> Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
> > Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
> > > Yes.
> > > > Is top-posting bad?

So there's a plugin for Mail.app called QuoteFix (download) that makes it do bottom-posting by default instead of top-posting. It also supposedly strips signatures out of the quoted text. Sadly, I can't get it to do anything at all. Anyone have any luck with it on 10.6.2?

First iPhone worm discovered

Apple iPhone owners in Australia have reported that their smartphones have been infected by a worm that has changed their wallpaper to an image of 1980s pop crooner Rick Astley. Once in place, the worm appears to attempt to find other iPhones on the mobile phone network that are similarly vulnerable, and installs itself again

On each installation, the worm - written by a hacker calling themselves "ikex" - changes the lock background wallpaper to an image of Rick Astley with the message: "ikee is never going to give you up".

The last time I asked this I didn't get any practical answers, but that was a year ago, so I might as well ask again:

Dear Lazyweb,

How do I normalize the audio volume of a bunch of MOV and MP4 files?

The "Sound Check" option in iTunes works passably well for MP3 files, but doesn't do anything for videos. This makes it annoying to use a playlist full of music videos as a source of ambient entertainment, since the volume fluctuates wildly.

I think that a solution involving manually pulling the audio out of the movie files, normalizing it as a WAV, and re-inserting it into the movie is probably doomed to synchronization errors. So let's not.

I have tried using the "Get Info / Options / Volume Adjustment" slider manually on a few videos, but that is far too manual and annoying to do for all of them. Perhaps an approach would be to compute the volume boost desired of each movie, then set whatever ID3 tag corresponds to that slider? Or failing that, do it with Applescript?

Update: I kinda got something working with Applescript here. It fails if any video requires a volume increase of more than 100% (~6dB), but I only have a few videos of which that is true.

Dear Lazyweb, what's the sensible way to synchronize photos between my iPhone and Mac, given that I do not have iPhoto installed? I'm hoping to have a directory, say, ~/Pictures/Phone/, which is bidirectionally mirrored: photos I take on the phone show up there. Photos I place there show up on the phone. Photos I delete from there are deleted from the phone.

If I just let Lightroom launch when the phone is attached, it always pops up the import dialog even if there are only already-imported photos on the phone, which is annoying.

Dear Lazyweb,

This is the part where you tell me about cool iPhone apps that I would like. Go.

I already have: OpenTable, Taxi Magic, Now Playing, Apple Remote, Shazam, Facebook, Google Earth, Photoshop Mobile, Katamari Lite, Sol Free, Twitterific, Wikipanion, and AIM.

Other questions:

• Is the official AOL AIM app the one to use? Isn't there something that integrates SMS and AIM into one app? And that also speaks Jabber? It's weird that Apple's bundled messaging app doesn't do this.
• What's the closest thing to Bubbels?
• What's the best Tetris?
• What's the easiest way to convert MP3 snippets to ringtones?
• Can I make it stop asking me to confirm every time an app wants to know my location, and just always assume "yes"?
• Does the mail reader really have no "mark all read" or "delete all" commands?

Folks, I couldn't take it any more. Today I wiped my Palm Pre and bought an iPhone.

Believe it or not, this actually has nothing to do with my utterly nightmarish experience of trying to get my applications into Palm's app catalog, and everything to do with the fact that the phone is just a constant pain to use.

This should be obvious, because my complaint about Palm's developer relations is that they are setting up a closed ecosystem, and Apple is even worse than Palm in that regard. (And while Palm is also slow and unresponsive to respond to developers, Apple is, again, even worse.)

So why would I get an iPhone? Because it's an appliance that just fucking works.

I have a list of 30-ish reports of more-or-less irritating bugs that I encountered during my first week of using the phone that I back-channeled into Palm via several of their developers, but most of those bugs were tolerable. The deal-breaker bugs are as follows:

1. I still can't reliably sync my phone to my Mac.

   Now, I have to say that since the last time I publically bitched about this, the developers of Missing Sync really stepped up: I've been exchanging emails with a couple of the Missing Sync developers for months now, doing tests and sending logs and trying out alpha versions, sometimes several times a week. So I really appreciate the effort they went to to try and diagnose the bugs that I was experiencing. But, the bottom line is, it still doesn't work. The only reliable way to sync the phone is to manually do "desktop overwrites device", which means I can't actually edit contacts or calendars on the phone, ever.

2. Peformance is a joke.

   Seriously, it's comically bad. The speed of this phone is truly pathological. It's horrible across the board, but some of the most egregious examples:

   • If the Calendar app is not running, it takes 10-15 seconds to get from "I clicked on the Calendar icon" to "I can see today's events". And then, switching from the display of one day to the next takes 2+ seconds (and it doesn't buffer swipes, so you have to keep trying). It's embarassing when I'm talking to someone and they ask me about availability and I have to say, "I'll tell you in a little while, once my phone wakes up."

   • If a call comes in, the phone starts ringing, and I can answer and talk to the caller, but most of the time it takes another 10 seconds before the Phone application's UI comes up! So if it's from the front door and I have to press a button to buzz someone in, I have to either hope the app starts responding before the caller hangs up; or I have to slide out the physical keypad and pray that it buffers the keystroke. Trying to answer the door feels like a game of whack-a-mole.

   • If I want to take a photo (for example, of the license plate of a hit-and-run) getting from "I clicked on the Camera button" to "I have taken a photo" takes almost 20 seconds. If I want to get all the way to "I have reviewed the photo, and can tell that it came out ok", that takes more like 40 seconds.

It seems to me that the only way this phone is going to be usable is for it to get literally 10× faster across the board. There was a speed improvement of maybe 10% between WebOS 1.0 and 1.2.1, so I think it's safe to assume that they've already picked the low-hanging fruit. I don't expect the performance of this phone to be even remotely suitable for every day use for at least a year. I figure it's going to either take a substantial amount of work on the lower levels of the OS, or they're going to have to throw Moore's law and new hardware at it... and the recently-announced Pixi is clearly not the hardware that's going to be 10× faster.

So even though I hate Apple's developer-hostility, and even though I hate that now I'm giving money to AT&T, and even though AT&T's network is way less reliable in San Francisco than Sprint's, and even though I absolutely despise the iPhone's on-screen keyboard... at least now I have a phone whose software actually works.

I thought about trying out an Android phone, but the reality is that the most positive review I've ever heard about Android was damning with faint praise along the lines of, "it sure does show the potential to someday be an iPhone competitor." Also, you have to surrender all your data to the Hivemind to use one. At least an iPhone will actually sync with the computer on my desk.

Sorry, Palm. I tried to root for the underdog, I really did.

Dear Lazyweb, any idea why I can't build the gd2 (bug 21098), ghostscript (bug 21111), or faac (bug 21112) MacPorts on 10.6? I get "This Perl not built to support threads" even after having cleaned and re-installed perl5, perl5.8 and perl5.10. Many other ports installed fine. I guess it's an "autoreconf" screw-up?

XScreenSaver 5.10 is out now. I think I have fixed the color and crashing problems on MacOS 10.6.

I'm still curious to hear from someone who has tried to run this on 10.4 PPC.

Let me know how it works...

Apparently this is video of a demo running on an 8mHz Mac Classic. It is 414 KB and written in assembly. Which is awesome.

I downloaded it and tried to get it running in Mini vMac, but after spending some time down the surprisingly-familiar rathole of trying to figure out how in the world I transfer a runnable version of StuffIt into the emulated world, I gave up. If anyone manages to produce a .dsk image that has the executable demo on it, I'd love to see it.

Dear Lazyweb,

Now that the nagware "USB Overdrive" driver has stopped working on 10.6, I guess it's time to ask again: is there some simple, free way to cause my middle mouse button to send Option+Left Click instead of Middle Click? (Logitech RX1000.)

Update: It turns out that USB Overdrive does still work on 10.6, it's just that the behavior changed slightly. I also use the Apple pref that swaps Opt and Cmd, and now that means that I have to tell USB Overdrive that middle-button sends Cmd+Left instead of Opt+Left. I didn't have to do that in 10.5, so I guess the order in which these things fire changed. Or something.

Anyway, I still find it absurd that I'm expected to pay extra just to remap my mouse buttons, because the OS doesn't include this basic functionality, and there's no free software to do it. It makes it feel like this OS is nickel-and-diming me over trivia.

Hey Apple! How come ptys are still just as broken in 10.6.0 as they were in 10.5.0? I reported this bug in Nov 2007. "Problem ID 5606018", for those of you on the inside who can see such things.

At some point after that, it was marked as "closed" with no mention of why.

Note that the current MacOS behavior has all three of these awesome properties: 1) Inconvenient; 2) Has no sane workaround; 3) Different behavior than MacOS 10.1 through 10.4; and 4) Different behavior than every other Unix in the world.

XScreenSaver 5.09 is out now! In addition to the appearance of a few new savers, this version works on Snow Leopard (as well as 10.4).

It has a few bugs, but since the previous version didn't run at all on 10.6, I'll call this the "better than nothing" release.

Some things I could use help with:

1. There were some new color-endian issues with 10.6. I have tested it on a 10.5.8 PPC Mac and on a 10.6 Intel Mac. I would like to know if images are displaying properly (in, for example, the Ripples screen saver, when loading photos from disk) on 1) 10.4 Intel Macs, 2) 10.4 PPC Macs, and 3) 10.5 Intel Macs.

2. Somehow the colors got screwed up in xmatrix on both 10.6 Intel and 10.5 PPC. It makes no sense to me that the colors are screwed up there but nowhere else. I'm lost in a twisty maze of endiannesses, all alike.   Update: I've fixed this, it will be in the next release.

3. When running the savers under SaverTester or System Preferences on 10.6 (but not 10.5), I get frequent crashes at startup inside NSLayoutManager, as I mentioned earlier. I assume it is a memory corruption bug somewhere, but I can't find it.

4. Someone needs to fix the configure.in file for autoconf 2.64. I can't make any sense of this bullshit change they've made: Expanded-Before-Required.html. I have no stomach for this, so until someone sends me a patch, I guess xscreensaver will require autoconf 2.63 or earlier.

5. osxgrabscreen.m is using "deprecated functions" like CGDisplayAddressForPosition(), and that code was flaky to begin with. If someone would like to write me some "modern", non-deprecated code that grabs an image of the desktop and returns it as an array of RGB data, I would be most appreciative. This, apparently, is rocket science.   Update: Fixed this too, though the fix is 10.5-specific, so it will remain flaky on 10.4.

6. Something has gone catastropically wrong with makedepend on 10.6. It takes like 15 minutes to process even a single one of the xscreensaver Makefiles. It's crazy. This is not an xscreensaver problem per se, but if you know a fix, I'd like to hear it.

Let me know how it works!

I'm working on getting xscreensaver running on 10.6, and roughly 2/3rds of the time any of the savers launch, they crash here:

Program received signal: "EXC_BAD_ACCESS".
#0 0x00007fff825df445 in +[NSLayoutManager(NSPrivate) _doSomeBackgroundLayout] ()
#1 0x00007fff825df23f in _NSPostBackgroundLayout ()
#2 0x00007fff84cfe437 in __CFRunLoopDoObservers ()
#3 0x00007fff84cda6e4 in __CFRunLoopRun ()
#4 0x00007fff84cda03f in CFRunLoopRunSpecific ()
#5 0x00007fff86e50c4e in RunCurrentEventLoopInMode ()
#6 0x00007fff86e50a53 in ReceiveNextEventCommon ()
#7 0x00007fff86e5090c in BlockUntilNextEventMatchingListInMode ()
#8 0x00007fff824a5570 in _DPSNextEvent ()
#9 0x00007fff824a4ed9 in -[NSApplication nextEventMatchingMask:untilDate:inMode:dequeue:] ()
#10 0x00007fff8246ab29 in -[NSApplication run] ()
#11 0x00007fff82463844 in NSApplicationMain ()
#12 0x000000010000342c in main (argc=1, argv=0x7fff5fbff380) at /Users/jwz/src/xscreensaver/OSX/main.m:16

I'm not even using NSLayoutManager (as far as I know), so presumably this is some random memory corruption that happened somewhere else entirely, but turning on the MallocCheckHeap and related environment variables doesn't reveal anything. Any ideas how to debug this?

None of the XCode "Performance Tools" seem even remotely useful for tracking down memory corruption, but maybe I just don't understand them. Anyway, I thought the garbage collector was supposed to make everything sweetness and light?

Before I dive in to getting xscreensaver to work on 10.6, I started smaller, and got the Dali Clock screen saver to work. Version 2.30 is out now. Please try it.

Unfortunately, I think the screen saver executable in there only works on 10.6, and the app and widget no longer work on 10.4, and I can't figure out how to fix that.

That's where you come in, dear Lazyweb.

To make it build on 10.6, I had to make these changes in XCode:

• Architectures: Standard (32/64-bit Universal)
• Base SDK: Mac OS X 10.5 (10.6 for the .saver)
• C/C++ Compiler Version: GCC 4.0 (not 4.2)
• Objective-C Garbage Collection: Supported
• Info.plist: change "LSMinimumSystemVersion" from "10.4.0" to "10.4".

But it's obviously unacceptable that this should be a 10.6-only binary.

1. How to I build DaliClock.app in such a way that it is runnable on 10.4, 10.5, and 10.6 systems?

   When I set the Base SDK to 10.4, I get "warning: Mac OS X version 10.5 or later is needed for use of the new objc abi", followed by "#error 64-bit not supported" from from objc/objc.h, included via Foundation.h.

   I suspect this means that you can't build a 10.4 version of the x86_64 binary, which is fine. Since 10.4 was perfectly happy running the i386 or ppc binaries, it's ok if the x86_64 build be 10.6-only, and the i386 and ppc builds be 10.4. But I don't see a way to specify that.

2. How to I build DaliClock.saver in such a way that it is runnable on even 10.5 systems?

   When I set the Base SDK to 10.5, I get "ld: warning: in MacOSX10.5.sdk ScreenSaver.framework, missing required architecture x86_64 in file".

   Maybe this is the same kind of problem. But it's worse, because it means I can't build a 10.5-compatible version of the saver at all.

3. How do I make these warnings go away?

   "AppController.m warning: passing argument 3 of 'addObserver:forKeyPath:options:context:' makes integer from pointer without a cast"

   The code in question is this, which had been warning-free before:

   [userDefaultsController addObserver:self
             forKeyPath:@"values.windowTitlebarIsHidden"
             options:nil
             context:@selector(windowTitlebarIsHiddenDidChange:)];

Normally I wouldn't give a shit about installing this OS upgrade, except that apparently Apple has fucked up ScreenSaverEngine, so in order to make the XScreenSaver distribion work on 10.6, I have to do a 64-bit build of all of the savers... and that's not possible on 10.5, because the 10.5 version of the ScreenSaver.framework bundle doesn't include the x86_64 architecture.

How angry am I going to be if I install 10.6 on my only computer?

Will it break Photoshop, Illustrator and Lightroom?

The nature of Apple's screen saver fuckup is that .saver bundles aren't separate programs (like they are in XScreenSaver under X11) but instead are dynamically loaded code into the ScreenSaverEngine app. And now they've changed ScreenSaverEngine to a 64-bit app which refuses to load 32-bit code -- meaning they broke every third party .saver bundle.

Dynamically loading the code this was always an idiotic idea. Even before Apple's current fuck-up, it had already meant that one screen saver could screw up the namespace of one that happens to run later (e.g., there are some savers that you can't run consecutively in System Preferences); and it means that a buggy screen saver that hangs can make you need to power-cycle the computer, since deactivation requires the cooperation of the 3rd party saver itself, instead of that being handled at a higher level. With X11 XScreenSaver, user activity guns down the saver whether it is responsive or not: a sandbox, basically, which is the only sensible way to do it.

I'd volunteer to rewrite ScreenSaverEngine from scratch, to make it less flaky and more compatible, if I thought there was any chance Apple would accept and ship my contribution.

Update: Progress is being made. I have questions.

Dear Lazyweb, how do I get rid of the "new tab" plus-box on the title bar of Safari 4? I never use tabs and it's in the way. This thing:

Answer: defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4TabBarIsOnTop -bool NO

No, I'm not interested in discussing the merits of tabs with you. At all. Shut up.

Dear Lazyweb,

Is there some kind of face-recognition plugin for Lightroom? Failing that, some software that will make it easy for me to auto-tag the people in my photos into their EXIF data, which I can then re-import into Lightroom?

Importing everything into iPhoto is not an option, since it copies and/or renames everything, and doesn't write data back to the original files. (Also iPhoto is generally crap.)

I tried "ilovephotos" and it's useless. It does an ok job of spotting faces, but makes no attempt to learn who's face is whose.

Are there any options that don't suck?

Options that involve "upload all your photos" or that do not provide any way to put the data into EXIF tags will not be considered.

Dear Lazyweb,

How the hell do I get SpamAssassin to work properly with Postfix? I've been through this several times before, but as far as I can tell, it's never worked right. Here is what I want:

• Postfix feeds all locally-delivered mail through SpamAssassin;
• Each recipient user on the system can have a .spamassassin/user_prefs file that uses directives like "required_score" and "blacklist_from" and "score". (Note that I said that I want this to be per user, not global. His blacklist is not her blacklist.)

Sounds simple, right? Sounds like the setup everyone in the world must have, right?

I can't get it to ever read the user_prefs files. And my mail log is full of errors about not being able to write lock files in ~user/.spamassassin/.

( What I've tried... --More--(31%)  )

A bunch of bug fixes, but most notably this time, I finally retired a bunch of screen savers that suck. Also I rewrote Jigsaw and Sonar as OpenGL programs, and they are a lot slicker now. The pieces in Jigsaw come in many more varieties, and it rotates the pieces as well.