Author Archive for Bob Rudis

Information security dude who is highly enthusiastic about all things Apple. I code a bit, script a bit and have even been known to post a blog entry once or thrice. Cycling, cooking, hiking and getting thrashed by my kids are some of the things I like to do. Comics rule (old school DC is where it's at, dude), I own way too many gadgets and love living in the greater Seattle area.

Site: http://www.rudis.net/

Aspyr’s d20 Hits The Mark With Neverwinter Nights 2 Port to OS X

Written on March 25, 2008 by Bob Rudis and 2 people have commented

With the move to Intel Macs, Apple set the stage for increased gaming opportunities and went so far as to promise OS X users more titles to choose from since they are “working closely” with the premier development houses to ensure OS X is considered a first-run target operating system. While some gaming companies have [...]

iPhone Development Postmortem

Written on March 21, 2008 by Bob Rudis and 3 people have commented

The big day has come and gone and we have many more details regarding the iPhone Development Program. Much of what I discussed in the previous post regarding enterprise support has been adopted by Apple, though only the privileged few that were allowed into the enterprise beta program know the full details (and I am [...]

ActiveState Takes Komodo Edit To The Community

Written on March 13, 2008 by Bob Rudis and No one has commented

As I’ve been catching up from an illness backlog, I came across this press release from ActiveState – providers of commercially-supported versions of Perl, Python & TCL – on their decision to take their great editor Komodo Edit open source. This editor has been based on the Mozilla code base, and the open source version [...]

Child’s Play - MacKiev Gets It Right

Written on March 11, 2008 by Bob Rudis and 2 people have commented

While primarily due to being ill *yet again* (I’m beginning to think Seattle is the nation’s cold/flu incubator), last week’s blogging was further disrupted by the preparations for and celebration of our last child’s second birthday. As you can imagine, children of geeks tend to get more geeky presents and Ian is now the proud [...]

iPhone & The Enterprise

Written on February 27, 2008 by Bob Rudis and 5 people have commented

By now, you’ve seen the announcement of the March 6th iPhone announcement (which better be more than discussing a future announcement since that’s already two pointer de-references we have to manage). While I am – and many other and far more capable developers are also – eagerly awaiting the SDK release, the promise of “exciting [...]

Remote Denial of Service For OS X (Leopard)

Written on February 27, 2008 by Bob Rudis and 4 people have commented

Given the large amount of “feedback” I receive from many venues on why I’m crazy for suggesting that OS X users employ some type of client-side security software, I wanted to point out a very recent exploit that I saw over at Joel Esler’s blog. The vulnerability is around the IPv6 networking layer of the [...]

Quick & Secure Network Filesystem Access With ExpanDrive

Written on February 26, 2008 by Bob Rudis and 6 people have commented

Magnetk – makers of SftpDrive for Windows – have brought their secure, remote filesystem magic to OS X with version 1.0 of ExpanDrive.
If you have a blog/site hosted on any flavor of Linux or BSD (including OS X) or do any amount of cross-platform management or development then you know how useful ssh is for speedy [...]

Hug A Indie Mac Developer Day

Written on February 21, 2008 by Bob Rudis and 6 people have commented

I hereby declare this day as Hug A Indie Mac Developer Day. What sparked this spontaneous outpouring of appreciation for these Wizards of Cocoa? Apart from just the standard good will towards the likes of Daniel Jaikut, Jonathan ‘Wolf’ Rentzsch, Fraser Speirs, Gus Mueller (and a host of others that would turn this into an [...]

It’s All Greek To Me: 15 Lorem Ipsum Resources

Written on February 14, 2008 by Bob Rudis and 13 people have commented

Web designers, font purveyors, professional paginators and even application developers need sample data to test their layouts, creations and algorithms. “Lorem ipsum” has been the de-facto standard when placing non-distracting text into test areas and has been shown to exhibit characteristics of standard lettter, word and space distribution. While one could just keep a copy [...]

Apple TV ‘Take 2′ - Post Upgrade Melancholy

Written on February 12, 2008 by Bob Rudis and 5 people have commented

For the past 24+ hours RSS readers around the globe have been awash with OS X 10.5.2 update news and notes on the ancillary side updates. The Cupertino software barrage continued today, including the Apple TV “Take 2″, which added access to iTunes rentals, Flickr/.Mac photos/movies and HD trailers.
I started the download before my evening [...]

While You’re Waiting For The iPhone SDK…

Written on February 12, 2008 by Bob Rudis and 5 people have commented

As a previous post indicated, Apple has yet to publicly release the iPhone/iTouch non-web SDK and it is still unclear if casual developers will be able to get their applications onto these new devices. As we all wait like expectant parents, there are some great resources out there for the current, Apple-preferred method of iPhone [...]

iPhone Development Preview

Written on February 11, 2008 by Bob Rudis and 1 person has commented

Craig Hockenberry (of Icon Factory/Twitterific) give us a glimpse of what development will be like for the iPhone via his personal/development blog. What can we expect?

Tossing most of your current UI code
Being way more careful about object/memory use
Relying on your Objective-C & Cocoa skills for visual element design since NIBs are non-esistent
Learning a whole new [...]

Speed Up Documentation & Lesson Creation With ScreenSteps

Written on February 11, 2008 by Bob Rudis and 1 person has commented

Image is everything when preparing application documentation for manuals or creating a lesson for a training class or a self-paced module. An annotated series of screen, window or dialog boxes is much easier to understand than a simple list of actions and OS X users have many tools to choose from, including ScreenSteps 2
(from [...]

Twitterific 3.1 (Beta) Annoys Less, Fixes Bugs

Written on February 07, 2008 by Bob Rudis and No one has commented

The fine folks over at Icon Factory have release a beta (1.2MB zip file) update to their popular OS X Twitter client which fixes one really annoying problem in how new messages are displayed – no more autoscroll to the top – and adds a slew of enhancements, including NetNewsWire-like keyboard shortcuts (the spacebar moves [...]

TrueCrypt 5.0 Brings Plausible Deniability To OS X Users

Written on February 06, 2008 by Bob Rudis and 2 people have commented

While I’m not trying to only focus on security topics, they just seem to pop up more often than not, including today’s serendipitous discovery that TrueCrypt is available for OS X. Security isn’t just about maintaining system integrity (loosely defined as keeping malicious code from getting onto/running on your system). A critical component is ensuring [...]

MarsEdit Update Kicks Your Blogging Up A Notch

Written on January 31, 2008 by Bob Rudis and 6 people have commented

I’m not one to get excited about dot-update releases from a software vendor, but a tool that was mentioned in my “must have” post – MarsEdit – has just updated from version 2.0 to 2.1, with that “0.1″ adding far more than a tenth of new features.
One of my major complaints about the previous version [...]

Fix for Office 2008 Security Issue

Written on January 26, 2008 by Bob Rudis and 7 people have commented

For those that have installed Office 2008, you may have seen some news floating on the internets about improper permissions — that were created by the installer — potentially allowing another local user to access your documents. It’s not a remote exploit issue and most folks are probably not vulnerable (you only need to [...]

A Look at Native KDE 4.0 for OS X

Written on January 25, 2008 by Bob Rudis and 10 people have commented

This week Slashdot (and many, many others) reported that KDE 4.0 has been released for Windows and OS X. KDE (K Desktop Environment) has been a popular GUI for *nix systems and there have been ways of getting it to run (mostly) on OS X prior to this native port if you were willing to [...]

Why Mac Security Matters: OS X Rootkit Hunter

Written on January 23, 2008 by Bob Rudis and 24 people have commented

After blogging about the need to use and maintain an anti-virus solution for your OS X systems, an anonymous reply questioning the need to use security tools at all on OS X systems gave me pause. You do not need me to link to the numerous articles flying around the internets that report on how [...]

MacSweeper: Keep This Rogue Mac Application In The Broom Closet

Written on January 16, 2008 by Bob Rudis and 8 people have commented

F-Secure is reporting on the first, widespread rogue Mac application that comes in the guise of security software: MacSweeper. It is hosted at www.macsweeper.com, but I do not recommend visiting that site. I’m not convinced this is the first rogue Mac application ever to hit the internets, but the F-Secure folks are top-notch researchers who [...]

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