Ruiz-Ade.com

A few weeks ago, when Apple announced all the new features coming to the iPhone, and specifically mentioned ActiveSync, I was reminded of a thought I had a couple months back:

There really is no good reason why the iPhone should not be able to synchronize its data to a .Mac account instead of being restricted solely to syncing via iTunes on a computer. This would actually make the iPhone even stronger for people who need reliable access to the latest version of their data without having to remember to plug the phone in all the time.

And then, this evening, as I’m going through the various RSS feeds I didn’t look at all day in NetNewsWire, If find this post on TUAW mentioning .Mac syncing on iPhones. Okay, that means the feature is most likely going to come some time this year.

Amusingly, even though I have my personal Mac at home (a 1.5GHz G4 PowerBook 15″) and a Mac at work (2GHz Core2 Mini), I still haven’t gotten myself a .Mac account. As much as I would like to synchronize my data between the two machines, I can’t seem to justify $100 a year just to be able to keep my Safari bookmarks and Address Book contacts synchronized. I already keep all my calendar information on Google Calendar, which my wife and I both use, and sync it to my Mac with Spanning Sync. (Spanning Sync will eventually have Contact syncing between Address Book and Google Calendar/Gmail too, now that Google has finally announced a Contacts API.)

The iPhone being able to sync to .Mac, however, changes the game. .Mac syncing means that, for $100 a year, I can basically never have to remember to plug the iPhone into my computer just to make sure my calendar, contacts, bookmarks and notes (well, hopefully notes) are all current. I don’t have to worry that when I add a contact in my iPhone, I need to plug in to sync it back to my Mac. For someone like me, who simply prefers for the technology to Just Work and do so on a consistent and transparent basis, .Mac syncing would sell itself.

Heck, it’s hard enough for me to remember to sync my music to my current iPod, because it means I have to dig out my cable. It’ll be interesting to see what really does come of this rumor.

I’m very slowly getting my ducks in a row with regards to my online presence. I’ve decided, for the time being, that it’s probably simplest for me to keep this site as a WordPress blog, as that reduces the work I need to do to keep the site updated. Now that I’ve finally made an infrastructure decision, I can start dressing it. I’m still thinking of carrying forward the theme I used on Method, but I’m not entirely sure yet.

I’ve got comments turned off, primarily because I haven’t had time to get them working while not getting spammed to death. It appears that there’s an anti-spam plugin already included in WordPress these days, so I’ll have to give that a go.

I am also thinking that this will be the end of method.unnerving.org, as well as public entries on my LiveJournal. I don’t like being too distracted. Spread too thin, if you like. It’s my hope that what I have to say will interest at least one other person in this world besides me, and so I’ll put it here, for reading and ridicule and all to see. Expect a mix of things, with periodic dry spells.

Oh, and I’m on Twitter, too (just like the rest of the free world, it would seem.)

It may not be a good thing, depending on what you try to hide on your computer.

After seeing it reported elsewhere that Spotlight’s “All Images” search on Leopard really does serve up every image on the system, I decided to give it a try myself and see what turned up. Sure enough, every single piece of spam I’ve received in the last week that included an in-line image (as a MIME attachment) ended up contributing to the show.

In this screenshot, you can clearly see all the images from the spam messages. The on of the woman in the hammock is actually from a spam message, if you can believe that. No idea who she is, but whatever email message that image was sent in got filed as spam.

A quickie for those that want to actually get their hands dirty with OS X’s ipfw firewall: WaterRoof seems to be the tool for configuring an ipfw firewall, setting a startup script for it, etc. for Leopard. One of the nice things is that it comes with a few rules sets that make getting the basic firewall quite simple.

I’ve simply turned off the Leopard “Firewall” for now, and reverted to the tried-and-true ipfw firewall instead.

Worked my way through a bit more of my system, and found another thing that’s not very happy with Leopard. Turns out that the MySQL Community Server (the free one you can download from mysql.com) really doesn’t work on Leopard, and it seems that it’s primarily the Preference Pane, startup item, and socket locations that need tweaking. Actually, people seem to be saying you should just ditch the preference pane and the startup item entirely. Apparently during the upgrade my data disappeared, too, which is somewhat entertaining. It was all testing data, and I can easily pull it from the production sources again (or even boot my backup drive and dump it from there.)

At this point, I’m probably going to just install the macports version of mysql (and postgresql) and use that. The Mysql.com version was nice because it included the StartupItem and a nice Preference Pane to control the service, but that was, really, its only benefit.

For an idea, simply searching on Google for “mysql leopard” will give you a number of useful and relevant items.