About the personal computing experience. · 2006-10-01 · Sponsors About This Particular Macintosh has been free since 1995, and we intend to keep it that way. Our editors and staﬀ

ATPM1210 October 2006 Volume 12 Number 10

About This Particular Macintosh About the personal computing experiencetrade

ATPM 1210 1 Cover

Cover ArtCopyright copy 2006 Mirko von Berner1 We need new cover art each month Write2 to us

The ATPM Staff

PublisherEditor-in-Chief Michael Tsai3

Managing Editor Christopher Turner4

Associate EditorReviews Paul Fatula5

Copy Editors Chris Lawson6

Ellyn Ritterskamp7

Brooke Smith8

VacantWeb Editor Lee Bennett9

Webmaster Michael Tsai10

Beta Testers The Staff11

Contributing Editors Eric Blair12

Mike Chamberlain13

Matthew Glidden14

Ted Goranson15

Andrew Kator16

Robert Paul Leitao17

Wes Meltzer18

Sylvester Roque19

Charles Ross20

Mark Tennent21

David B Thompson22

Evan Trent23

Vacant1httpdirecciondeartecom2mailtocover-artatpmcom3mailtomtsaiatpmcom4mailtocturneratpmcom5mailtopfatulaatpmcom6mailtoclawsonatpmcom7mailtoeritterskampatpmcom8mailtobsmithatpmcom9mailtolbennettatpmcom

10mailtomtsaiatpmcom11mailtoeditoratpmcom12mailtoeblairatpmcom13mailtomchamberlainatpmcom14mailtomgliddenatpmcom15mailtotgoransonatpmcom16mailtoakatoratpmcom17mailtorleitaoatpmcom18mailtowmeltzeratpmcom19mailtosroqueatpmcom20mailtocrossatpmcom21mailtomtennentatpmcom22mailtodthompsonatpmcom23mailtoetrentatpmcom

ATPM 1210 2 Cover

Artwork amp Design

Layout and Design Michael Tsai24

Web Design Simon Griffee25

Cartoonist Matt Johnson26

Blue Apple Icon De-signs

Mark Robinson

Other Art RD NovoGraphics Director Vacant

EmeritusRD Novo Robert Madill Belinda Wagner Ja-mal Ghandour Edward Goss Tom Iovino DanielChvatik Grant Osborne Gregory Tetrault RaenaArmitage Johann Campbell David Ozab

ContributorsLee Bennett Mike Chamberlain Matt Johnson Mi-raz Jordan Chris Lawson Robert Paul Leitao WesMeltzer Robert Reis Sylvester Roque Mark Ten-nent David B Thompson Angus Wong Macintoshusers like you

SubscriptionsSign up for free subscriptions using the Web form27

Production ToolsApache AppleScript BBEdit Cocoa Docu-tils DropDMG FileMaker Pro GraphicConverterLATEX Mesh make Mailman Mojo Mail MySQLPerl Photoshop Elements PyObjC Python rsyncSnapz Pro X ssh Subversion Super Get Info

ReprintsArticles original art and desktop pictures may notbe reproduced without the express permission of the

author or artist unless otherwise noted You mayhowever print or distribute copies of this issue ofatpm as a whole provided that it is not modified inany way Authors may be contacted through atpmrsquoseditorial staff or at their e-mail addresses when pro-vided

Legal StuffAbout This Particular Macintosh may be uploadedto any online area or included on a CD-ROM com-pilation so long as the file remains intact and unal-tered but all other rights are reserved All informa-tion contained in this issue is correct to the best ofour knowledge The opinions expressed in atpm arenot necessarily those of the entire atpm staff Prod-uct and company names and logos may be registeredtrademarks of their respective companies Thank youfor reading this far and we hope that the rest of themagazine is more interesting than this

bull bull bull

Thanks for reading atpm

24mailtomtsaiatpmcom25httphypertextherocom26httpwwwcornstalkercom27httpwwwatpmcomsubscribe28httpwwwatpmcom

ATPM 1210 3 Cover

SponsorsAbout This Particular Macintosh has been free since 1995 and we intend to keep it that way Our editorsand staff are volunteers with real jobs who believe in the Macintosh way of computing We donrsquot make aprofit nor do we plan to As such we rely on advertisers and readers like you to help us pay for our Website and other expenses

bull bull bull

You can help support atpm by buying from online retailers using our links1 If yoursquore going to buy fromthem anyway why not help us at the same time

We are also accepting inquiries from interested sponsors and advertisers We have a variety of programsavailable to tailor to your needs Please contact us at advertiseatpmcom for more information

1httpwwwatpmcomaboutsupportshtml

ATPM 1210 4 Sponsors

Welcomeby Robert Paul Leitao rleitaoatpmcom

Welcome to the October issue of About This Par-ticular Macintosh We begin our latest issue witha brief look at the state of the Mac and a quicktour of todayrsquos iPod Nation The autumnal equinoxhas passed and its aftermath brings cooler days andlonger nights In this issue wersquoll highlight a few brightspots on the fall journey to the holidays

iTunes 7Sporting a major version number identical to that ofits QuickTime component iTunes 7 has arrived Thislatest release of the popular Windows and Macintoshapplication has one non-identical feature The Win-dows version of iTunes 7 has a curious optional instal-lation Itrsquos an Apple software updater Increasinglythe Windows version of iTunes is less of an applica-tion that works with Windows and more of a solutionthat makes Windows irrelevant iTunes 7 introducesthe new movie store and offers several dozen featureflicks from Disney and Pixar

iMac MigrationThe waning weeks of summer witnessed the releaseof the new 24-inch iMac and the migration of theline to the 64-bit Intel Core 2 Duo Leopard Applersquospending OS X upgrade will match the new 64-bithardware with a 64-bit OS In the meantime the newiMac gives pro users a great deal to think about Dothey need a Mac Pro for commercial work or will thenew iMac more than meet their needs

Windows EmigrationThe new iMac line gives millions of Windows userssomething to think about as well In less than a yearApple has completed its Intel transition and will soonbring to market a real 64-bit OS for its Intel hard-ware The delays in the introduction of WindowsVista and a quirky and awkward 64-bit implementa-tion leave Microsoft years behind Apple in deliver-ing true 64-bit application performance Watch for asteady rise in Macintosh market share over the nextsix months as a steady stream of Windows users em-brace the Mac The new iMac is priced aggressivelyagainst its competition and makes for a superb solu-tion for homes schools and businesses The abilityto run Windows makes the iMac a very cost-effective

solution for any enterprise with a volume license forMicrososftrsquos OS

iPod Nation ImmigrationDay by day the iPod Nation is gaining new citizensThe redesigned iPod nano and iPod shuffle add a newdimension and new depth to the line Therersquos muchtalk about the release of the Zune as an iPod com-petitor come mid-November But the Zune is moreapt to take share from other iPod competitors thanfrom the worldrsquos top digital music device Watch foran expanded iPod selection at retail stores as Ap-ple prepares for another stellar selling season Foottraffic to the Apple retail stores will set records thisquarter and the iPodrsquos momentum will benefit Mac-intosh sales The iPod Nation is not only adding newcitizens each day but the Made for iPod accessoryprogram also makes the iPodrsquos success the vested in-terest of dozens of iPod-related product manufactur-ers

Share Price AppreciationApple Computer ended September with the com-panyrsquos share price at $7698 and the companyrsquosmarket capitalization (the sum value of all out-standing shares) at well over $65 billion dollars andwithin $10 per share of an all-time high Investorsand analysts see growth ahead for the Mac and iPodmaker and at mid-month the company should reportanother quarter of significant year-over year gains inrevenue and earnings Revenue and earnings donrsquotrise when the companyrsquos products stand still or siton store shelves Look beyond the popular newsto see how fast things might be moving Expectincreases in Macintosh market share to be reportedat mid-month and guidance from management thatsuggests another strong quarter for iPod sales TheIntel transition is complete and November andDecember should be big months for the Mac

ATPM Cover Art IncarnationEach month the editors of atpm endeavor to bringyou the best and most informative Macintosh lifestylemagazine in an easy to read monthly format Fre-quently we reach out to our readers for contributionsof stories articles and digital art This month we are

ATPM 1210 5 Welcome

seeking artists to contribute to contribute cover artfor our publication Please contact1 our managingeditor for more information

Our October issue includes

Bloggable Fire in the (AirPort) HoleDid Apple patch the WiFi vulnerabilities thatbrought so much angst last month Itrsquos hard tosay Wes Meltzer finds the argument on both sidesand tries to get out of the way this month withvarying degrees of success Plus a little extra onhistorical Mac benchmarks the cutting edge of Macdevelopment and the finer points of hat-eatingetiquette

Mac of All Trades Dream MachineWaiting for a new MacBook Pro reawakens memoriesof Applersquos past and thoughts of Macs to come

MacMuser 17primeprime Is Just Not Big Enoughfor Some MenHow does one decide between a wide screen LCDmonitor and a diesel Toyota Hiace

Web Accessibility Nvu Impressive andPowerfulNvu is an impressive and powerful piece of softwaresuitable for both those with and those without HTMLskills

Segments Infinitely ImprobableldquoHave we chosen a brighter future compared to thealternative universe ruled by MicrosoftIntel Onlythe Time Machine will tellrdquo

How To Crash Logs What Are They andWhat Do They MeanYour Mac logs just about everything that happensmdashincluding crashes Herersquos a brief description of whatthe crash logs can tell you

Desktop Pictures GermanyThis monthrsquos photos of Dachau Gunzenhausen andNuremberg were taken by atpm reader Robert Reis

Cartoon CortlandBack from his short hiatus Cortland returns with thestory of his college graduation and subsequent huntfor a job

1mailtoeditoratpmcom

Review A Better Finder Rename 74A Better Finder Rename has been a staple utility forso long some people may not even remember ever nothaving it in their arsenal Meanwhile its develop-ers have continued to add increasingly useful actionsraising the application to the level of a professionalpowerhouse tool

Review iWooferVolkswagenrsquos ldquoFastrdquo meets the iPod

Review Making Music on the Apple MacIf yoursquore new to the art of music-making on the Macthis might be the book for you

Review Parallels Desktop 221848Parallels Desktop is a useful choice for gaining theability to run Mac OS X and Windows at the sametime on an Intel-based Macintosh David Thompsonfeels improvements are needed with memory require-ments and file sharing between guest and host oper-ating systems

ATPM 1210 6 Welcome

E-MailFileMaker 851

You mention that FileMaker 85 is a universal binaryrelease for Macs early in your review but neglect thisimportant fact in your conclusions about whether ornot the upgrade is worthwhile

Also attendees at this yearrsquos developer conferencesaw that the Web viewer is much more than a portalto Web sites (such as Google Maps) but can be usedto extend FileMaker in very interesting ways whencombined with Java Flash or other Web technolo-gies Check out iSolutionsrsquo ICE product for example

mdashScott NewtonHonestly I donrsquot consider it that important afeature Itrsquos nice but the extra speed is only ofinterest to those with Intel Macs It still seemsto me that the reasons for upgrading will de-pend on the other new features available mostnoteably the Web viewer

Irsquoll check the product you mention regard-ing the increased usefulness of the Web viewerwhen combined with other technologies

mdashCharles Ross

bull bull bull

No doubt the big thing with 85 is that it is now Uni-versal which means a very signifcant speed increaseon Intel Macs

However on PowerPC Macs there is also an ob-servable performance boost I am seeing 50 fastersorts and recalcs in our solutions Not that this wouldmake me run out and upgrade an office full of File-Makers however it is noteworthy

mdashRob Russell

iMac Core DuoHaving purchased a 20primeprime iMac Core Duo with 1 GBof memory and 500 GB storage plus a better 3Dvideo card upgrade I felt pretty smug in movingaway from my three G3s and PC notebooks AlasSuch was not to be as I found myself running all fivecomputers with various tasks I just could not let goof my favorite hobby of running all computers whilelistening to the iPod and the TV I guess one couldsay it has never been an either-or proposition withme but an all-or-nothing mind set

1httpwwwatpmcom1209filemakingshtml

In any event the new iMac is by far the best homecomputer on the market and nobody who has anyunderstanding of all the others should ever consideranything else This is my very experienced opinionhaving worked with various computers and makes andsystems since 1968 Of course I have no intentionof down playing the new Mac Pros here but theyappear to be far more machine than I require for myoperations

mdashRon Cowden

Running Classic Software on an Intel Mac2

This is amazing And excellent to be able to doThanks for sharing it

mdashCatherine Wiles

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I have been holding off on getting an Intel Mac be-cause HyperCard is still a must-have application forme Of the three emulators you installed is there aclear performance leader in terms of speed and sta-bility Thanks

mdashTim Selander

Interesting question I didnrsquot really test forspeed but the truth is that each of themwas very responsive I would say that anyof them would work well I have been usingSheepShaver most of all because itrsquos runningthe most recent OS (85) of those emulated

Perhaps itrsquos because these OSes are lesscomplex than Windows XP but none of theseemulations were lagging in speed Whenever Iused to run XP under Virtual PC on my Power-Book G4 it was always too slow to do anythingbut a quick check of software I wrote Withthese the responsiveness was always good

I did have a few crashes but I honestlydonrsquot remember which they occurred in Itwas either SheepShaver or Basillisk II but MinivMac may not run the software you need

My recommendation would be to trySheepShaver first These donrsquot take too longto set up so itrsquos cheap to try them out andtest to see if the performance and stability aresatisfactory for you

mdashCharles Ross2httpwwwatpmcom1209classicshtml

ATPM 1210 7 E-Mail

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Absolutely HyperCard is why Irsquom a Mac user Irsquomnot a programmer but HyperCard lets me buildpretty much any little utility application I needWhy be a slave to software that does what someoneelse thinks I need Using HyperCard Irsquove auto-mated sub-titling on our TV program automated aradio station made a system to track our viewersand listeners kick out invoices manage our stockand more The computer does what I want it toWhat a shame Apple let it diemdashabsolutely the mostfoward-thinking useful piece of software Apple evermade

mdashTim Selander

WriteRoom Review3

Irsquove been using Ulysses4 which has a full-screen modeas well for quite a while I definitely prefer it to anyother text editor when focus is an absolute must

mdashDaniel Matarazzp

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The freeware application Journler5 has full-screenmode too plus many other journaling and formattingfeatures

mdashWelfl

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Irsquove been using WriteRoom for about three monthsnow and love it Since the majority of my text isfor the Web the lack of formatting options are not aproblem For that I rely on Markdown6

Irsquom of two minds about adding features It mightbe nice to be able to use TextEditrsquos formatting butthe pure simplicity of plain text is freeing Irsquove trieddemos of Ulysses CopyWrite and Jerrsquos Novel Writerwhich all offer full screen composing too but I foundthat the bells and whistles distracted me Yes Irsquomeasily distracted Thatrsquos why WriteRoom is so help-ful

mdashMichael McKee

bull bull bull3httpwwwatpmcom1209writeroomshtml4httpblue-teccomulysses5httpjournlerphildownet6httpdaringfireballnetprojectsmarkdown

Why not just use NANO or VI if you insist onbasic operation Theyrsquore already installed andfree There is a multitude of options to run themfull screen such as Single User Mode gt Consolefull screening the terminal7 or an adjustment toX11 Heck you could even full-screen BBEdit withthe application available at the previously referencedURL

mdashScott Park

The great thing about WriteRoom is that itrsquossort of like having a fenced-in backyard Thatbackyard is always right outside your door andwhenever you need it itrsquos there But if youhave to go back inside the effort required isminimal

In WriteRoom pressing Esc gets you thatbackyard separated from all the distractions ofhome But as soon as something calls or justto go back in and check your e-mail all youhave to do is press Esc again

It strikes me as the best combination ofisolation and ease of leaving that isolation

When I first switched to the Mac I keptmy Linux desktop sitting on my desk at homeready for me to use whenever I needed to finda way to get some work done (I had alwaysdropped to console mode to work) That wayall I had to do was rotate my chair between thetwo workstations

Anyway WriteRoom has that kind of com-bination while allowing you to stay in the OSIt has an ease of use that quitting distractingapplications and maximizing a window say orrebooting into Linux just canrsquot give you Thatrsquoswhat I like about WriteRoom

mdashWes Meltzer

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I write almost every day for my site Storage-Mojocom and WriteRoom has rapidly become mywriting tool of choice I use Textpander to insertmy commonly used tags so I can just do a SelectAll Copy and Paste into WordPress I also useBBEdit Textwrangler Word and some others butWriteRoom is the best thing for me since MacWrite

Prettying things up is just a distraction My needis to capture keystrokes into a text file as easily andsimply as possible Now if there were a battery pow-ered keyboard agrave la the Radio Shack 100 of 20 yearsago Irsquod be set

7httpianhendersonorgmegazoomerhtml

ATPM 1210 8 E-Mail

mdashRobin Harris

WelcomeI stumbled on atpm as I was surfing around inpreparation for upgrading to a new MacBook Proand thinking about what bag I would get with it Iappreciated reading opinion from real Mac users andwith them found my way to the right rig Thanksfor the effort

mdashMichael Chamberlain

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I just came across your publication through a mentionat Hog Bay Software that you were discussing some oftheir products All I can say is where have you guysbeen all my life I know that is more my problemand not yours but I find the Web site very readablefull of good content (if yoursquore a Mac fan as I am) andvery well organized I wish I knew about this placeearlier Thanks for the good read

mdashRK Foster

Wersquore happy you found us and enjoy what yousee Remember you can go back and read anypast issue all the way back to the first in theArchives8 link at the top of our pages mdashEd

New Business Models9

Excellent article and Irsquod second all the points madeSorry I wasnrsquot able to respond in time as Irsquod hopedbut Irsquom buried in WriteRoom development (actuallydocumentation now for the new 11 release due soon)

I came to Hog Bay Software for the products(WriteRoom was exactly what I was looking for atthe time) but it was Jesse his own insight andcreativity and what I see as the fundamentallyprogressive nature of his business model and method(especially as Irsquove seen it from the inside out now)that kept me around and has led to my direct andsignificant participation in my favorite product

Not only is user-directed software developmentgood for the users but itrsquos great for the softwareas I hope will be shown when our latest releases showforth later this quarter

mdashJeff Alexander

bull bull bull8httpwwwatpmcomBack9httpwwwatpmcom1209atposhtml

Thanks for this article I hope we get some good feed-back and ideas on how to make Hog Bay Softwarework better

I want to mention one last aspect of ldquouser pow-eredrdquo software I started working on these ideassoon after reading The E-Myth Revisted10 a buis-ness book that focuses on building your buisness asif you were building a franchise (Make processesrepeatable)

One of my goals with ldquouser poweredrdquo software isto make it easy for other Mac developers to developsoftware this way At some point down the road Iwould like to have a ldquotemplate Mac shareware com-panyrdquo downlaod That would include a template ap-plication built on Blocks code for a Web site to han-dle forums feature voting and software store and aset of documented processes for how to run the com-pany

That goal is still a long ways from completionBut if there are any developers out there who thinkthey would like to develop software this way pleasecontact me Irsquod be happy to share Web site codeand give tips on how best to make use of the Blocksframework

Long term I think it would be really cool to have abunch of small Mac companies working this way Allsharing the same underlying Blocks framework andWeb site code That way we could focus most of ourenergy into developing cool apps instead of all theextra stuff that gets in the way

mdashJesse Grosjean

RapidWeaver and Web Accessibility11

I think you are misisng the point of RapidWeaver Itis not written primarily for people who already knowHTML and XHTML It is written primarily for peo-ple like me who know nothing about Web program-ming RapidWeaver allows me the complete noviceto build Web sites That is its value And without theEdit View I would be totally lost So while your com-ments may be valid to someone who already knowshow to code Web pages your comments are totallyoff base for someone like myself who is a happy andvery satisfied user of RapidWeaver I think the pow-erful aspect of RapidWeaver is that it works for some-one like me but also has enough flexibility to makeit attractive to real HTML and XHTML coders Ifyou spend anytime at all reading through the user

10httpwwwamazoncomexecobidosASIN0887307280aboutthisparticu

11httpwwwatpmcom1209web-accessibilityshtml

ATPM 1210 9 E-Mail

forums you will find that coders have found all sortsof creative ways to modifyaccess features within thevarious RapidWeaver templates Just something foryou to consider

mdashJeff Boice

Since RapidWeaver and similar applications arenot written primarily for people who alreadyknow HTML thatrsquos exactly why they shouldcreate accessible HTML automatically Thefact that you were happy and satisfied beforeyou knew about the accessibility issues just un-derscores the point that RapidWeaver shouldldquodo the right thingrdquo so that novices neednrsquot beconcerned with this stuff

mdashMichael Tsai

Wersquod love to hear your thoughts about our publication Wealways welcome your comments criticisms suggestions andpraise Or if you have an opinion or announcement aboutthe Macintosh platform in general thatrsquos OK too Send youre-mail to editoratpmcom All mail becomes the propertyof atpm

ATPM 1210 10 E-Mail

Bloggableby Wes Meltzer wmeltzeratpmcom

Fire in the (AirPort) HoleRejoice rejoice You can turn your WiFi on againThe danger is past

At least for the momentOn September 21 Apple released two security

patches1 that protect essentially every Mac thatuses AirPort against malformed frames passed over80211b networks Thatrsquos the vulnerability I wroteabout last month2 which may or may not have beena real threat to Mac users

ldquoSordquo you say ldquoThe problemrsquos been fixed WesYou usually put stuff like that in those inane littlebullet-point links at the end of your columnrdquo

Irsquom guilty as charged readers But this onewas no ordinary security patch Just as Apple waslaunching a brand-new ad campaign lauding thecomparative security of its computers relative toits competitor productmdashMicrosoft Windowsmdashtwosecurity researchers claimed that a massive vulnera-bility in the AirPort drivers for OS X could lead to aroot exploitmdashwithout the user even registering on anetwork Rather than recap extensively here I willpoint you again to my previous column3 becauseI tried hard to be comprehensive Better still isJohn Gruberrsquos summary4

Whatrsquos interesting is the fallout from all of thisdid Apple patch this vulnerabilitymdashwhich sounds alot like the one Jon Ellch and David Maynor de-scribed in Augustmdashin response to the demonstrationand did the demonstration show a vulnerability orwas it staged

First things first I should note that Appleis claiming unequivocally that they found thisvulnerability5 in-house That jibes with what GlennFleishman and Jim Thompson et al said aboutthe potential route of attack that this could havetakenmdashin other words as I read it itrsquos possible thatthis demonstration was staged but happened to cor-

1httpdocsinfoapplecomarticlehtmlartnum=304420

2httpwwwatpmcom1209bloggableshtml3httpwwwatpmcom1209bloggableshtml4httpdaringfireballnet200608curious_case5httpwwwmacworldcomnews20060921wirelessi

ndexphppf=1

respond closely enough with a possible exploit thatApple discovered and patched Apple spokesmanAnuj Nayar told Brian Krebs the (rightly or wrongly)maligned Washington Post security columnist justthat

[T]he company is not aware of any ex-ploit code available to attack these flawsand SecureWorks to this day has notshared a working demonstration of howto exploit themldquoBasically what happened is Secure-Works approached Apple with a potentialflaw that they felt would affec tthe (sic)wireless drivers on Macs but they didnrsquotsupply us with any information to allowus to identify a specific problem So weinitiated our own internal product audit6and in the course of doing so found theseflawsrdquo

But Ellch is on the attack denying this Justas this magazine was set to go to press he gaveCory Doctorow the right to publish a transcript7 ofhis talk at ToorCon 2006 on Doctorowrsquos personalWeb site (But he linked to it on Boing Boing so itwill get a fair number of eyeballs) In this talk heclaims that Apple and SecureWorks kept his researchpartner from giving the original scheduled lecturedetailing the previously demonstrated AirPort vul-nerability Doctorow states unequivocally thatpressure from SecureWorks8 got the talk canceledand implies that Apple was involved On the otherhand he notes in passing that ldquoone colleague at theshow spoke to an Apple employee in the audiencewho denied that Apple had leaned on SecureWorksrdquo(So far no word from Maynor)

Ellch also released on a security-oriented listservsome details of a similar exploit9 using Intelrsquos Cen-

6httpblogwashingtonpostcomsecurityfix200609apple_issues_patches_for_macbohtml

7httpcraphoundcomcache_toorcon_2006txt8httpwwwboingboingnet20061001speech_given_

by_censhtml9httpwww80211mercenarynetslashdot

ATPM 1210 11 Bloggable Fire in the (AirPort) Hole

trino on-board drivers I understand very little of itto be completely honest but it sounds like it relies ona variant of a packet DDoS attack If you flood thevictim machine with UDP packets at one per 4000microseconds and then send dissociation requests atone per 5000 microseconds you may be able to getyour malformed UDP packet in the driver stack

That sounds an awful lot like the vulnerabilitythat Apple patched Whether Ellch and Maynordemonstrated such a vulnerability is whatrsquos up forgrabs

In the interim Gruber had previously offered abounty10 to Maynor and Ellch if they could hĳack astock just-out-of-the-box MacBook The prize wasthat very MacBook Rich Mogull at Securosis dis-putes that the bounty would be helpful11 and eventells us to trust him that the demonstrated exploitis real (Sorry but your assurance of a video demon-stration just ups the ante amigo)

Neither of the security researchers ever took himup on the offer but I think in light of this patchit would be a valid experiment for someone to takeup Come now someone must be able to show uswhether unpatched MacBooks are vulnerable in anuncontrolled environment

Gruber is unconvinced by all of this Hersquos been atthe center of this hurricane since it first was spottedin the southeast Atlantic in August and he lays allof his evidence out on the table He believes in lightof this patch that one of three possibilities12 is true

1 Maynor and Ellch did not findan actual exploit against Ap-plersquos built-in AirPort driversbut bamboozled and lied toBrian Krebs (and letrsquos notforget George Ou) that theyhad

2 Maynor and Ellch did find suchan exploit but never showed orproved it to Apple

3 Maynor and Ellch both foundsuch an exploit and showed itto Apple and Apple continuesto lie about what Maynor andEllch showed them

10httpdaringfireballnet200609open_challenge11httpsecurosiscom20060905mac-wi-fi-gruber-n

eeds-to-let-it-go-and-maynor-and-ellch-should-ignore-the-challenge

12httpdaringfireballnet200609airport_security_update

Things donrsquot look good for Maynor and Ellchin spite of the assurances of Krebs and Mogull Ina note to the readers of MDJ and MWJ publisherMatt Deatherage suggests strongly that the releaseof Applersquos patch combined with its public insistencethat they found this vulnerability on their own doesin what credibility Maynor and Ellch had Irsquoll letDeatherage have the final word

If Maynor and Ellch had demonstratedit or shown code to just one Mac expertwho could have verified their claimstheyrsquod rightly be lionized for their workInstead they took credit for ldquohackinga MacBookrdquo at security shows and inthe international press while refusing toprovide even the barest proof that theyrsquodactually accomplished what they saidthey had or at least what they wantedyou to believe theyrsquod said Now that bugsand fixes are in the real world therersquosno way of ever knowing if what they saythey found matches those bugs or notmdashwhen they had the chance to prove itthey refused13 Itrsquos like saying after thefact that you knew the answer to FinalJeopardymdashyou have to say it before itrsquosrevealed to get credit for knowing it

(NB Scroll down to find the relevant passageOn the other hand I strongly suggest you readDeatheragersquos update apparently he just survivedcongestive heart failure Welcome back Matt)

And Nothing Left to Burnbull Geek Patrol published a set of CPU benchmark

graphs over the last six years of Apples14 Ofinterest is the ldquoPro Laptoprdquo graph showing theoriginal PowerBook G4 (500MHz) up throughthe MacBook Pro I actually gasped out loudand used certain unprintable phrases when Ipulled up the full-size graphic from the lastPowerBook G4 to the MacBook Prothe bench-mark scores roughly doubled Expect furtherimprovements if Apple ever gets Core 2 Duosmdashthatrsquos right four CPU coresmdashin the MacBookPro (Plus you can plug in an off-the-shelf chipinto your Mac Pro and it will work pretty wellAnandTech was able to get dual-core Xeons

13httpwwwmacjournalscomnews20060922htmla30

14httpwwwgeekpatrolcablog138

working in one impressive results15) I thinkitrsquos time to replace this Titanium PowerBook

bull Will I finally at long last have to eat my hatI canrsquot find this in our archives but maybeyou can I seem to remember promising youall that if Apple released an actual legitimateiPhone I would eat my hat AppleInsider isnow saying that there is evidence Apple will re-lease just such a device16 Irsquom still highly skep-tical for all the reasons17 Irsquove laid out beforebut Eww Does one use a fork and knife toeat a baseball cap (Also would it have killedApple to release the iPhone before I just boughta new one)

bull Khoi Vinh is really impressed by OmniWeb 5518which now uses a stock WebKit rather thanthe branched version itrsquod been using since theoriginal OmniWeb 5 release I have a lot ofrespect for Khoi so perhaps when my com-puter is not on the verge of collapse I will tryit In a similar vein Brent Simmons predictsapplications are going to rely more and more ona hybrid desktop-Web model19 since Applersquosunderlying HTML glue takes care of so muchof the hard work This is very exciting

bull TidBITSrsquo Matt Neuberg rails this month onwhat he believes is the decline of WWDC20Scott Stevenson thinks hersquos crazy21mdashor hastoo-high expectations I report you decide

Copyright copy 2006 Wes Meltzer wmeltzeratpmcom

15httpanandtechcommacshowdocaspxi=2832ampp=616httpwwwappleinsidercomarticlephpid=201717httpwwwatpmcom1101bloggableshtml18httpwwwsubtractioncomarchives20060907_a_br

owser_baphp19httpinessentialcomcomments=1amppostid=334420httpdbtidbitscomarticle864821httptheocacaocomdocumentpage294

Mac of All Tradesby Mike Chamberlain mchamberlainatpmcom

Dream MachineI had a dream about Apple computers the othernight It was the first one in a very long timeBefore I tell you about it you should know that I amwaiting for the delivery of a new MacBook Pro and23primeprime Cinema Display (amateur psychologists startyour engines) The delivery has been delayed andIrsquove fallen victim to that itchy ldquocheck e-mail andorder status every hourrdquo syndrome You know theone that all of us who have waited for the arrival ofCupertinorsquos latest have experienced

The last time I had a dream about an Apple it wasrather hazy It was also while I was waiting for thedelivery of an Apple computer It was hazy becauseI didnrsquot really know what to expect Nobody knewNobody I knew had a computer It was the beginningof something new

In the fall of 1977 Games magazine made itsdebut The inaugural issue contained a short one-page article about a personal computer called Applethat would in the writerrsquos opinion mark a significantchange in electronic gaming With a personal com-puter he wrote it would be possible to expand thenumber and the sophistication of the titles that werebeginning to hit the gaming-console market in ever-greater numbers I had been a frustrated gamer forsome time I kept the magazine on my nightstand forthree months periodically rereading the article Fi-nally my wife said ldquoFor Petersquos sake buy that thingbefore you drive me crazy And get rid of that mag-azine while yoursquore at itrdquo

I was in the Army in Europe at the time andsince this was long before FedEx getting a computerfrom the US was a huge drill I wonrsquot bore you withthe gory details but it was in the five months it tookto receive it that I had the dream about this fantasticmachine and what I would be able to do with it Thatwas how it all started Finally Apple II serial 21250arrived and I have never looked back

It wasnrsquot long before I splurged for another 16Kof memory Wow And then expanded to a disk drivewhen they became available As I experimented withthe capabilities and potential of this early edition ofour favorite computer I began to get a glimpse ofwhat it might be capable of But it wasnrsquot until my

Apple was employed in the Cold War that I began tounderstand what a truly revolutionary machine it wasand got a taste for the power of desktop computing

As an Army officer assigned to a Corps Headquar-ters I was given the responsibility of watching over arather large sum of money that was used for trainingand maneuvers When a new software program calledVisiCalc came out I bought it and began to developspreadsheets that made my job a lot easier ldquoYou sayyoursquove changed your mind about how many _____you need You need to know the cost when Noproblem Colonel Right awayrdquo It didnrsquot take manyquick turnarounds to get attention

One afternoon I was summoned to a secure of-fice in the basement of the Headquarters and briefedon a secret operation Polish labor unions were inopen defiance of their government and of the wishesof the Soviet Union and it appeared that a dramaticshift in the alignment of Europe was possible TheSoviets had troops stationed along the Polish bor-der and might be preparing to invade agrave la Hungaryand Czechoslovakia Our president had decided thatif the Russians crossed the Polish border he woulddeploy US units to Europe on a ldquotrainingrdquo exerciseOur Headquarters had been asked by Washington toreceive them and to figure out how much it was go-ing to cost Since I had a computer that could an-swer the question I was made a part of ldquoOperationNematoderdquo (Itrsquos an Army thing Donrsquot try to un-derstand) Not long after the briefing I found my-self in a signal-secure booth (no electromagnetic em-anations possible) where for the next day and a halfI worked my spreadsheet magic to arrive at an an-swer The numbers went back to Washington andat some point I am certain made their way into aWhite House briefing The invasion never happenedand the troops never deployed but for a moment atleast Apple was on the front lines of the Cold War

Irsquove carried Apples in and out of offices ever sinceand even managed to convert a couple of organiza-tions from the dark side Since that first Apple IIIrsquove owned a IIe IIc Mac SE LC III G3 G4 Power-Book G3 iMacs (15primeprime and 17primeprime) and iBooks for mycollege-bound kids Lately Irsquove been using a Power-

ATPM 1210 14 Mac of All Trades Dream Machine

Book G4 for my personal and professional life whichallows my wife unrestricted access to the iMac Butas great as it is the Apple experience at least forme is about more than the machines There is some-thing personal about the Mac that isnrsquot true of therelationship that those ldquoother folksrdquo have with theircomputers They donrsquot fawn over them or turn intoevangelists for their processors or their OS For non-Apple users computers are just the latest boxes theyare using to get things done Often it is a collectionof individual parts assembled in an otherwise stan-dard case I wonrsquot trash that as one way to do it butwith Apple what I need just seems to be theremdashandmany times itrsquos there before I know I need it Swivelscreens iPods AirPort real plug and play iPhotoiTunes iWeb and on and on It just keeps gettingbetter

This is the first of what I hope will be a fairlyregular series of columns for atpm I appreciate thefree exchange of information that atpm offers andI believe that writing a bit about the Apple expe-rience gives me an opportunity to give somethingback to the Mac community As the name of thecolumn suggests we will be jumping around to anumber of different topics in the Mac world Irsquomnot an engineer or a programmer Irsquom a user oneof the majority of satisfied Mac users who appreciatethis great machine and enjoy talking to other peopleabout the things that can be done with it In thecoming months we will be reviewing Apple-relatedWeb sites and which ones you should have in yourmenu bar discussing new software and how to do agood evaluation before you spend your money look-ing at the many peripherals that enhance the Macexperience and thinking about the future which iswhat Mac is really all about Irsquom looking forwardto sharing with and hearing from you Feel free tocontact me at mchamberlainatpmcom

Oh yes I almost forgot my recent dream I dreamtI was at a Mac expo of some kind standing at thecounter waiting patiently for my MacBook Pro to bebrought out Suddenly Steve Jobs walked up I in-troduced myself because every Mac user feels as if heknows His Steveness personally Donrsquot we We hada short conversation about something or other Thenhe began to walk away as I was telling him aboutmy Army Apple experience I noticed that he wasmoving smartly so I said ldquoI can tell you about it aswe walk or I could just drop it and you could getgoingrdquo

ldquoIrsquoll take you up on thatrdquo he said And he wasgone

I just want to say Steve if yoursquore out thereman no hard feelings Just keep on doing what youdo Donrsquot let me slow you down By the way canyou move the processing along on my MacBook ProThanks

See you other Mac fans next month Peace

Copyright copy 2006 Mike Chamberlain mchamberlainatpmcom

MacMuserby Mark Tennent mtennentatpmcom

17primeprime Is Just Not Big Enough for Some MenLike an old car it seems that as we age bits of us packup slow down or need a de-coke More likely andlegally a de-wine (or insert favourite over-indulgencehere) Get to 30 and your looks start fading By40 teeth need regular attention Reach 50 and eye-sight decreases so 7-point text might as well be on themoonmdashsomething younger graphic designers couldtake notice of especially yellow condensed text onpurple backgrounds and other such nonsense

In some respects reading onscreen helps Notonly are things a comfortable distance away butscreen contrast and brilliance can be adjusted andpages resized to make things more comfortable Onlyone problem remainsmdashusing a monitor that is justnot big enough It doesnrsquot help having to designA3-landscape (420times297mm) pages on a 17primeprime monitoreither

When I started computing for real in the daysof ldquoHome Computersrdquo powered by Zilog 8-bit chipsand the like my first machine1 had a black-and-greenmonitor displaying at 256 lines of 720 pixels Thiswas acceptable for text even a few games and goodenough to get me into ldquodesignrdquo via desktop publish-ing

This first computer was rapidly followed by twoAtari Mega STrsquos paid for from the DTP done on theAmstrad computer The Atari screens were actuallysmaller than the previous ones but at least had colorAgain the financial results of the Ataris bought thefirst Mac and I joined the big boys Even then thestandard Apple 13-inch monitor was only just accept-able for DTP its crisp resolution making up for thesmall viewing area Eventually I worked with twoMacs on my desk to share the load computationallyand to get more applications available at one time

Nowadays our Macs are capable of so much moreMulti-tasking is taken for granted RAM runs to gi-gabytes and we can have almost every applicationwe own running at the same time It all makes fora messy screen something Apple tried to address bysliding things in and out of the Dock and giving usExposeacute Some users swear by two or more monitors

1httpenwikipediaorgwikiAmstrad_PCW

just about all recent Macs have a video card that sup-ports this Personally I prefer one screen on my deskbut the price tag on the really big ones is enough tobuy a hundred square miles of prime Romanian realestate

Which is why I looked at using virtual desktopsas a solution The forthcoming Leopard version ofMac OS X will have such a facility built in calledSpaces2 Virtual desktops are nothing new since theirintroduction as Amiga OS scrolling desktops in 1985Unix and Linux have had virtual desktops for yearsWindows XP has them but Microsoftrsquos own PowerTools only works with US regional settings and isunsupported

The Mac world saw the worldrsquos first commer-cial desktop manager Stepping Out in 1986 andcurrently there are at least three contenders two ofwhich are free CodeTekrsquos $40 VirtualDesktop Pro3Rich Warehamrsquos venerable and free DesktopManager4and Tony Arnoldrsquos free VirtueDesktops5 which isbased on Warehamrsquos work but offering a fuller graph-ical experience These are most likely doomed to thedustbin when Leopard arrives

I chose VirtueDesktops to test the theory Itstarted with a simple matter of double-clickingto run the program As a free piece of softwareVirtueDesktops does exactly what it says it shouldThe program is a universal binary giving an unlim-ited number of virtual screens a choice of transitionsand window fading and it is AppleScriptable and ex-tensible to add additional features I found it workswell with Exposeacute showing just the windows for thecurrent desktop I was able to turn VirtueDesktopsoff and on with no ill effects The applications run-ning in virtual desktops switched to the one singledesktop when VirtueDesktops was quit Just abouteverything can be set to personal preferences eachdesktop can have its own pattern and applicationscan be ldquostuckrdquo to a certain desktop The transition

2httpwwwapplecommacosxleopardspaceshtml3httpwwwcodetekcomctvd4httpdesktopmanagerberliosde5httpvirtuedesktopsinfoabout

ATPM 1210 16 MacMuser 17primeprime Is Just Not Big Enough

effects are neat too as shown6 using the standardApple ldquoCuberdquo transition effect

After two days of complete confusion losing trackof what application was open in which desktop vir-tual desktops gave me brain strain and didnrsquot reallyhelp anyway Virtual desktops are more for peoplewho like to have ldquoenvironmentsrdquo Where for exam-ple one desktop can be set aside for programmingand coding with all the paraphernalia it involvesanother can be used for different browsers and Webcreation tools a third desktop for music editing andso on As a designer I find most Mac design soft-ware is well integrated so that clicking on a graphicin a page layout program results in Photoshop or Il-lustrator automatically coming to the fore to edit itThe other built-in tools of the Macrsquos operating systemcope with screen clutter created by multiple applica-tions being open at the same time

For me the only solution is to buy a new moni-tor not a second one to run side by side but a bigbig-boysrsquo toy Itrsquos just too hard to fit A3 landscapespreads onto two monitors side-by-side and still beable to read the text to edit it The screen needs tobe a 23primeprime or larger and will come complete with a costthat increases exponentially with size and quality Onthe other hand just a couple of years ago the pricewould have bought a pretty decent family car Evennow for the same money I bought a reliable Toyotapick-up last year when renovating my house After Isold the pick-up I regretted the decision and miss itsload-lugging abilities and go-anywhere ability It wasthirsty though averaging 25mpg which in Europe isabout half the mileage we expect from our vehicles

What a dilemma How does one decide among anApple Dell HP or LaCiemdashor a diesel Toyota Hiace

The answer is staring me in the face Not thecheapest monitor and a long way from the mostexpensive Mid-range in features and quality butit looks great next to my aluminium G5 Betweenthinking of it and buying Apple also reduced itsprice and increased the quality so I can give a fivethumbs up the my new 23primeprime Cinema Display Com-pared with my perfectly good 17primeprime LCD it has 50more screen and itrsquos brighter and easier to readwhich is something to bear in mind if your eyes arefeeling the strain of on-screen working

As for virtual desktops and the forthcomingSpaces no thanks

Copyright copy 2006 Mark Tennent mtennentatpmcom

6httpwwwatpmcom1210virtuedesktopsmp4

Web Accessibilityby Miraz Jordan httpmactipsinfo

Nvu Impressive and PowerfulUnlike serious Web designers who probably hand-code Web pages or use professional software suchas Dreamweaver1 most folks are likely to lookat software such as Applersquos iWeb2 Sandvox3RapidWeaver4mdashor the subject of this article Nvu

Web pages are all about communication but itrsquoseasy to forget that some visitors may be using screenreaders Braille devices head switches or other lesscommon hardware and software to interact with thepages we produce Itrsquos important that software weuse creates good-quality coding that makes our pagesaccessible for all visitors The articles in this serieslook at how some common programs perform in thatrespect

This month I look at Nvu (10) I set out asusual to create a perfectly ordinary one-page docu-ment with a little text some headings a list a coupleof links and a photo This represents a ldquotypicalrdquo pagethat anyone might create

NvuNvu5 is open source and covered under the MPLLGPLGPLtri-license On the Mac OS X 1015 or later is re-quired but Nvu is available for many platformsincluding Linux and Windows

The ProcessI started up Nvu and pasted some prepared text intothe Normal tab Buttons and pop-ups on the defaulttoolbar resembled what you might see in a word pro-cessor including tooltips to help you choose what youneeded It was very easy to apply headings a listlinks and some emphasis

To add a photo I clicked the Image icon on thetoolbar and chose the photo from my hard drive Bydefault the Alternate Text radio button was selectedand when I tried to click OK without supplying al-ternate text a helpful alert appeared

1httpwwwatpmcom904studio-mxshtml2httpwwwatpmcom1207web-accessibilityshtml3httpwwwatpmcom1208web-accessibilityshtml4httpwwwatpmcom1209web-accessibilityshtml5httpwwwnvucom

I try to exit without entering alternate text

Nvursquos alert explains the what and why of alternate text

After dismissing the alert I was returned to theimage selection window where I either had to enteralternate text or deliberately choose ldquoDonrsquot use al-ternate textrdquo before I could proceed

When I saved the page Nvu asked me for a pagetitle I also found Page Title and Properties underthe Format menu and was later able to edit the titlethere

The ResultsThe results were impressive When I looked at theSource view to check the coding that had been cre-ated I could see that headings lists ltstronggt andltemgt tags had all been correctly applied The codingwas clean without any excess

I attempted to apply a specific font to a few wordsand Nvu sensibly applied a ltspangt with an inline

ATPM 1210 18 Web Accessibility Nvu Impressive and Powerful

style When I chose the Bold and Italics buttons onthe toolbar for formatting text it applied an inlinestyle rather than the old-fashioned ltbgt or ltigt tags

My page was created using an HTML 4 Transi-tional doctype and with an ISO-8859-1 character setPersonally I prefer XHTML and UTF-8 but a visitto the Format Page Title and the Properties menuallowed me to choose UTF-8 from a list of charactersets

If I had visited the Preferences before startingwork I could have specified XHTML and UTF-8 asdefaults

Paragraphs or BreaksAs with RapidWeaver6 I was disappointed to findthat my pasted text had been automatically markedup not as paragraphs with ltpgt tags but with linebreaks It would be a sensible default for Nvu to as-sume that pasted text is paragraphs and to mark itup with ltpgt tags See last monthrsquos article on Rapid-Weaver for an explanation of the difference betweena break and a paragraph

I found that if I pasted text into a new windowselected all and applied a paragraph style then Nvuwrapped paragraphs fairly sensibly in ltpgt tags al-though it also included break tags where Irsquod pressedReturn twice between paragraphs It was fairly easyto use the Find and Replace All commands to get ridof them

If typing text in from scratch it seems to work toselect a style such as Heading or Paragraph from thepop-up before typing Set the behavior of the Returnkey to create a new paragraph when the Return key ispressed and Nvu then uses paragraph tags correctlyinstead of break tags

The InterfaceNvu is quite impressive It offers four ldquoviewsrdquo of yourpage Normal HTML Tags Source and Preview

Normal is a plain view where you see only yourtext and images Preview shows how your page willlook in a browser These two views seemed to showme the same thing perhaps because my page was sosimple

HTML Tags displays small yellow boxes besideevery element showing what HTML tags have beenapplied to it such as lth2gt ltspangt or ltimggt whileSource gives you access to the full HTML source code

Whichever view I was in I was able to editmy page although some menu items such as For-

mat Page Title and Properties were not availablefrom the source view

Validator ToolUsing correct valid HTML code and CSS stylesheetsgoes a long way towards creating accessible pagesItrsquos always a good idea to validate your pages and fixany errors to help ensure your Web site will rendercorrectly in the browser

Nvu includes a Validate HTML item in the Toolsmenu Save your page and choose Validate HTMLfrom the Tools menu Nvu contacts the W3C vali-dation service provides your page for checking andreports the results in an Nvu window All the breaktags created by default caused failures in my testpage

You can then fix the problems and validate againuntil you see the ldquoValid HTMLrdquo response

My ConclusionsNvu doesnrsquot give you all the ldquothemesrdquomdashthe fancy vi-sual layoutsmdashthat some other products do so yoursquollhave to obtain templates or design your own look andfeel for your Web pages Most sites deliver informa-tion through text the visual design can be addedin later using stylesheets such as those available freewith the Style Master7 CSS editor software

In spite of the ltbrgt versus ltpgt issue8 Nvu is aclear winner It gives the user real control over usingappropriate markup such as lists and headings Itdefaults to requiring alternate text for images Itmakes it easy for the user to validate her page andgives full and easy access within all views NormalSource Preview and the useful HTML Tags view

It uses familiar toolbar buttons and pop-ups simi-lar to those you find in Microsoft Word or other wordprocessors and applies appropriate coding when youuse them Most controls are simple but itrsquos commonto see an Advanced button giving easy access toNvursquos more sophisticated features

After trying out several other applications whosefocus was all on appearance and damn the coding Iwas ready for a disaster when I opened Nvu InsteadIrsquom impressed

Whatrsquos more Nvu is useful for both ordinary folkswanting to make simple Web pages and Irsquod ventureto say for HTML professionals I havenrsquot given it afull workout with a complex sitemdashin fact my testingwas limited to a single page with one image and a few

7httpwwwwestcivcomstyle_master8httpwwwatpmcom1209web-accessibilityshtml

headings but it is worth a serious look for the Webprofessional

Useful Linksbull Stylemaster9 software for creating cascading

style sheets

bull WebXACT10 automated accessibility checker

Related Articlesbull Web Accessibility RapidWeaver A Useful Tool in Need of Sharpening11

atpm 1209 September 2006

bull Web Accessibility Sandvox Sand in the Eyes12atpm 1208 August 2006

bull Web Accessibility The Claytonrsquos Web13atpm 1207 July 2006

bull Web Accessibility14 atpm 1001 January2004

Copyright copy 2006 Miraz Jordan httpmactipsinfo15Miraz lives in Wellington New Zealand Her bookWordPress 2 Visual Quickstart Guide16 has just beenpublished

9httpwwwwestcivcom10httpWebXACTwatchfirecom11httpwwwatpmcom1209web-accessibilityshtml12httpwwwatpmcom1208web-accessibilityshtml13httpwwwatpmcom1207web-accessibilityshtml14httpwwwatpmcom1001web-accessibilityshtml15httpmactipsinfo16httpwwwamazoncomgpproduct0321450191

Segments Slices from the Macintosh Lifeby Angus Wong atkwanguswongnet

Infinitely ImprobableItrsquos showtime1

Applersquos ldquoblockbusterrdquo announcement was morelike a ldquobunker busterrdquo attack on crazed wannabesincluding Microsoft (and its Zune also-to-run) andother delusional entrants in the digital media warsWith the iTV2 product now confirmed on the Q1rsquo07 horizon I just canrsquot see anyone in the entire ITlandscape able to put more than a cosmetic scratchon the all-terrain armored battle platform that isApplersquos iTunesiPod ecosystem Seemingly comingout of nowhere this mega-machine has been crushingopposition quarter after quarter causing tremendousturmoil in all the companies we love to loathe Evena yesteryear titan like Intel has been bent to the willof Jobs embroiled in petty price wars that ultimatelybenefit only Apple and its consumers

It is becoming infinitely improbable that Appleisnrsquot on track to completely dominate the new digitalplayground In this new age of the Web 20 GoogleSkype and YouTube the real game changer is thatdisruptive ldquolittlerdquo company in Cupertino WhatApplersquos done in recent years is basically run circlesaround the 800-pound gorillas (who are looking morelike chimps these days)

Speaking of monkey business did any of you catchthose photos of the Zune3 You gotta hand it to theRedmond boys to make something look super sexyAgainst Microsoftrsquos ldquokillardquo product the new 8 GBblack iPod nano is mighty hot4 My level of amaze-ment at Microsoftrsquos appalling execution is at recordlevels It almost feels like the company is deliber-ately fencing cheap looking products (at expensiveprices) just to humor the market (ldquoLookit Haha-hahardquo) Either its marketing geniuses have come upwith some outta-da-world brilliant marketing strat-egy or they just are as clueless as ever (or perhaps Ishould say just as clueless as Sony)

1httpeventsapplecomedgesuitenetsep_2006eventindexhtml

2httpwwwappleinsidercomarticlephpid=20413httpwwwappleinsidercomarticlephpid=20504httpwwwapplecomprlibrary2006sep12ipodht

ldquoWhatrsquos changedrdquo Barring legalities I thinkthat Microsoft was ldquosuccessfulrdquo for some 15 yearsbecause the market was (mostly) just as cluelessBut stars collide empires crumble markets evolveand people who have tasted the superior usability ofthe iPod are starting to realize that maybe there arebetter products out there if only they just tried themout While the decision to go with Intel paved theway it is really Boot Camp and Parallels5 that areenabling a new paradigm of computing experienceThe chasm is being crossed by the masses

And what of the larger Apple ecosystem iTV willbe mind-bogglingly huge iTV is not so much aboutan entertainment console that many of us are goingto put in our living rooms as it is about the wholeconcept of Apple in almost every aspect of our livesand Irsquom not even counting the potential ramificationsof the rumored iPhone

Apple will essentially be what Microsoft triedto be Like Steve Jobs said Apple is now in ourdens living rooms cars and pockets But Apple isalso online (Mac) on our streets (retail stores) inour offices (Xserve) and on our desks (Macs) It iswith Apple that we spend our work time and our freetime Our collective digital identities are going to beenmeshed into the fabric of the upcoming duopolythat is AppleGoogle Have we chosen a brighterfuture compared to the alternative universe ruled byMicrosoftIntel Only the Time Machine will tell

I do know one thing though While I can nolonger joke about ldquoLornhornrdquo being a cow someonerecently told me ldquoVistardquo means ldquochickenrdquo in Latvia6

I think Leopards eat chickens too

Copyright copy 2006 Angus Wong atkwanguswongnet TheSegments section is open to anyone If you have somethinginteresting to say about life with your Mac write us

5httpwwwatpmcom1210parallelsshtml6httpnewsyahoocomsafp20060907od_afpusitso

ftwarecompanymicrosoftlatvialanguageoffbeat_060907102918

ATPM 1210 21 Segments Infinitely Improbable

How Toby Sylvester Roque sroqueatpmcom

Crash Logs What Are They and What Do TheyMeanMost Mac users have noticed a wealth of benefitssince making the shift from OS 9 to OS X Ar-guably the most important of these is the overallincreased stability of the OS1 I hate to admit itbut I have had more experiences with crashes onmy dual 2 GHz G5 than I would like I can almosthear some of my Windows-using friends laughingmaniacally even as I type this

The first few weeks were fine Then I beganexperiencing kernel panics2 that turned out to bememory-related3 Once I resolved that problemmonths went by with no issues at all Things per-formed as flawlessly as we have come to expect fromMacs Then I began experiencing kernel panics onboot up After a bit of frustration I discovered thatmy Mac would boot in safe mode and I could thenreboot the system normally without any crashingBefore I could resolve the issue a software updatemust have fixed the problem because it has goneaway and not recurred While I was experiencingthat problem I got into the habit of leaving my Macon and simply putting it to sleep when it wasnrsquot inuse

Most recently I have experienced a crash thatseems to be application-specific My wife has beenplaying Second Life4 and sometimes uses my Mac torun characters Most of the time things are fine butonce in a while the game crashes The crashes areusually confined to that game but sometimes the en-tire system grinds to a halt forcing me to power downand reboot Even with all these problems I am not atroubleshooting genius but there may be some thingsyou can learn from my experiences

Know Your System at Its BestRight now while the system is stable take notice ofwhatrsquos installed I donrsquot mean you have to spend agreat deal of time jotting down everything thatrsquos in-

1httpwwwatpmcom1208paradigmshtml2httpdocsinfoapplecomarticlehtmlartnum=106

2273httpwwwatpmcom1108howtoshtml4httpsecondlifecom

stalled on your Mac but it does help to have someidea whatrsquos on your system It can be particularly dif-ficult to remember this information if you are respon-sible for maintaining multiple Macs In the past Ihave suggested using the System Profiler report as thebasis of a good troubleshooting log5 As new thingsare added to the system jot them down You wonrsquotneed this information often but if you do yoursquoll beglad to have it handy

Since things are working properly this wouldbe a great time to clone your system to a sec-ond hard drive I addressed this issue in aprevious article about cloning6 Since that timenew tools have become available No matter whichapplication you use to clone the system be sureto use the most current version for your operatingsystem Also remember to make regular backupsof your data These are perhaps the two most im-portant troubleshooting steps you will ever performWith these steps completed you can get up andrunning again in no time by booting from the clonedsystem

If you have a well-behaved system at the momentcreate a new user account that will only be used inyour troubleshooting efforts Do not add hacks add-ons or other ldquoenhancementsrdquo to this account Whena problem occurs in your normal account log in tothe troubleshooting account and attempt to recreatethe problem If it doesnrsquot occur in this account theproblem may well be file corruption or other problemsin your main user account

When a problem occurs and your system is notperforming flawlessly do not panic Although OS Xis quite complex solving its problems can sometimesbe remarkably simple In addition to causing a greatdeal of stress panic tends to inhibit your best trou-bleshooting toolsmdashclear logical thought and carefulobservation

Detecting the pattern underlying a single appli-cation crash might not be too difficult for an expe-

5httpwwwatpmcom907howtoshtml6httpwwwatpmcom810cloningshtml

ATPM 1210 22How To Crash Logs What Are They and What Do They Mean

rienced computer user but things are often not thatsimple Multi-tasking7 makes it possible to have sev-eral applications open simultaneously Things arealso complicated by the inherent stability of OS Xthat allows many Macs to be left on constantly andare therefore unattended for hours at a time Giventhis set of circumstances how is a Mac user supposedto determine the probable cause of a crash EnterConsole and the crash log

Crash LogsmdashWhat Are They and WhereAre TheyCrash logs are yet another indication of the Unix her-itage underlying OS X Sometimes it seems that Unixlogs almost everything good or bad that happens ona system You might not have been watching whenyour system crashed but chances are there is a textfile somewhere that has logged enough informationfor someone to reconstruct exactly what was happen-ing at the time of the crash Think of it as flight datarecording for your computer These logs can give de-velopers much more detailed insight about a crashthan most users could hope to provide Do you knowwhat block of memory your Mac was accessing thelast time it crashed Neither do I but the crash logsknow Now that we know what a crash log is whereis it

Most crash logs are stored in an individualuserrsquos home directory Follow the path to usernameLibraryLogsCrashReporter The crashlogs will be inside that folder How many there arewill depend on how often your Mac crashes and howoften you clear out these files Until we began havingdifficulty with Second Life I had not logged a crashof any sort in months According to Apple there aresome special circumstances8 in which crash logs arewritten in

LibraryLogsCrashReporterltProgramNamegtcrashlog

Crash logs are written here if any of the followingcircumstances are true ownership of the crashed pro-cess cannot be determined the crashed process wasowned by the root user at the time of the crash orthe userrsquos home directory is not writable

You can access crash logs using Console whichis in the ApplicationsUtilities folder on your

7httpenwikipediaorgwikiComputer_multitasking8httpdeveloperapplecomtechnotestn2004tn2123

htmlSECCRASHLOGBASIC

hard drive Once you have launched the programyou should see a list of logs on the left side of thescreen Clicking a programrsquos triangle will show a listof logs for that program Clicking one of the log fileswill display the contents of that log in the right paneof the window If you do not see the list of logs onthe left side of the screen click the Logs icon and thelist should appear

What Do They MeanCrash logs may be the most daunting and leastuser-friendly aspects of OS X Thatrsquos a bit moreunderstandable when you consider that these fileswere intended to be used by developers as a meansof improving their software You and I might notunderstand these things very well but developersdo understand and make use of them Even ifthey donrsquot give end users the kind of informationneeded to fix a problem we can glean a modicumof information so letrsquos take a brief look at thecontents If you subscribe to the MacFixIt siteyou can find a somewhat more detailed explanation9

here If you are not a MacFixIt subscriber orwould simply like a more detailed overview consultthis technical article10

The first few lines of a crash log will contain thedate and time of the crash as well as OS version infor-mation This will include the version of an operatingsystem as well as the build number Build numbersare a bit more specific than OS version numbers Iftwo users purchased different models of Macs with thesame OS version the build numbers might be differ-ent due to differences in the hardware That sectionof the report will look something like this

DateTime 2006-08-26 215827846 -0500OS Version 1047 (Build 8J135)Report Version 4

The next segment of the crash report identifiesthe process that crashed the parent processes andthe version number This information may be usefulif you are not sure what application led to the crashThis can be misleading at times since the process thatcrashed can in fact have been called by another pro-cess It is not uncommon for example for developersto call upon processes written by Apple as part of theOS Here is an example of that segment of the report

9httpwwwmacfixitcomarticlephpstory=20060309075929717

10httpdeveloperapplecomtechnotestn2004tn2123htmlSECCRASHLOGBASIC

In this case the my ATI graphics card seems to beone component of the problem

Command ATI MonitorPath ApplicationsUtilitiesATI UtilitiesATI Displaysapp

ContentsResourcesATI MonitorappContentsMacOSATI MonitorParent WindowServer [225]Version ()PID 244Thread 0

The next piece of information is the type of crashthat occurred These types are usually referred to asexceptions I doubt this information is of much useto end users troubleshooting a crash There is evensome question about just how useful it is for develop-ers Apple has identified the four most common typesof exceptions (crashes) each of which is summarizedbriefly below

KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS The thread inquestion is making an attempt to use un-mapped memory This error can be causedeither by data or by an instruction

KERN_PROTECTION_FAILURE This is al-ways a data-related issue The questionableprocess is attempting to write data to an areaof memory that has been reserved as read-only

BAD_INSTRUCTION There is somethingwrong with the instruction that a threadis attempting to execute

ARITHMETICEXC_I386_DIV This is theerror that occurs on Intel-based Macs whichoccurs when the thread in question attemptsto divide an integer by zero

In my case the error in question turned out to beKERN_INVALID_ADDRESS (0x0001) at 0xbf7fffe0The game Second Life was running at the time andit was checking the log that pointed me to the ATIcrash log The Second Life log indicated a very lowframes per second rate immediately before the crashSince Second Life can be both memory- and graphics-intensive my initial suspicion was that the game waspushing the memory and graphics limitations of thecomputer atpm publisher Michael Tsai who hasmuch more application development experience thanI do tells me this error usually means there hasbeen some corruption of an applicationrsquos memory If

thatrsquos the case the culprit is likely an applicationbug or operating system bug

The last portion of the crash log is often referredto as a backtrace It identifies which thread crashedand the steps occurring immediately before the crashThe first column of this section indicates the order ofthe tasks being performed Items are listed in reversechronological order The first column indicates theorder with item 0 being the most recent The secondcolumn indicates the library containing the code forthat line The third column is a program counteraddress and the fourth column lists the name of thefunction that was running at the time of the crashOne line of the report will look something like this

Thread 0 Crashed0 comappleCoreFoundation 0x907ba1c0 _CFRuntimeCreateInstance + 36

This segment of the report can run for many linesAlthough these lines are for the most point unintel-ligible to the average user careful examination mayprovide clues to what the application was doing at thetime of the crash If you are lucky this segment willcontain information with names that are somewhatdescriptive providing clues about the exact tasks theapplication was performing

What Do You Do NowNow itrsquos time to put your observation and detectionskills to work No matter how simple or complex theproblem you are trying to solve troubleshooting is es-sentially a matter of answering four basic questionsWhat type of problem are you having When doesthe problem occur What seem to be the contribut-ing factors How do I solve the problem

The first question to answer is does this appearto be a kernel panic which affects the entire systemor an application crash which usually affects onlyone program Kernel panics11 are often the resultof hardware issues or problems with kernel exten-sions Although hardware is often an issue in thesetypes of crashes do not assume any hardware hasfailed In my own experience kernel panics are some-times hardware-related as they were with my mem-ory chips but they can also be due to things such asmemory and graphics cards not being properly seatedin their respective slots Have you opened the caseand installed any new components recently If so

carefully check these connections using appropriatesafety procedures

Application-specific crashes usually affect a spe-cific program leaving the rest of the system intactFor these types of problems yoursquoll want to know whatapplications were running at the time If you were atthe computer at the time of the crash what were youdoing Recreate those steps to see if the crash con-tinues to occur (You are actually trying to crash theprogram More accurately you are trying to repro-duce the circumstances that led up to the crash)

Solve the ProblemIf you have gotten this far you may have an idea ofpotential problem areas to examine Here are somegeneral tips to follow then I will point you in thedirection of some more specific information

Simplify the SystemWhen a problem occurs try to simplify the numberof issues that must be investigated If you suspectthe problem may be hardware-related start with thesimplest things first Check all power and data ca-bles to make sure they are properly attached If thatdoesnrsquot solve the problem disconnect as much extra-neous hardware as possible and reconnect things oneat a time until you have everything reattached

If you are trying to simplify a software issue trylogging in to the troubleshooting account you createdearlier If the same problem does not occur in that ac-count you can now start looking at files within youruser account as the possible culprit If the problem isoccurring in both accounts restart your system withthe Shift key held down This forces the system toload only those kernel extensions absolutely neces-sary for the system to operate If the problem goesaway then the issue may well be caused by somethingcommon to both accounts

There are several other keyboard shortcuts thatcan be invaluable in troubleshooting application orsystem crashes This list12 not only contains usefultroubleshooting keyboard shortcuts but also othershortcuts commonly used in daily operation Printthis list keep it handy and before you know it youwill be using the keyboard for activities you thoughtrequired the mouse

Learn From Your Fellow Mac UsersI have mentioned before that I have found severalMac-related sites invaluable for solving problemsand getting new ideas If you havenrsquot alreadydone so check out Mac Owners Support Group13MacMentor14 or OSXFAQ15 These sites contain awealth of information and joining them is free Whileyou are at the OSXFAQ site head to the forums andgrab this general troubleshooting guide for OS X16Chain this guide somewhere near your Mac for futurereference Itrsquos a much more concise reference thanmost things Irsquove seen elsewhere I also use MacFixIt17

to keep up with late-breaking troubleshooting newsThe late-breaking updates are free but for advancedsearching and extended-troubleshooting guides yoursquollwant to spend the $25 per year to become a sub-scriber

Final ThoughtsBy now you have probably at least glanced at theinformation referenced in this article Here are threetips you may not find written anywhere else The firstone is to start with the simplest possible explanationfor the problem and work from there I spent 20minutes one day trying to decide why my G5 refusedto power up at all Since this was in the middle of thekernel panic phase I was ready for a major hardwarefailure It turns out that the power cord had pulledout of the machine just enough to break contact andprevent power up On visual inspection everythinglooked fine I found the problem when out of sheerdesperation I started retracing my steps

Once you have checked the obvious my secondtip is to check the simplest things first During thetime I was having memory-related problems I openedthe case several times to make sure the questionablechips were installed properly On one of these se-quences I did not hear the usual system chime asthings powered up That chime occurs after yourMac has passed the Power On Self Test (POST) Ifyou Mac fails the POST there is likely a hardwareissue that needs to be resolved Generally it meansthat some internal piece of hardware is not connectedproperly or has failed I immediately assumed theworst It turns out I had reconnected my externalspeakers which disables the internal speaker Sincemy external speakers werenrsquot connected to an elec-

13httpmacosgcomindexphp14httpwwwmacmentororgswitch15httpwwwosxfaqcom16httpforumsosxfaqcomviewtopicphpt=726917httpwwwmacfixitcomindexphpmsg=8

trical outlet at the time there was no sound Boywas I relieved Thatrsquos a much cheaper fix than I wasexpecting

I picked up the last tip in the prendashOS X days Itcame from a program that listed OS 9 error codestheir meanings and some possible solutions If anapplication crashes when you perform a certain stepin a program try a different means of triggering thesame step to see if the program still crashes Supposeyour favorite program quits when you use Command-C to copy information to the clipboard try initiat-ing the copy operation from the Edit menu using themouse If the program still crashes thatrsquos one morepiece of information about the problem If the pro-gram doesnrsquot crash you have a viable workarounduntil a fix is released for the problem

Thatrsquos it for now Wersquoll see what happens nextmonth

Copyright copy 2006 Sylvester Roque sroqueatpmcom

Desktop PicturesGermanyThis Monthrsquos Desktop Pictures1

This monthrsquos photos of Dachau Gunzenhausen andNuremberg were taken by atpm reader Robert Reis2

Previous Monthsrsquo Desktop PicturesPictures from previous months are listed in thedesktop pictures archives3

Downloading All the Pictures at OnceiCab and Interarchy can download an entire set ofdesktop pictures at once Use the ldquoWeb Down-load Entire Siterdquo command in the File menu givingit the URL to the pictures page above In iCab usethe Download command to download ldquoGet all files insame pathrdquo

Contributing Your Own Desktop PicturesIf you have a picture whether a small series or justone fabulous or funny shot feel free to send it toeditoratpmcom and wersquoll consider publishing it innext monthrsquos issue Have a regular print but no scan-ner Donrsquot worry E-mail us and we tell you whereto send it so we can scan it for you Note that wecannot return the original print so send us a copy

Placing Desktop PicturesMac OS X 103x and 104xChoose ldquoSystem Preferences rdquo from the Applemenu click the ldquoDesktop amp Screen Saverrdquo buttonthen choose the Desktop tab In the left-side menuselect the desktop pictures folder you want to use

You can also use the pictures with Mac OS Xrsquosbuilt-in screen saver Select the Screen Saver tabwhich is also in the ldquoDesktop amp Screen Saverrdquo Sys-tem Preferences pane If you put the atpm picturesin your Pictures folder click on the Pictures Folderin the list of screen savers Otherwise click ChooseFolder to tell the screen saver which pictures to use

Mac OS X 101x and 102xChoose ldquoSystem Preferences rdquo from the Applemenu and click the Desktop button With the pop-

1httpwwwatpmcom1210germany2httpwebmaccomrobertanthonyreis3httpwwwatpmcomBackdesktop-picturesshtml

up menu select the desktop pictures folder you wantto use

You can also use the pictures with Mac OS Xrsquosbuilt-in screen saver Choose ldquoSystem Preferences rdquofrom the Apple menu Click the Screen Saver (101x)or Screen Effects (102x) button Then click on Cus-tom Slide Show in the list of screen savers If youput the atpm pictures in your Pictures folder yoursquoreall set Otherwise click Configure to tell the screensaver which pictures to use

Mac OS X 100xSwitch to the Finder Choose ldquoPreferences rdquo fromthe ldquoFinderrdquo menu Click on the ldquoSelect Picture rdquobutton on the right In the Open Panel select thedesktop picture you want to use The panel defaultsto your ~LibraryDesktop Pictures folder Closethe ldquoFinder Preferencesrdquo window when you are done

ATPM 1210 27 Desktop Pictures Germany

Cortlandby Matt Johnson mjohnsonatpmcom

ATPM 1210 28 Cartoon Cortland

Copyright copy 2006 Matt Johnson mjohnsonatpmcom

Software Reviewby Lee Bennett lbennettatpmcom

A Better Finder Rename 74Developer Frank ReiffPublicspace1

Price $20Requirements Mac OS X 103

Universal2Trial Fully-featured (only permits 10 files

to be renamed at once)

A Better Finder Rename (ABFR) is one of the sta-ple utilities known by most every long-time Macin-tosh user A perfect tool for expertly managing file-names its large selection of conditions for choosingand modifying portions of filenames (or the entirename) makes it a must-have for anyone who is theleast bit concerned about file organization on theircomputer

1httpwwwpublicspacenetABetterFinderRename2httpwwwapplecomuniversal

Therersquos almost no end to the possibilities of renamingactions

The last time atpm looked at A Better FinderRename it was April 1999 and version 173 had just

3httpwwwatpmcom504roundupshtml

ATPM 1210 40 Review A Better Finder Rename 74

been released To me even those early versions seempowerful enough to hold their own against popularutilities of today Yet ABFR just keeps getting bet-ter offering increasingly creative ways to both isolateexactly which files you wish to rename and to specifyexactly how to rename them

Fast-forward to November 2005 and ABFR 70has undergone a complete rewrite as a Cocoa appli-cation One of its most anticipated new features isthe ability to combine several rename actions into asingle step

ABFRrsquos multi-step rename feature shown in the left draweris a time-saving addition that means yoursquoll never again have

to invoke multiple renaming sessions Clicka to enlargeahttpwwwatpmcom1210imagesabfr-multistep-la

rgepng

Version 73 came with an alternative to the multi-step feature which should be of benefit for paranoidtypes who would rather do just one step at a timeTherersquos now an Apply button to perform a renameaction and remain in the ABFR application permit-ting you to immediately set up a new action

The instant preview window has also seen big im-provement It can now be detached and resized fromthe default drawer configuration and you can dragand drop additional files from the Finder addingthem to the renaming session Curiously even thoughthere is a button to remove items from the previewwindow you cannot drag them away in the samemanner that you can drag them in Poof anyone

A prior version of ABFR added the ability towork with MP3 and AAC audio files If your au-dio files are properly tagged with ID3 informationABFR can extract that information for renamingfunctions For example when iTunes is managingyour library automatically the filenames are usuallyjust the song titles which are inside a folder thatis named for the album Those album folders liveinside yet another folder which is named for theartist Suppose you want to copy a handful of songsfrom various albums to your Desktop then burnthem to a CD with no folder structure ABFR can

read the ID3 tags to give all the song files a namesuch as Artist_Album_Songmp3 You can chooseone of the filename presets or build your own4

ABFR can also look at date and time informa-tion from the EXIF data in digital photos and add itto filenames or create numbered filename lists basedon this data Support for Adobersquos Digital Negative(DNG) format and experimental support of two newRAW formats when used under OS X 104 was addedearly this year

Geeks uh I mean power users will appreci-ate the support of regular expressions Letrsquos be hon-est heremdashyou either know how to use regular expres-sions or you donrsquot Since I donrsquot the best I can do issuggest you take a look at what ABFRrsquos Web pagesays about it5

Another boon to advanced users is the ability tochoose one of four ways in which the technical actof renaming6 is performed The default ldquoUltra-safeFinder moderdquo is the setting to leave for most circum-stances Other modes include Cocoa mode which ismuch faster for huge renaming actions and Unicodemode which uses the Carbon APIs

Finally ABFR features tools for creating time-saving workflows The simplest workflow function isto create a droplet upon which you can repeatedlydrag files to perform common rename actions Ad-vanced users can set up standardized names in an-other application such as BBEdit or Microsoft Excelexport them to a text file (plain or tab-delimited)and use these lists to manage batch file renaming

ABFR is solid and reliable Even the safe re-name mode is very quick Itrsquos had a long time tomature into the indispensable tool it has proven it-self to be If you had asked me ten years ago if thefirst versions of ABFR could be any better Irsquod prob-ably have answered ldquoI donrsquot see how Itrsquos alreadyamazingrdquo Yet Publicspace has continually proventherersquos always something that can be better Therersquosprobably already a good list of rename action im-provements and additions of which I wouldnrsquot havedreamed That said I do have two thoughts on us-ability

If yoursquore using both the multi-step drawer and theinstant preview drawer at the same time the inter-face is awfully wide Sure you can drag these drawers

4httppublicspacenetABetterFinderRenameManual_mp3html

5httpwwwpublicspacenetABetterFinderRenameManual_RegularExpressionsPrimerhtml

6httpwwwpublicspacenetABetterFinderRenameManual_RenameMechanisms7html

closer but they then become a bit too narrow to beuseful especially the preview drawer As stated ear-lier you can detach the preview drawer and moveit elsewhere though I happen to like drawers andthe ability to keep an applicationrsquos interface tied to-gether Perhaps an optional setting to have the pre-view drawer come out the bottom instead of the rightside is worth consideration

My other thought concerns the menu of renameactions seen in the first screen shot above While Iam definitely not accusing ABFR of feature bloat itcan sometimes take a moment to scan through thelist to find what Irsquom looking for As you can seein the screen shot the action menu list is nearly astall as the entire vertical resolution of my TitaniumPowerBook

The solution may be something Irsquove not even con-sidered but ideas that come to mind include theintroduction of some hierarchy in the action menuandor pruning preferences so that the list isnrsquot pop-ulated with actions for which some users may neverneed

While these two issues are a hit against usabilityneither affects functionality in any way The multi-step drawer usually isnrsquot needed and doesnrsquot have tobe out and there is at least a small bit of grouping inthe action list A Better Finder Rename is definitelya tool that can benefit anyone

Copyright copy 2006 Lee Bennett lbennettatpmcom Re-viewing in atpm is open to anyone If yoursquore interestedwrite to us at reviewsatpmcom

Accessory Reviewby Chris Lawson clawsonatpmcom

iWooferDeveloper Rain Design1

Price $129 ($100 street)Requirements iPods 3G 4G 5G

mini or shuffle Separate iPodnanoshuffle version available(same price)

Trial None

Rain Design better known for their ergonomic acces-sories like the iLap2 has branched out into the bur-geoning iPod accessories market with the iWooferThis $129 speaker system also functions as a USBdock for third-generation or newer iPod models in-cluding the iPod mini and iPod shuffle models A sec-ond iWoofer model supports the iPod nano (as wellas the iPod shuffle) Both iWoofers include an FMtuner for radio playback if you ever get bored withyour iTunes library

1httpwwwraindesigninccomiwooferhtml2httpwwwatpmcom1005ilapshtml

Features-wise the iWoofer is fairly complete Youcanrsquot quibble with its broad iPod support and an FMtuner is a nice touch The radio could use a betterimplementation though The reception is nothingto write home about itrsquos not as atrocious as the ra-dio Shark (thank the iWooferrsquos external antenna forthat) but itrsquos not great either Any $20 department-store clock radio will rival the quality of its recep-tion which is perhaps not what you wanted to hearabout the device you just dropped a hundred andthirty smackers on Worse therersquos no visual indica-tion of station frequency and the tuner is digital soyou have absolutely no clue what station yoursquore lis-

ATPM 1210 43 Review iWoofer

tening to until the DJ takes a break from overplayingldquoMy Humpsrdquo interspersed with commercials for thelocal used-car lot to do his FCC-mandated duty andannounces what station hersquos working for Finally itwould have been nice if Rain Design had thought toinclude a feature where switching to the FM tunerwould automatically pause the iPod

But you didnrsquot buy it for its FM tuner capabili-ties so you donrsquot care about all that You bought itbecause you want to be able to unleash Rammstein onyour unsuspecting cubicle neighbors For having onlytwo tiny 30-mm drivers and a 25-inch subwoofer thesound is surprisingly good While the drivers can dis-tort at high volume settings when playing music witha heavy midrange and the bass is only average for aspeaker of this size the high notes are clean and crispIf you keep the volume under control yoursquoll be pleas-antly surprised by the sound You donrsquot even haveto be chained to the AC adapter to enjoy it eitherthe iWoofer can be powered by four AA batteries forportable uhm ldquowoofingrdquo

The iPod dock implementation is excellent Un-like many third-party docks the iWoofer allows theiPod to both charge and update while docked via theincluded USB cable Kudos to Rain Design for get-ting it right here Kudos are also given to the engineerwho insisted that a means for turning off the blueLED ring underneath the unit be included as thelight is extremely bright in a dark room and quicklywears out its welcome (Note to other manufactur-ers not everyone wants you to prove that you cancreate a blue LED with a brightness of 1588 lumensper milliwatt)

That leaves two complaints The AC adapter isquite possibly the worst wall-wart Irsquove ever had thedispleasure of dealing with There is simply no wayin any reasonable power strip to avoid taking upthree plugs with it While this might be excusablewere the adapter attractively designed itrsquos not evengood-looking and it doesnrsquot match the design of theiWoofer to boot Plan to pony up $10 more for a tol-erable third-party AC adapter And speaking of thedesign either you love the look or you hate it TheiWoofermdashespecially the black modelmdashlooks like themutant bastard child of Volkswagenrsquos Fast3 and aniPod but I mean that as a compliment Itrsquos ratherendearingly cute in an alien sort of way

I like Rain Design I really do And I want to likethe iWoofer But the AC adapter is lousy enough toknock it down one full rating and its half-thought-

3httpwwwslatecomid2137532

out FM tuner and high price donrsquot help Send thisone back to the kitchen to bake a little longer

Copyright copy 2006 Chris Lawson clawsonatpmcom Re-viewing in atpm is open to anyone If yoursquore interestedwrite to us at reviewsatpmcom

Book Reviewby Sylvester Roque sroqueatpmcom

Making Music on the Apple MacPublisher PC-Publishing1OrsquoReilly2

Author Keith Gemmell3Price $15Trial None

For reasons I canrsquot quite explain Ihave always had a passing interest in making mu-sic on a Mac The one thing that has stoppedme from trying it is an incredible lack of talentor sense of rhythm As a first step in that direc-tion I reviewed Keep It Simple With GarageBand4

by Keith Gemmell5 for the August issueWhile working on the review of that book I

learned that Mr Gemmell has also written MakingMusic on the Apple Mac A quick perusal of thebookrsquos description suggested that it was geared to-ward anyone considering setting up a home studioI wasnrsquot planning on going that far but it soundedlike interesting reading so I volunteered to reviewthis book as well

General ImpressionsMaking Music on the Apple Mac was first publishedin 2005 and therefore pre-dates the GarageBandbook It has the same concise writing style and co-pious use of screenshots and photographs I supposeyou could argue that no one really needs to see aphotograph of a MIDI6 keyboard but itrsquos there ifyou would like to see it Most of the figures in thisbook are much more useful than that After allthere are some things that you just need to see tocompletely understand

If you are a fan of tips tidbits and occasionalbits of trivia in the margins of your books this bookwonrsquot disappoint Look carefully and you will dis-cover mixing tips definitions of basic terms and theoccasional Web site all in the margins Therersquos evena brief history of the MIDI interface

1httpwwwpc-publishingcommmamhtml2httpwwworeillycomcatalog1870775953indexht

ml3httpwwworeillynetcompubau22114httpwwwatpmcom1208kiswgshtml5httpwwworeillynetcompubau22116httpenwikipediaorgwikiMIDI

First StepsmdashChoosing the Right HardwareThis book encompasses 103 pages divided into sevenchapters The first two chapters are devoted to hard-ware issues Chapter 1 begins with the obvious ques-tion which Mac has sufficient speed for your homestudio application Mac models from eMacs to PowerMac G5s are considered as possible centerpieces ofa recording studio without getting bogged down intechnical jargon You wonrsquot find a discussion of Intel-based Macs here though If you just donrsquot have timeto read 15 pages of information it is summarized inthe Appendix and condensed to just over two pages

Some of the tips in this chapter may be obvious tolong-time Mac users The admonition to buy as muchRAM as you can reasonably afford is not only appro-priate for music editing but also for other intensivetasks as well While I expected to see a tip regard-ing the need for increased RAM I did not expect tohave to think about screen size As you graduatefrom GarageBand to professional programs such asLogic Cubase or Digital Performer the number oftool palettes and windows can increase significantlyIf you tend to keep several windows and palettes opensimultaneously a small screen can be problematic

Chapter 2 is devoted to additional hardware thatone needs to get good recordings Once you decide togo beyond the Macrsquos built-in recording capabilitiesthere are several pieces of hardware that might proveuseful Microphones speakers audio interfaces andMIDI gear are all discussed briefly in this chapterThe advice is generally practical and the author doesnot assume that everyone needs professional qualitygear If you are new to making music on the Mactherersquos some good information here Do you knowthe difference between a condenser mic and a dynamicmic You will after reading this chapter What aboutthe microphonersquos pickup pattern If you donrsquot knowthe difference between cardoid omni or figure 8 pat-terns you will after reading page 22

Second StepsmdashAdding the Right SoftwareChapters 3ndash5 examine the software side of a Mac-based recording studio In such a discussion Garage-Band has to be among the first pieces of software to

ATPM 1210 45 Review Making Music on the Apple Mac

come to mind Many Mac users have this programeither because they purchased a computer with it pre-installed or purchased it as part of the iLife suite

Chapter 3 which is devoted to GarageBand tipsand tricks is the longest chapter in the book Thereare more than 30 pages of GarageBand goodness hereincluding tips tricks suggestions and a descriptionof many of the included special effects If you wantto know what features were added in version 2 ofGarageBand check out chapter 4 Curiously enoughthis is the shortest chapter in the book

Even though GarageBand has a remarkable set offeatures your creative urges may eventually requirea little more flexibility If thatrsquos the case you need toconsider a software upgrade Fortunately as a Macuser yoursquove got some viable options including LogicCubase and Digital Performer How do you knowwhich one is best for you

Given the cost of professional-level recording soft-ware you donrsquot want to guess wrong when decidingwhich program to purchase You could scour Websites haunt user groups and consult friends or youcan consult chapter 5 In 18 pages Mr Grinnellgives a nice overview of each program and its rela-tive strengths and weaknesses As usual screenshotstips and tricks abound As you read this chapterkeep in mind that there wonrsquot be information aboutwhich programs are available as universal binaries ortheir performance under Rosetta Remember from ahardware standpoint this book stops at the G4-basedMac mini and the Power Mac G5

Thatrsquos a WrapNow that you have recorded your sonic masterpiecewhatrsquos next Well musicians generally want theirmusic played as often as possible for as many peopleas possible This process is discussed in the book aswell Chapter 6 is devoted to the pros and cons ofscoring and distributing your own music If you haveany background in this area at all yoursquoll have notrouble understanding the authorrsquos comments Thisis a difficult area for me to judge since I have no expe-rience in music composition but the authorrsquos discus-sion of these issues seems reasonable and is as conciseas the rest of the book

Chapter 7 takes a very basic look at a music dis-tribution option that is becoming increasingly morepopular Yoursquove created a musical masterpiecemdashwhynot put it on the Internet for the world to hear Ifyou have never done this before donrsquot worry aboutneeding additional software This chapter explains

how to use iTunes and GarageBand to do the heavylifting

If you think the finished track is pretty good whynot get a little feedback7 from fans and fellow musi-cians After you have reviewed 30 songs by otherartists on this site you can post your own music forreview by other members

Final ThoughtsIf you are new to recording on Macs this book isan excellent introduction The information is wellpresented without a lot of jargon If you have beenrecording for some time already this is probably notthe book for you Making Music on the Apple Macis an excellent beginners resource as long as you re-alize that it does not contain information about theperformance of the Intel Macs

Copyright copy 2006 Sylvester Roque sroqueatpmcom Re-viewing in atpm is open to anyone If yoursquore interestedwrite to us at reviewsatpmcom

7httpwwwgaragebandcomhtdbindexhtml|pe1|X8jTJnjrvP2rZVY

Software Reviewby David B Thompson dthompsonatpmcom

Parallels Desktop 221848Developer Parallels Inc1Price $80 (download)Requirements Intel-based Macintosh

Mac OS-X 1046Trial Fully-featured (15 days)

The purpose of Parallels Desktop for Macintosh(PDM) is to provide access to an Intel virtual ma-chine on Intel-based Macs That interface and thevirtual machine that underlies it allows installationof alternate operating systems that will run in anOS X window That technical talk means I canrun Microsoft Windows in an OS X window Win-dows under Parallels Desktop runs natively on myIntel-based Mac

This ability is important to me and others likeme who want to use Macintosh computers but needaccess to Windows (or other operating systems) forcertain activities For example my profession hy-drology requires me to use a pair of standard nu-merical models that run only under Windows UntilApple decided to use Intel processors for Macintoshcomputers I was forced to either use emulation viaVirtual PC2 or use a second Windows-based com-puter

Using and maintaining more than one computer issomething I no longer want to do I want to keep mycomputational life as simple as possible The fewercomputers I have to maintain the better I like it

I have experience with emulators I usedDOSEMU under Linux way back in the earlydays of Linux when system administration was fairlychallenging DOSEMU worked fine for DOS-basedsoftware It was even fairly speedy given the hard-ware it was running on (80486 Intel processors) Ofcourse DOS was a relatively simple system and itshardware requirements were modest

After I switched to Macintosh I used MicrosoftrsquosVirtual PC (VPC) to give me access to Windows XPPro under OS X On my PowerBook G4 Virtual PCran and I was able to install Windows but the sys-tem was not usable because performance was rela-tively poor That is while the 125 GHz G4 was

1httpwwwparallelscomenproductsdesktop2httpwwwatpmcom802virtual-pcshtml

able to run Windows under Virtual PC the pro-cessor wasnrsquot quite powerful enough to make usingWindows practical The response of Windows wasjust too slow On my dual-G5 desktop Mac how-ever performance of the VPCXP combination wasacceptablemdashnot great but usable

Given that background I anticipated better per-formance with the ParallelsWindows combinationthan with Virtual PC After I acquired my MacBookPro and set it up I downloaded a copy of Parallelsand installed it

Installation was easy I downloaded the softwaremounted the disk image and ran the installer Par-allels Inc uses an automated e-mail system to senda temporary activation code for trial use

Once Parallels was installed I fired it up adjustedthe memory allocation from the default value of 256MB to 512 MB and started the virtual machine Iwas then able to install XP The Windows installerexecuted fairly quickly and I was presented with thedesktop I ran Windows Update then downloadedand installed my tools and had the system opera-tional within an hour No hitches were encounteredwhen running the Windows installer

Memory Issues and PerformanceWindows XP Pro runs best with lots of memoryWhile it will install and run with 256 MB the sys-tem runs better with at least 512 MB Thatrsquos why Ibumped up the allocation under Parallels

With a 512 MB memory allocation for WindowsParallels uses quite a bit of memory To illustrate Icaptured the screen shot below Parallels used about452 MB of memory (resident size or RSIZE) and itstotal memory footprint (VSIZE) was something over1 GB When I first installed Parallels on my MacBookPro I had only 1 GB of RAM installed in the systemSystem performance was significantly impacted whenrunning PDM with 1 GB of RAM and a 512 MBallocation for the virtual machine The system spenta lot of time swapping motivating me to purchasean additional 1 GB of RAM to max-out my systemThis isnrsquot a big deal for me because I typically installthe maximum RAM on my systems anyway but it

ATPM 1210 47 Review Parallels Desktop 221848

is an issue You will want to have at least 2 GB ofRAM to run PDMXP under OS X

I also examined ldquoMy Computerrdquo under Windowsto see what hardware Windows thought it was run-ning on The result is shown below Windows cor-rectly identified the hardware as an Intel T2600 at216GHz with 512 MB just like it should Parallelsis doing its job

Use of Windows under Parallels is well like us-ing it on any other computer To develop an ob-jective view of system performance I ran the SiSoftSandra processor benchmark on the virtual machineSandra reported that my virtual computer was run-ning at about two-thirds the speed (in terms of MIPSand MegaFLOPS) of a T2600 Intel Core Duo clockedat 216GHz Thatrsquos technical talk to indicate Paral-

lels on my MacBook Pro was running with about a33 percent performance penalty over what Windowswould do running natively on similar hardware

Even with the performance hit associated withrunning a guest operating system under OS X theParallelsWindows combinations felt substantiallyfaster than Virtual PC on my old PowerBook G4and moderately faster than Windows running na-tively on my Toshiba Portege Centrino-based systemThese rough tests and impression do not comprisean engineering study comparing performance of thevarious hardwaresoftware platforms they are myimpressions based on using the different systems

That noted I would say the ParallelsWindowscombination on my MacBook Pro is quite usable theVirtual PCWindows combination was not usable onthe PowerBook G4 I should also note the VirtualPCWindows combination was quite usable on mydesktop dual G5 too but I noticed a clear perfor-mance hit associated with software emulation of In-tel hardware on the dual G5 Using Parallels on myMacBook Pro or Virtual PC on my dual-G5 desktopmy numerical models run well enough to work formodest-sized problems I can use them to test anddebug student assignments and use the tools for myown projects

Using ParallelsOne potential issue with Virtual PC is capture andrelease of the mouse and keyboard by the guest OSThis is handled elegantly by Parallels Simultane-ously pressing the Control and Option keys releasesthe mouse and keyboard from the guest operatingsystem Itrsquos a good key combination because I rarelyuse both of those keys together An even better solu-tion is to install the Parallels tools under WindowsMore on those tools below

As a system administrator one of the tasks I faceis management of disk resources On my Linux sys-tems changing a partition size used to be a challenge(Itrsquos less troublesome now with virtual disk manage-ment) The task might require copying data on anexisting partition removing the partition creating anew partition migrating the data to the new parti-tion and assigning the mount point for the expandedpartition Parallels assigns a default disk allocationof 8000 MB With Windows and my two numericalmodels installed I used about 5500 MB of that al-location I ran the Parallels Image Tool to find outhow difficult it is to reallocate disk resources

The Parallels Image Tool is implemented as aldquowizardrdquo that takes information you provide andruns a simple task I was able to resize the virtualdisk from 8 GB to 12 GB in about five minutes Iwas pleased

Access to printers is important so I tested theprinting capability of Parallels This required en-abling the printer on the Parallels interface whichwas as simple as clicking on the USB button at thebottom of the Parallels window and selecting myBrother HL-2070N from the dialog When I turnedon the printer Windows found it and asked forpermission to install the software Then the printerjust worked

One last thing I wanted to do was to share filesbetween the host operating system (OS X) and theguest operating system (Windows) I read the UserrsquosGuide but the only mention of file access I couldfind was to use a Samba server on the OS X sideand mount the drives as a Samba share on the Win-dows side I have experience working with the Sambaserver under Linux and decided I didnrsquot have time togo that route However when searching for clipboardsharing between OS X and Parallels I found a refer-ence to ldquoshared foldersrdquo My curiosity thus piqued Iinstalled the Parallels tools under Windows

The Parallels tools are straightforward to installWith the virtual machine running choose ldquoInstallParallels Toolsrdquo from the VM menu Follow the Win-dows wizard and reboot the virtual machine Thisturns on mouse pointer synchronization clipboardsharing and folder sharing (Notice the absence ofany mention of files)

Clipboard sharing works as expected Command-C Command-X and Command-V on the OS X sideand Control-C Control-X and Control-V on theWindows side CoolmdashI liked that

File sharing however is cumbersome Eachdirectory (folder) you want to access under Par-allelsWindows must be explicitly enabled in thevirtual-machine configuration If you specify your up-permost document level folder (UsersThompsonDocumentsfor example) any files present in that directory willbe accessible but you cannot traverse the tree tofiles in lower directories in the tree (An exampleof what it looks like is shown below) Although Icanrsquot verify my guess this ldquofeelsrdquo like a network fileinterfacemdashin other words I think a Samba service isrunning underneath the hood

ConclusionFor my application (running a couple of Windows-only numerical models) Parallels is quite useful Idonrsquot have to choose which operating system at boottime I can have both available to me simultaneouslyThis comes with a cost in terms of physical mem-ory required and a performance hit for Windows butthatrsquos an acceptable limitation to me I always installthe maximum memory in my notebook computersand 2 GB is sufficient to run both systems Printingworks with USB-based printers Clipboard sharingis useful as is the smooth mouse integration Filesharing between guest and host operating systems isless smooth and requires the user to configure foldersto be shared Irsquom hopeful this can be improved If itdoes then Irsquoll change my rating from ldquogoodrdquo to ldquoverynicerdquo

Copyright copy 2006 David B Thompson dthompsonatpmcomReviewing in atpm is open to anyone If yoursquore interestedwrite to us at reviewsatpmcom

FAQ Frequently Asked QuestionsWhat Is ATPMAbout This Particular Macintosh (atpm) is amongother things a monthly Internet magazine or ldquoe-zinerdquo atpm was created to celebrate the personalcomputing experience For us this means the mostpersonal of all personal computersmdashthe Apple Mac-intosh About This Particular Macintosh is intendedto be about your Macintosh our Macintoshes andthe creative personal ideas and experiences of every-one who uses a Mac We hope that we will continueto be faithful to our mission

Are You Looking for New Staff Membersatpm is looking to add more regular reviewers to ourstaff Though all positions with About This Partic-ular Macintosh are volunteer reviewing is a greatway to share your product knowledge and experiencewith fellow members of the Macintosh communityIf yoursquore interested contact atpmrsquos Reviews EditorPaul Fatula1

How Can I Subscribe to ATPMVisit the subscriptions page2

Which Format Is Best for Mebull The Online Webzine edition is for people who

want to view atpm in their Web browser whileconnected to the Internet It provides sharptext lots of navigation options and live linksto atpm back issues and other Web pages

bull The Offline Webzine is an HTML version ofatpm that is formatted for viewing offline andmade available in a Mac OS X disk image Thegraphics content and navigation elements arethe same as with the Online Webzine but youcan view it without being connected to the In-ternet It requires a Web browser

bull The Print PDF edition is saved in Adobe PDFformat It has a two-column layout with smallertext and higher-resolution graphics that are op-timized for printing It may be viewed onlinein a browser or downloaded and viewed in Ap-plersquos Preview or Adobe Reader on Macintosh or

1mailtoreviewsatpmcom2httpwwwatpmcomsubscribe

Windows PDFs may be magnified to any sizeand searched with ease

bull The Screen PDF edition is also saved inAdobe PDF format Itrsquos a one-column layoutwith larger text thatrsquos optimized for readingon-screen

How Can I Submit Cover ArtWe enjoy the opportunity to display new originalcover art every month Wersquore also very proud of thepeople who have come forward to offer us cover art foreach issue If yoursquore a Macintosh artist and interestedin preparing a cover for atpm please e-mail us Theway the process works is pretty simple As soon as wehave a topic or theme for the upcoming issue we letyou know about it Then itrsquos up to you We do notpay for cover art but we are an international publica-tion with a broad readership and we give appropriatecredit alongside your work Therersquos space for an e-mail address and a Web page URL too Write toeditoratpmcom for more information

How Can I Send a Letter to the EditorGot a comment about an article that you read inatpm Is there something yoursquod like us to writeabout in a future issue Wersquod love to hear from youSend your e-mail to editoratpmcom We often pub-lish the e-mail that comes our way

Do You Answer Technical Support Ques-tionsOf course (although we cannot promise to answerevery inquiry) E-mail our Help Department athelpatpmcom

How Can I Contribute to ATPMThere are several sections of atpm to which readersfrequently contribute

Segments Slices from the Macintosh LifeThis is one of our most successful spaces and one ofour favorite places We think of it as kind of theatpm ldquoguest roomrdquo This is where we will publishthat sentimental Macintosh story that you promisedyourself you would one day write Itrsquos that specialplace in atpm thatrsquos specifically designated for yourstories Wersquod really like to hear from you Several

ATPM 1210 50 FAQ

Segments contributors have gone on to become atpmcolumnists Send your stuff to editoratpmcom

Hardware and Software Reviewsatpm publishes hardware and software reviews How-ever we do things in a rather unique way Techno-jargon can be useful to engineers but is not always ahelp to most Mac users We like reviews that informour readers about how a particular piece of hardwareor software will help their Macintosh lives We wantthem to know what works how it may help themin their work and how enthusiastic they are aboutrecommending it to others If you have a new pieceof hardware or software that yoursquod like to reviewcontact our reviews editor at reviewsatpmcom formore information

Shareware ReviewsMost of us have been there we find that special pieceof shareware that significantly improves the qualityour Macintosh life and we wonder why the entireworld hasnrsquot heard about it Now herersquos the chanceto tell them Simply let us know by writing up a shortreview for our shareware section Send your reviewsto reviewsatpmcom

Which Products Have You ReviewedCheck our reviews index3 for the complete list

What is Your Rating Scaleatpm uses the following ratings (in order from bestto worst) Excellent Very Nice Good Okay Rotten

Will You Review My ProductIf you or your company has a product that yoursquod liketo see reviewed send a copy our way Wersquore alwayslooking for interesting pieces of software to try outContact reviewsatpmcom for shipping informationYou can send press releases to newsatpmcom

Can I Sponsor ATPMAbout This Particular Macintosh is free and we in-tend to keep it this way Our editors and staff arevolunteers with ldquorealrdquo jobs who believe in the Macin-tosh way of computing We donrsquot make a profit nordo we plan to As such we rely on advertisers to helpus pay for our Web site and other expenses Pleaseconsider supporting atpm by advertising in our issuesand on our web site Contact advertiseatpmcomfor more information

3httpwwwatpmcomreviews

Where Can I Find Back Issues of ATPMBack issues4 of atpm dating since April 1995 areavailable in DOCMaker stand-alone format and asPDF In addition all issues since atpm 205 (May1996) are available in HTML format

What If My Question Isnrsquot AnsweredAboveWe hope by now that yoursquove found what yoursquorelooking for (We canrsquot imagine therersquos something elseabout atpm that yoursquod like to know) But justin case yoursquove read this far (We appreciate yourtenacity) and still havenrsquot found that little pieceof information about atpm that you came here tofind please feel free to e-mail us at (You guessed it)editoratpmcom

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ATPM 1210 51 FAQ

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Welcome

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Bloggable Fire in the (AirPort) Hole

Mac of All Trades Dream Machine

MacMuser 17 Is Just Not Big Enough

Web Accessibility Nvu Impressive and Powerful

Segments Infinitely Improbable

How To Crash Logs What Are They and What Do They Mean

Desktop Pictures Germany

Cartoon Cortland

Review A Better Finder Rename 74

Review iWoofer

Review Making Music on the Apple Mac

Review Parallels Desktop 221848

Cover ArtCopyright copy 2006 Mirko von Berner1 We need new cover art each month Write2 to us

The ATPM Staff

PublisherEditor-in-Chief Michael Tsai3

Managing Editor Christopher Turner4

Associate EditorReviews Paul Fatula5

Copy Editors Chris Lawson6

Ellyn Ritterskamp7

Brooke Smith8

VacantWeb Editor Lee Bennett9

Webmaster Michael Tsai10

Beta Testers The Staff11

Contributing Editors Eric Blair12

Mike Chamberlain13

Matthew Glidden14

Ted Goranson15

Andrew Kator16

Robert Paul Leitao17

Wes Meltzer18

Sylvester Roque19

Charles Ross20

Mark Tennent21

David B Thompson22

Evan Trent23

Vacant1httpdirecciondeartecom2mailtocover-artatpmcom3mailtomtsaiatpmcom4mailtocturneratpmcom5mailtopfatulaatpmcom6mailtoclawsonatpmcom7mailtoeritterskampatpmcom8mailtobsmithatpmcom9mailtolbennettatpmcom

10mailtomtsaiatpmcom11mailtoeditoratpmcom12mailtoeblairatpmcom13mailtomchamberlainatpmcom14mailtomgliddenatpmcom15mailtotgoransonatpmcom16mailtoakatoratpmcom17mailtorleitaoatpmcom18mailtowmeltzeratpmcom19mailtosroqueatpmcom20mailtocrossatpmcom21mailtomtennentatpmcom22mailtodthompsonatpmcom23mailtoetrentatpmcom

ATPM 1210 2 Cover

Artwork amp Design

Mark Robinson

bull bull bull

ATPM 1210 3 Cover

bull bull bull

ATPM 1210 5 Welcome

ATPM 1210 6 Welcome

E-MailFileMaker 851

mdashCharles Ross

bull bull bull

mdashRob Russell

mdashRon Cowden

bull bull bull

mdashTim Selander

ATPM 1210 7 E-Mail

bull bull bull

mdashTim Selander

WriteRoom Review3

bull bull bull

mdashWelfl

bull bull bull

mdashMichael McKee

mdashScott Park

mdashWes Meltzer

bull bull bull

ATPM 1210 8 E-Mail

mdashRobin Harris

bull bull bull

mdashRK Foster

mdashJeff Alexander

mdashJesse Grosjean

ATPM 1210 9 E-Mail

mdashJeff Boice

mdashMichael Tsai

ATPM 1210 10 E-Mail

ndexphppf=1

style sheets

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Trial None

ATPM 1210 50 FAQ

4httpwwwatpmcomBack

ATPM 1210 51 FAQ

Sponsors

Welcome

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Cartoon Cortland

Review iWoofer

Artwork amp Design

Mark Robinson

bull bull bull

ATPM 1210 3 Cover

bull bull bull

ATPM 1210 5 Welcome

ATPM 1210 6 Welcome

E-MailFileMaker 851

mdashCharles Ross

bull bull bull

mdashRob Russell

mdashRon Cowden

bull bull bull

mdashTim Selander

ATPM 1210 7 E-Mail

bull bull bull

mdashTim Selander

WriteRoom Review3

bull bull bull

mdashWelfl

bull bull bull

mdashMichael McKee

mdashScott Park

mdashWes Meltzer

bull bull bull

ATPM 1210 8 E-Mail

mdashRobin Harris

bull bull bull

mdashRK Foster

mdashJeff Alexander

mdashJesse Grosjean

ATPM 1210 9 E-Mail

mdashJeff Boice

mdashMichael Tsai

ATPM 1210 10 E-Mail

ndexphppf=1

style sheets

rgepng

Trial None

ATPM 1210 50 FAQ

4httpwwwatpmcomBack

ATPM 1210 51 FAQ

Sponsors

Welcome

E-Mail

Cartoon Cortland

Review iWoofer

bull bull bull

ATPM 1210 5 Welcome

ATPM 1210 6 Welcome

E-MailFileMaker 851

mdashCharles Ross

bull bull bull

mdashRob Russell

mdashRon Cowden

bull bull bull

mdashTim Selander

ATPM 1210 7 E-Mail

bull bull bull

mdashTim Selander

WriteRoom Review3

bull bull bull

mdashWelfl

bull bull bull

mdashMichael McKee

mdashScott Park

mdashWes Meltzer

bull bull bull

ATPM 1210 8 E-Mail

mdashRobin Harris

bull bull bull

mdashRK Foster

mdashJeff Alexander

mdashJesse Grosjean

ATPM 1210 9 E-Mail

mdashJeff Boice

mdashMichael Tsai

ATPM 1210 10 E-Mail

ndexphppf=1

style sheets

rgepng

Trial None

ATPM 1210 50 FAQ

4httpwwwatpmcomBack

ATPM 1210 51 FAQ

Sponsors

Welcome

E-Mail

Cartoon Cortland

Review iWoofer

ATPM 1210 5 Welcome

ATPM 1210 6 Welcome

E-MailFileMaker 851

mdashCharles Ross

bull bull bull

mdashRob Russell

mdashRon Cowden

bull bull bull

mdashTim Selander

ATPM 1210 7 E-Mail

bull bull bull

mdashTim Selander

WriteRoom Review3

bull bull bull

mdashWelfl

bull bull bull

mdashMichael McKee

mdashScott Park

mdashWes Meltzer

bull bull bull

ATPM 1210 8 E-Mail

mdashRobin Harris

bull bull bull

mdashRK Foster

mdashJeff Alexander

mdashJesse Grosjean

ATPM 1210 9 E-Mail

mdashJeff Boice

mdashMichael Tsai

ATPM 1210 10 E-Mail

ndexphppf=1

style sheets

rgepng

Trial None

ATPM 1210 50 FAQ

4httpwwwatpmcomBack

ATPM 1210 51 FAQ

Sponsors

Welcome

E-Mail

Cartoon Cortland

Review iWoofer

ATPM 1210 6 Welcome

E-MailFileMaker 851

mdashCharles Ross

bull bull bull

mdashRob Russell

mdashRon Cowden

bull bull bull

mdashTim Selander

ATPM 1210 7 E-Mail

bull bull bull

mdashTim Selander

WriteRoom Review3

bull bull bull

mdashWelfl

bull bull bull

mdashMichael McKee

mdashScott Park

mdashWes Meltzer

bull bull bull

ATPM 1210 8 E-Mail

mdashRobin Harris

bull bull bull

mdashRK Foster

mdashJeff Alexander

mdashJesse Grosjean

ATPM 1210 9 E-Mail

mdashJeff Boice

mdashMichael Tsai

ATPM 1210 10 E-Mail

ndexphppf=1

style sheets

rgepng

Trial None

ATPM 1210 50 FAQ

4httpwwwatpmcomBack

ATPM 1210 51 FAQ

Sponsors

Welcome

E-Mail

Cartoon Cortland

Review iWoofer

E-MailFileMaker 851

mdashCharles Ross

bull bull bull

mdashRob Russell

mdashRon Cowden

bull bull bull

mdashTim Selander

ATPM 1210 7 E-Mail

bull bull bull

mdashTim Selander

WriteRoom Review3

bull bull bull

mdashWelfl

bull bull bull

mdashMichael McKee

mdashScott Park

mdashWes Meltzer

bull bull bull

ATPM 1210 8 E-Mail

mdashRobin Harris

bull bull bull

mdashRK Foster

mdashJeff Alexander

mdashJesse Grosjean

ATPM 1210 9 E-Mail

mdashJeff Boice

mdashMichael Tsai

ATPM 1210 10 E-Mail

ndexphppf=1

style sheets

rgepng

Trial None

ATPM 1210 50 FAQ

4httpwwwatpmcomBack

ATPM 1210 51 FAQ

Sponsors

Welcome

E-Mail

Cartoon Cortland

Review iWoofer

bull bull bull

mdashTim Selander

WriteRoom Review3

bull bull bull

mdashWelfl

bull bull bull

mdashMichael McKee

mdashScott Park

mdashWes Meltzer

bull bull bull

ATPM 1210 8 E-Mail

mdashRobin Harris

bull bull bull

mdashRK Foster

mdashJeff Alexander

mdashJesse Grosjean

ATPM 1210 9 E-Mail

mdashJeff Boice

mdashMichael Tsai

ATPM 1210 10 E-Mail

ndexphppf=1

style sheets

rgepng

Trial None

ATPM 1210 50 FAQ

4httpwwwatpmcomBack

ATPM 1210 51 FAQ

Sponsors

Welcome

E-Mail

Cartoon Cortland

Review iWoofer

mdashRobin Harris

bull bull bull

mdashRK Foster

mdashJeff Alexander

mdashJesse Grosjean

ATPM 1210 9 E-Mail

mdashJeff Boice

mdashMichael Tsai

ATPM 1210 10 E-Mail

ndexphppf=1

style sheets

rgepng

Trial None

ATPM 1210 50 FAQ

4httpwwwatpmcomBack

ATPM 1210 51 FAQ

Sponsors

Welcome

E-Mail

Cartoon Cortland

Review iWoofer

mdashJeff Boice

mdashMichael Tsai

ATPM 1210 10 E-Mail

ndexphppf=1

style sheets

rgepng

Trial None

ATPM 1210 50 FAQ

4httpwwwatpmcomBack

ATPM 1210 51 FAQ

Sponsors

Welcome

E-Mail

Cartoon Cortland

Review iWoofer

ndexphppf=1

style sheets

rgepng

Trial None

ATPM 1210 50 FAQ

4httpwwwatpmcomBack

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Sponsors

Welcome

E-Mail

Cartoon Cortland

Review iWoofer

style sheets

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Trial None

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Welcome

E-Mail

Cartoon Cortland

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Cartoon Cortland

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Welcome

E-Mail

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