.). The article was spread over 8 pages, and some people looked at my homepage and the iBlog homepage alternative, so the actual number of unique visitors would be much smaller. Actually, I've got page requests from 2,091 unique hosts (that includes web crawlers). If I look at it with respect to the number of page requests come from referrals (people who had just linked to my site from either a search engine or an outside link) I get almost 1800 unique visits. And of those only about 700 people appear to have read through the article.

It's really amazing what you can learn by looking through a good weblog report. (Yeah, yeah, and I'm sure some of you think it's no surprise the M.S. degree I'm trying to finish up is in Statistics. For your information, a stats master's degree has everything to do with high-ass-level theoretical Mathematics and nothing to do with starting at—and interpreting—pages of numbers!)

Okay, blogging time is over. Time to return to the Statistics paper.

Posted at 10:13 AM     Read More  


Sun - November 2, 2003

Just finished an iBlog Software Review


(As I write this I can't help but notice the funny self-referential nature of this posting. Well, perhaps life is recursive by nature and I should just get on with it.)

I've been spending little bits of time over the last couple weeks writing an article about the iBlog utility . If you've been reading this journal (yes, this very one!) then you already know the story about how I stumbled upon some major security problems with the iBlog utility, how in attempt to warn people about these issues I wrote a quick mini-article summarizing the problems, and how subsequently my web site saw more traffic in a single day than it had in its entire previous existence.

One thing was true: this was news, people recognized that this was (interesting) news, and I was at the forefront of this little bit of news. Thus my "15 seconds" of fame on the Internet. I enjoyed a brief success doing what I've been working hard at to achieve for months: hosting a web site that constituted a significant web presence. (Until that point, the only people who came to this site were those using Google to find a good Crepe Recipe !)

So I wrote a follow-up review of this infamous iBlog application . I did this for two reasons. First, I don't like getting attention for tearing something down without doing some fair justice by trying to point out its merits. In other words, I recognize that these people at Lifli Software worked damned hard on their program, and their hopes and dreams and maybe even their financial future was impacted by my actions. (I still think they should be spanked for not fixing these security problems yet.)

Second, I'm curious to see if I can repeat the phenomenon that brought a brief success to my website. Namely, if I write an informative web article, can I draw people here to read it?

Well, just minutes ago I submitted information about the article to about 9 different Mac-centric "news" web sites. We will see if any of the editors will choose to pick up the story, and of those that do, how many will actually draw an audience. In other words, this is a grand experiment to test the efficacy of writing free web articles in order to attract web traffic.

Let's see how it goes...

Posted at 03:10 PM     Read More  


Wed - October 29, 2003

Updates on OS X 10.3 Panther, Dreamweaver & Firewire Drive Crashes


First, some news on the computer front. I'd mentioned a few problems with the upgrade to Mac OS X 10.3 "Panther", one of which I solved, so I'll mention the solution here (and hope anyone needing it will be lead here by Google).

Dreamweaver MX (version 6.1) can not use its Spell Checker with Panther if you have the File Vault security feature activated. That's it plain and simple. If you want spell check, you must not use the File Vault. I'm sure someone will fix that down the line, and unless you're like a CIA spy or something like that, File Vault isn't going to be a "live or die" kind of feature, especially since it never existed before this new release of Panther.

Another Apple issue that's rather disturbing: it does sound like many people with external Firewire hard drives are having their entire drives (the data, not the physical device) destroyed when upgrading to Panther. This is pretty serious business and I'm amazed that Apple's been silent about this issue. Losing a hard disk (like I have now) can be SERIOUSLY NASTY. This could put some major egg on Apple's face if they don't act quickly to fix things!

Posted at 04:47 PM     Read More  


Sun - October 26, 2003

Panther first reactions


Wow, I sure did enjoy that extra hour from Daylight Saving Time. Half of it was spent enjoying some extended sleep time (since it felt like a gift it just seemed so much more enjoyable!) and the rest of the time was spent tuning my Powermac with its new OS X 10.3 Panther operating system.

There have been a few noticeable bugs that made it not quite the smoothest installation, but I'd rather have it now and let Apple finish polishing it than to wait until December or later. A couple of reactions:

Exposé is indeed great. It is the most noticeable improvement to the user interface and it is wonderful. Expect Microsoft to clone this feature in their next iteration of Windows. It's just too great to be ignored! Even cooler: I had bought a Microsoft optical mouse for my Mac a long time age. (Intellimouse Explorer USB to be specific.) This mouse has the typical three buttons on top (the middle button doubling as a scroll wheel) and two additional buttons on the side where your thumb curls around. So I've always wondered what a person would want with a 5-button mouse. Guess what! You can easily set up the three Exposé buttons to activate with buttons 3, 4 and 5 (the middle and two side buttons). Suddenly navigating among all your windows is a snap! Everyone should go get a 5-button mouse for their Macs right away!

Scheduled Power-up is a feature nobody has written about, but it rocks! This falls under the "How the Hell do they do it?" and "Let's see your PC do THAT!" categories. In a nutshell, you can setup your Mac to automatically turn itself on (and off) at scheduled times! I have my Powermac set to turn on at 7am. I powered down completely last night. Guess what? My computer was up and running when I opened my groggy eyes this morning! How the Hell did they manage that? It's magic!

Windows Networking (SAMBA) integration still needs work. There's a Network navigation icon on the new Finder's sidebar that makes it easier to access folders/shares on network computers. You no longer have to formally "mount" the folder. I keep my iTunes (mp3) library on a big Samba share on my Linux server and access it from all four other computers in my apartment. The iTunes application is decent about indexing music files that are stored on the network, but before iTunes can actually access those files I have to manually pull up the Finder and click over to the music folder so OS X will quietly mount the volume. There's no way to automatically mount a networking volume upon login.

Another glitch: if you mount a Windows (SAMBA) network folder in one account, you can't access that same share from another account unless you completely reboot the computer! I can understand given the whole UNIX underpinnings what's going on with automount and why it's not a non-trivial problem to solve, but this is still lame.

There were a few buggy behaviors I encountered. Exposé kinda wigged out when I was setting the mouse buttons, although it behaved perfectly once I logged out and into my account. The login screen for some reason turns the mouse pointer the same blue shade as the background so it's easy to lose. It turns back to normal the moment I click on something. There are things like that.

Well, that's enough about Panther for now. I've got to get some work done on that master's paper today. I might as well be lurking in my apartment because it's still hot as Hell outside. Who said it could be pushing 100 degrees in late October? That's simply wrong. Mix that with all the ash in the air from the huge raging fires and it combines to make an unpleasant week here in Los Angeles! Ick!

Posted at 12:56 PM     Read More  


Thu - October 2, 2003

Playing with iBlog


After spending so much time screaming about the security concerns of iBlog, it didn't take long for me to begin to feel a bit guilty. I mean, the application actually appears to be a nice, straightforward utility. Granted, I think the writers deserve to be spanked for letting such a bad security feature out into the public, but I am also a computer freelancer, I've written a bit of code in my time, and I know how hard it is to create and release a good product.

So in all fairness, I decided I had an obligation to really play-test this application and eventually write a fair review. (Review will be forthcoming.) The long-and-short of it? I actually think iBlog is a really nice little app and I'm strongly considering incorporating it into this web site.

I copied all these blog entries into it, played with adding the "nav bar" on the left into it, and the result is rather clean looking. It'll be a while before I actually make any switch.

Posted at 08:32 AM     Read More  


Wed - October 1, 2003

Fame!


Yea! October is finally here! There are so many fun things I have planned for this month that I'm going to have to really get organized in terms of work. Among some cool things going on (a) my friend Bob is FINALLY going to come visit from New York, (b) Hans is taking us on a sailing trip to Catalina, (c) Gay Day at Disneyland is this weekend, (d) Halloween is my favorite holiday of the year.

Lot's of cool stuff.

Today has focused again on the whole iBlog thing. A friend of mine suggested I submit the security issue to a few web sites like MacInTouch and MacFixIt . At first I thought they weren't going to bite, but this morning I found my abstract and links to my article on quite a few web sites. My traffic today has exceeded the traffic for all of September. In effect, I think my traffic will have gone up about 20-30 fold.

Not bad.

Now I just have to figure out how (a) to get people to wander around to other parts of my website and (b) to get potential customers so I can get some work and maybe pay next month's mortgage!

And for something in the "it's about bloody time!" department: checking my web logs, today Safari has gone from barely ever showing up on the radar to surpassing Internet Exploder. Of course it's understandable considering the specifically targeted audience that's getting pulled in.

Posted at 10:12 PM     Read More  


Mon - September 29, 2003

Enter iBlog


Oh I can't tell you how happy I am to see the Summer Heat fade away. I almost feel like these thoughts are somehow UnAmerican. I mean, isn't the American ideal of paradise somehow centered around sitting on a beach, getting a tan, etc. etc.? Well, I'll at least claim an excuse for hating the heat since I live in The Valley which can be anywhere from 10 to 30 degrees hotter than Hollywood just maybe 10 miles away. All I can say is I'm happy to stop running the expensive air conditioner.

An amusing little development: Apple offers a free copy of the new "iBlog" program for anyone who is subscribed to their .Mac service. I still think "blogging" is a fad. (There's no evidence that anyone is reading my front page, and almost certainly no evidence that anyone is ever returning over time to check up on my life.) But you know what? Throughout my life I've tried to start writing a journal or diary at least half a dozen times, and this meager form has gone far longer than any of my other endeavors.

So I'll keep on blogging for a while, since it's obviously keeping me writing. And I might switch over to "iBlog", although that would probably mean no longer keeping the blog on my front page, but moving it into the periphery. The jury is still out on that.

By the way, I'm still trying to surf. Last weekend was a bit discouraging. There's a big learning curve ahead and I'm not far along enough for it to really be fun yet. But there's this stubborn determination that I'm not likely to shake.

Take care everyone. October is just around the corner!

UPDATE (just a tad after midnight):

I just played around with the "private" pages created by iBlog. Wow! There's very little security in place. If you know the author's private iBlog root directory, you can just set your browser to disable JavaScript (easy in I.E.) and then the page displays without even asking for authentication! In other words, the "privacy" created by the iBlog program is horrendously ameturish! If you intend to "publish" a private web log, make sure you can lock down the appropriate directory on your web server with REAL authentication protocols. (That means: don't publish a private web log on .Mac!)

Wow! That's the poorest security implementation I've ever seen in my life!!! That's saying something!

Posted at 10:02 PM     Read More  

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