Ah, the memories.

Mac OS X is five years old this month, and Apple’s gone through five revisions to this OS (counting the Public Beta) with a sixth on the way. Remember when the latest and greatest OS from Apple had a desktop that looked like this?  
 
 
 
I remember booting it up, and being a little confused. Why’d they move the Apple menu to the middle of the menubar? Then, after trying to click on the Apple logo in the middle of the menu bar, I remember getting angry. How the heck was I going to get to the Recent Items if there wasn’t a freakin’ Apple menu? Then I downloaded Classic Menu and life was good again. Until I realized that the Chooser was gone, how was I going to set up printing? Gah! 
 
It took me a while to get used to X, and I think it wasn’t until 10.2 first came out that I started using OS X regularly as opposed to playing in OS X and getting real work done in OS 9. 
 
Anybody else got memories of their 9 to X changeover to share? Let me know in the comments. 
 
(Cross-posted at TAB) 

For the record, La and I have separate computers, but not for this reason.

Mozilla bug report 330884 
 
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322) 
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.1) Gecko/20060111 Firefox/1.5.0.1 
 
This privacy flaw has caused my fiancé and I to break-up after having dated for 5 years. 
 
Basically, we share one computer but under separate Windows XP user accounts. We both use Mozilla Firefox — well, he used to use it more than I do but now we don’t really use it. The privacy flaw is this: when he went to log-in under his dating sites (jdate.com, swinglifestyle.com, adultfriendfinder.com, etc.), Mozilla promptly asks whether or not he’d like Firefox to save the passwords for him. He chose never, obviously. However, when he logged off his user account, and I logged onto my Windows XP account X amount of days later, I decided to use Firefox because hey — it loaded everything much more 
efficiently, was better to work on with website designs and is a lot more stable than IE7beta2. 
 
Firefox prompted whether or not I’d like it to save my password for logging into my website. I chose never and changed my mind. I went into the Password Manager to change the saved password option from Never to Always and that’s when I saw all these other sites that had been selected as “Never Save Password.” Of course, those were sites I had never visited or could ever dream of visiting. 
 
Then I realized who, how and what… and sh*t hit the fan. Your browser does not efficiently respect the privacy of different users for one system. 
 
Reproducible: Always 
 
Steps to Reproduce: 
1. Create 2 unique user accounts (for steps sake, let’s call the two accounts Joe and Mary) in Windows XP Home. 
2. Logout and sign-in under Joe. 
3. Open Firefox and go to an e-mail site or to jdate.com or wherever. 
4. Attempt to log-in to the site so that Firefox will ask whether or not you want your password saved. 
5. Choose not to save the password. 
6. After successfully logging in and having selected the “never save password” option, logout. 
7. Log-in as Mary and open Firefox. 
8. Browse, browse, browse… but you don’t really have to. Just go to “View Saved Passwords,” click on the tab that will show you sites to never save passwords for, and you’ll see whatever painful site Joe denied to save a password for. 
9. Break-up with fiancé. 
 
 
 
Firefox should be respecting every single area of privacy per user on one system. It’s not doing that… I’m going to submit this as Major because not everyone shares one computer, but it should really be considered Critical. 

NetRestore works with Disk Utility-created ASR images

I’d noted in an earlier entry that Mike Bombich’s NetRestore can work with ASR disk images created either with Carbon Copy Cloner or with Disk Utility images, but that verifying the restore did not seem to work when using Disk Utility images. I’m happy to report that times have changed between that entry last September and now. With the latest NetRestore, I’ve noticed that verifying the restore now also works with Disk Utility-created ASR images. It’s a small thing, but it’ll help me maintain one image for both Disk Utility’s Restore function and NetRestore 

Either a job for life, or I don't want it.

French students are having violent demonstrations about a new law that gives businesses the right to hire someone 18 to 25-year-olds on youth job contracts, which would allow employers to terminate a contract within two years. After two years, the contract would revert to a standard full-time contract (i.e., nearly impossible to fire.) It doesn’t sound so extraordinary to my American ears, but that’s because I live in a (by and large) “employment at will” freemarket-based economy, where both I and my employer have the right to terminate my employment pretty much at will. Admittedly, my employer would probably be more prone to terminating my employment than I would if I was a bad employee, but it also means that I can bail to look for a better opportunity if I feel like my employer is treating me badly. The flip side is that because my employer can ditch me if I’m a dud, they’re more open to taking a chance on me in the first place. 
 
The French employment setup is pretty much the opposite. It’s very hard (and expensive) to fire someone, dud or no. Once hired, you’re pretty much Hired For Life. So, employers are hesitant to hire people, especially young people who don’t have an established employment record. As a logical consequence, there is chronic unemployment, especially among the young. The new law is an attempt to address that, but the young don’t want it. Instead, they want the same deal that people over 26 get: employment with a standard contract. The new contract will make it easier not just to hire but also to fire those under 26, which these youngsters see as a threat to their future and any hope of the kind of jobs for life many of their parents and grandparents enjoyed. So, instead of taking a chance with the new contracts and actually getting a job, they’d prefer to remain unemployed and, as a bonus, break things as a political statement. 
 
Idiots. France is broke, folks. Trying to use the same violent methods as your parents did in 1968 to obtain jobs for life, guaranteed pensions and a generous welfare system will only make France broker and your own situation worse. 

Universal Mac OS X?

It looks like it’s possible to build a Universal image for Mac OS X, with a few caveats. Most binaries included with the Intel 10.4.x are in fact Universal builds, which allow both PPC Macs and Intel Macs to use them. This includes the kernel, most kernel extensions, the system libraries and frameworks; the Intel 10.4 even includes the bootloaders for both platforms. 
 
The methods and madness are documented by Andrew Mortensen at his website at http://www-personal.umich.edu/~admorten/CreatingUniversalTigerWithRadmind.pdf