Macs Are Great!

Apple has apparently listened to some of the criticism of their Apple TV product, and has introduced an upgraded model that includes a 160gb hard drive. This seems very much appropriate since a 40gb hard drive is a bad joke on a device meant to store an entire collection of digital music and TV and movie content as well. I’ve got about 38 gb of digital music, mostly ripped from our 600 music CDs (that we bought, I’m nae a pirate). Then there are the legitimately owned MP4 videos that I’ve ripped from our DVDs. And the ancient Simpsons MPG videos from our dearly departed ReplayTV. I could easily fill a 160gb Apple TV!

Apple has also added support for YouTube videos on the Apple TV. I YouTube, you YouTube, it’s a good thing.

Now that Apple has gotten serious about the Apple TV, I think I’ll put it on my wish list. And a certain gift I had wanted for my birthday is out of stock (a Canon SLR lens) so maybe I’ll ask a certain person to get me an Apple TV instead of the lens. Woo hoo!

We have a Panasonic Plasma HDTV with an open HDMI connector, and we have a Gigabit LAN with an existing hub in our TV room too. I’m glad Apple decided to treat their Apple TV as a serious product.
[tags]Apple TV, hardware, upgrades, video, HDTV, YouTube[/tags]

written by Steve Rider

A very good friend of mine who lives in the next state over called me last night wondering why he could not connect to any of my web sites. Right now they are spread across 2 dedicated servers as we wait for a client to finish migrating from our old server to this kick ass dual core server. I suggested there might have been a temporary routing problem between his ISP and the data center in Dallas where this server lives, and we went on to talk about other things.

This morning I had an email from him listing sites of mine he could not reach, he was just getting timeouts. Since I do tend to block IP addresses in my firewall that I see being used for nefarious reasons, I looked up his IP and verified that it was not blocked. But still he could not connect.

On a hunch I had him try doing an nslookup of one of my domains, and discovered to my great surprise that he was using a DNS server in Russia and it returned its own IP address for every domain name. In other words his Microsoft Windows computer had been hijacked, and all of his web access was being proxied through this Russian server. And the reason he could not access my sites is because I had already blocked this criminal enterprise in my firewall.

I did some research for him and found out that the particular malware his Windows box was infested with was likely installed when he received an email or visited a webpage with a maliciously crafted Windows MetaFile (.wmf) image. If he had been so foolish as to use Internet Explorer as his web browser or Outlook Express as his mail client then it would have been conveniently auto-installed for him as part of Microsoft’s “Rich Multimedia Experience” design philosophy.

I went on for some time about how he should reformat his C: and reinstall Winblows when he interrupted me and asked if he would have this kind of a problem with a Mac. And of course I answered quite honestly that he would not. He explained that a University where he was once employed was offering a great iMac educational deal, and when we ended our conversation his plan was to order an iMac tomorrow.

There’s one more friend who won’t need to call me for technical support anymore, and I know he will love his iMac. A happy ending, for sure.
[tags]get a mac, Windows, security, malware DNS exploits, Russia, OS X, Microsoft[/tags]

written by Steve Rider

I ended up ordering the Adobe Creative Suite 3 Web Premium upgrade (for Mac) instead of the Web Standard Upgrade. This decision was based on the fact that the Premium version includes Photoshop and costs only $100 more.

I have installed the software on both my PowerMac Dual G5 and my Intel iMac, Adobe allows installation on 2 computers if one is used at home, and so far I have only used Dreamweaver CS3. There are enormous improvements in window handling that, alone, would justify the cost of this upgrade. With the Macromedia Studio 8 on the Mac the behavior of program windows was maddening and extremely frustrating. I use desktop managers on all of my Macs to give me multiple virtual desktops. With the older Dreamweaver if I gave another program focus all of the Dreamweaver windows would go sulk somewhere in never never land. Or, if I had some file activity going on the activity window would follow me around like a lost puppy when I switched to another desktop. Dreamweaver windows were either AWOL or in the way far too often, resulting in more than one juicy expletive on thousands of occasions.

Fortunately this most annoying behavior has been fixed. Dreamweaver now handles windows as well as a freeware text editor. This feature alone was worth the $493 to me. By ordering from Amazon I was able to get a very slightly lower price, free shipping, and not so much with the sales tax.

I’ll have more to say in the next few weeks as I use the other programs, but my biggest wish on my wish list was for some much needed bug fixes in Dreamweaver. I’m so glad I got that. I give the new Dreamweaver CS3 4 stars as a preliminary rating, this might go up as I use it more.

[tags]Adobe, Creative Suite, CS3, Dreamweaver, Software, Web Editors, HTML editors, review, Web Premium Upgrade[/tags]

written by Steve Rider