Lots of thoughtful posts are cropping up about the new restrictions Apple plans to implement for OS X applications that will be distributed through the App Store. The occasion is, I suppose, the news that Apple is pushing back the deadline for all applications distributed through the App Store to be Sandbox-compliant from the middle of this month to March 2012.
For a basic rundown of the new rules and what they mean, check out this post from Pauli Olavi Ojala.
For an argument that Apple could take a more realistic, less restrictive approach to securing applications, see Will Shipley. In it, he explains why entitlements and code auditing may be useful in theory, but certificates are a more straightforward solution:
But, in the real world, security exploits get discovered by users or researchers outside of Apple, and what’s important is having a fast response to security holes as they are discovered. Certificates give Apple this.
His proposed solution makes a lot of sense, I’d love to see Apple adopt it.
Ars Technica’s Infinite Loop blog has a useful post on the sandbox features in OS X Lion as well.
Since updating my Mac running Snow Leopard to 10.6.1, I’m seeing the following message in the Terminal at least once after running every command:
dyld: shared cached file was build against a different
libSystem.dylib, ignoring cache
Someone said online that you can clear the cache using the following command:
sudo update_dyld_shared_cache -force
That returned the error:
update_dyld_shared_cache failed: vm address 0xFEEDFACE not found
in /System/Library/Frameworks/Accelerate.framework/Versions/A/
Frameworks/vecLib.framework/Versions/A/libLAPACK.dylib
I was hoping to post a solution to the problem for other people, but I haven’t solved it yet! So if you have any ideas, please post a comment.
Update: Looks like the library that’s preventing me from updating the dyld cache is in the hardware acceleration framework. Here’s one proposed solution, which involves moving the offending framework, running update_dyld_shared_cache and then moving the framework back. I’m not entirely comfortable with that.
What do you guys think of the new link format? Good? Bad? Should each link be a separate post?
A couple of weeks ago, I set a magnetic money clip on top of my MacBook, killing the hard drive pretty much instantly. It made a funny grinding noise, the beach ball spun, and that was it. The hard drive never had a chance.
Fortunately, I have been backing up my Mac regularly with Time Machine, and I had a backup that was only a week or so old. I do nearly all of my work in version control or in the browser, so the only thing I stood to lose was a few tracks I had purchased from the Amazon.com MP3 store.
All I had to do was replace the hard drive and restore the backup.
First, I had to buy a new hard drive. Hitachi’s 7200 RPM notebook hard drives are the most highly regarded, but they were out of stock at Amazon, so I bought a Western Digital 320 gig hard drive instead.
Installing the hard drive was easy. Macinstruct describes the process as challenging, but it took me less than 15 minutes.
I have two different Leopard DVDs, and I couldn’t get the MacBook to boot from either of them (I still don’t have any idea why). So I booted from the OS X 10.4 CD, formatted the new hard drive, and installed the OS. Then I booted from the Leopard DVD (again, I have no idea why it didn’t work before but it did work after) and upgraded to Leopard.
At that point, I realized that restoring from Time Machine was something you have to do after booting from the Leopard install DVD. So I rebooted from that DVD again, and restored the Time Machine backup.
When I rebooted after the restore was complete, the MacBook started rebooting over and over and over. It wouldn’t even boot into single user mode. So I rebooted from the Leopard DVD again and used the Disk Utility to repair the disk and the permissions. There were no disk issues, but there were a few file permission issues. It fixed those, but when I rebooted again, the reboot cycle started all over.
At that point I was at a bit of a loss. I thought the problem may be a corrupt operating system, so I booted from the Leopard DVD and reinstalled the OS in Archive and Install mode. That failed, complaining that it couldn’t copy my user directory.
I figured my last shot was just to install a fresh copy of Leopard and manually copy my files from the backup drive. Before I did that, though, I tried running a Time Machine restore again, and this time it worked, restoring my machine to the state it was in before I destroyed the hard drive in the first place.
Time Machine works, but not incredibly well. Life would have been easier if I’d had a backup created using Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper. I could have booted from the backup drive and restored to the new hard drive.
Had the MacBook been my only computer, the whole ordeal would have been incredibly stressful. It took me several days to get the new hard drive, and the restoration process was abetted by having another computer next to me that I could use to look up answers to the questions I ran into.
If I had to depend on the laptop for my day to day work, I’m pretty sure I’d keep my Time Machine backup drive and add a second external hard drive to the mix with a disk exactly like the one in the computer. I’d run Time Machine full time (as I do now), and make a supplemental backup to the second external hard drive weekly with a full system backup utility. Then in a disaster scenario, I could just swap out the dead hard drive with the second backup drive and experience zero down time. Large laptop hard drives are less than $100, and you can get an enclosure for $20 or $30. That’s not a high price for insurance.
Apparently Flash 10 isn’t much better than the previous versions of Flash in terms of performance on OS X. Anyone ever read a decent technical explanation of why that’s the case? Is it that Adobe just doesn’t put the effort into optimizing the Flash player on OS X that they do into optimizing it under Windows? Is it that there are APIs that Adobe takes advantage of under Windows that aren’t available in OS X?
I’ve never seen a really good explanation for the disparity.
The reason why I wonder if it’s something endemic to the Mac is that I’ve seen similar complaints about World of Warcraft performance. For example, here’s a comparison of World of Warcraft performance between the game running under OS X and on the same computer running Windows via Boot Camp. The performance is substantially better under Windows.
What’s the general consensus on BBEdit 9 versus TextMate for working on Ruby on Rails applications? Is there a compelling reason to migrate away from TextMate?
Good news: there’s now a native version of OpenOffice for OS X. Bad news: it’s really slow and buggy.
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