Since I’m playing with Skype, I decided to take a look at Gizmo which does basically the samething. My first impressions are positive and that became stronger when I used it for the first time. The audio with Gizmo was better than Skype which has a “edgy” sound to it, a bit harsh as it were. I like the interface of Gizmo better and the Google mapping of the link is a great toy. Did I mention that Gizmo has on hold music?

What I can not do with Gizmo is to upload files which probably speaks to Skype’s origins from KaZaa as much as anything else. I can send a voice mail to someone even if they are off line by email which is pretty cool but no MP3 encoding

I’ve had some minor stablity issues where Gizmo quits unexectedly but then Skype’s newest beta crashed on cancelling a call so it’s a wash in my book to who is more or less stable. I personally prefer the Gizmo frontend and “look and feel”.

I did testing of both Skype and Gizmo over wireless and over a Cisco VPN behind NAT. Gizmo has the better quality in the audio and both made the connection just fine. I should also mention that I was going from a Mac (mine) to a friends PC version of each software over in the UK. So we had VPNs, NAT, across the pond, wireless and mix platform which is a pretty good test I think. Gizmo also has it over Skype since Gizmo uses open standards so from a security perspective, I can do more to secure both the link and the data that may travel over it.

With the two year old showing all the signs of having a heavy right brain influence, much like her older sister, it was time to find a paint program for the Mac. I had a WACOM tablet that I had bought for the PC but it never worked well on it, the driver was crap. But on the Mac, it’s flawless. So after some hunting around, I found a very cool paint app from Ambient Design and it’s FREE!! It’s called Artrage 1.1 and you really have to play with it to appreciate the simplistic design and how well it works. The best feature for the two year is the ability to setup “tracing paper” using a existing image. I happen to use images like Elmo and Big Bird with letters for a high tech colouring book. The app takes up the entire screen so no matter where the tyke rolls the pen on the Wacom pad, nothing bad will happen.

If you have kids or evenif you just like to mess around as an artist, you really should explore this cool application. The price is right and who knows, you might get poor and famous from it Artists never get rich, sorry

I subscribe to the MAKE magazine and they just put out a piece on hacking the Nano. This looks to be too much fun I may have to get a Nano just to try the hacks or just hack my 3G iPod. You will need a tool called “iPodwizard” from here. Notice the cool text and new fonts on the Nano.

Skype is all the rage right now. I have both Windows and OSX clients installed for testing. I’ve been reading up on the security aspects of Skype and it’s unsettling for a network admin or a security admin. While Skype’s protocol is not public unlike SIP, there are some papers available where people have reversed engineered the protocol to a point. I say to a point because part of Skype is encrypted using what is thought to be RSA. Another problem is that with sufficent bandwidth and processor power, you can become a “supernode” where you become a router for Skype traffic. This does not address the problems of uncontrolled use of IM messaging and file trading from behind your comporate firewalls to person/persons unknown. And you can not see what it is as it’s encrypted. None of this gives me warm fuzzies on the network nor should it give you warm fuzzies. At least with real VoIP systems like Call Manager from Cisco there is logging and controls in place to manage what actually happens on your network. This doesnt begin to address the legal concerns of having phone calls (which these are but with some debate) originate within your company by someone assumed to be an employee. It’s easily imagined that personal information or company private information could be “leaked’ and the company held accountable without any defense since there are not any logs to prove otherwise.

On to more fun topics, I found a couple of cool utilities fromStick Software. I really like their screen capture utility called “Constrictor”

and their fractal screen saver called “Fracture”.

And the price is right for these high quality shareware packages.

As time marches by, it brings change whether you like or not. We went from the original Classic Mac to Mac clones, to Newtons and now OSX. Next year we will be on an Intel platform for some of the systems and things change again.

We just expanded our household by one more daughter so it’s now three daughters and counting. Talk about change It’s tough being the only guy in house of women. The change here much like the Intel change is enormous, newborns do that no matter if they are your favorite OS or a new baby girl. In both cases, you learn to love the change because it almost always is for the best.

Even our favorite toy, the iPod has changed. The new Nano has got to be THE sexy toy of the year. It’s small, light and just looks damn good. The new Sony “iPod killer” looks like crap next to it. Sorry Sony, you just do not have the touch.

Time marches on and change is inevitable. I, for one, am looking forward to the next year of change and will just enjoy the ride

I found a cool LINK and PDF on securing a Mac using Tiger. The paper gives alot a good detailed information on securing Panther with updates for Tiger. I just updated my version of Skype since I’m contracted to write a chapter for new Syngress book on Skype.

I have been using Thunderbird for my email and like my PC, I’m pretty happy with it on the Mac. I’m annoyed that the Mac has IMAP but the PC version only has POP. Since my email server gets hit from all my systems at different times, I like to use IMAP so I always have the same email and structure.

iPod Access v3.5 works well. I just used it to move songs from my PC formatted iPod to my iTunes on the Mac. No mess, no fuss. It did miss a few songs but overall the fact it moved them at all was pretty useful.

OK, Maps for Trees might be a better choice of words but Treemaps is an interesting way to visualize data sets. I used an application Disk Inventory X that uses a treemap to show the relationship, type and clusters of data on your disk drive. See this picture:

You can see that the data is coloured blocks in what looks to be complete chaos. But, if you take the time to look and study it, you will see that it really makes sense. It’s very easy to see where the lion’s share of the data is sitting and a click on the square takes to where it is and gives you information about it.

This is not a new, new way to view data but it’s certainly catching on lately. Even the Marines like it for keeping track of Equipment Readiness. Informationweek for Sept 5th has a nice article on Treemaps.

As some of you know, I’m a big fan of Flickr (assuming Yahoo doesnt ruin it shortly) and one of the fan-sites will let you print out a pretty cool looking “official” un-official badge You have to love the name of the site when someone names it “flagrantdisregard”

I got CLAM antivirus to work and sure enough, it found several viruses on my Mac. No, not Mac viruses, PC ones in the various collections of email I have. Most I knew were there but it did find a couple where I just had missed the email and apparently so did the server. But I’ve had several different email servers in the past two years so no surprise there.

It’s not real speedy but hey! the price is right and the GUI makes it easy to use.

Tonight is my Linux presention and I have to say after using the Mac for the past few months, installing software on Linux is like taking several steps back. But, once installed, Linux does work very well and I can do most things that I can do with the Mac. But still, the Mac shines at Video and Photo editing which is my main use of the Mac along with wasting bits on stuff like this blog

For the presentation, I have been using a package called “Captivate” from Macromedia. It’s like Camtasia but I find it alot easier to use in most cases. I did find a few times where Camtasia has it up on Captivate but so it goes. I have yet to find anything like this for the Mac, anyone have any ideas? I’m sure there is something out there.

I just found out today that Apple neglected to install a few applications like groupadd. How is that Apple could “forget” something as basic as this? Mac users would never use the command line? Stupid!! Anyways.. I found a site that offers a package called “OSXUserUtils 1.3″ which seems to work with OSX Tiger. It’s a normal package that you uncompress from SIT and then install it. And it even works

What started this was the installation of CLAM Antivirus which you can see in the screen shot above.
I guess it is so ingrained in this ex-windows user that it will be just a matter of time before someone writes a virus for the Mac. So I’m working to see how well Clam works on the Mac. There is even a GUI available for it at ClamXav. I choose to install my AV from source files rather than using a package. Again, it’s a habit of mine to install security products from source since with a package, you are relying on someone else’s good or bad habits when they make the package. The source files installed just as they were expected to, the normal ./configure, make and make install worked just fine.

The new Roxio/Sonic Toast 7 is pretty nice. I installed it last week and it’s been flawless in burning CDs, DVDs and some DVD-RWs. I was able to get a 30 dollar rebate which knocked the price down to about 70 dollars. Not too bad! I was also able get a reasonable upgrade from TextWrangler to the full version of BBEdit for about 130 bucks. The upgrade comes from using TextWrangler and registering it and since it is free, it’s not a bad deal at all.

The new Plextor 16x dual layer drive is working perfectly on firewire. I bought a Venus DS5 case for it which offers both firewire and USB2.0. The mac and software picked it right up and Toast knows it’s a dual layer drive. Total cost was about 160 with the drive at 90 dollars and the case was around 70 dollars.