Dont fear the internet

Don’t fear the internet has some good primers on the internet, HTML, CSS and using the browser as a development tool.

OS X Lion Security

An article at the Register this morning about security in OS X Lion and the introduction of ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization) to make it harder for malware to exploit the system and execute nasty code.

“It’s a significant improvement, and the best way that I’ve described the level of security in Lion is that it’s Windows 7, plus, plus,” said Dino Dai Zovi, principal of security consultancy Trail of Bits and the coauthor of The Mac Hacker’s Handbook. “I generally tell Mac users that if they care about security, they should upgrade to Lion sooner rather than later, and the same goes for Windows users, too.”

Mac OS X 10.7 Lion

The latest version of OS X (10.7 aka Lion) is out today. Link to the Mac App Store is here — you have to be running OS X Snow Leopard (10.6) to have the App Store installed. Price is $30.

The best and most complete overview of the new operating system is, as usual, John Siracusa’s writeup at this Ars Technica article.

* Quicken users: if you are running an older version of Quicken — prior to Quicken Essentials — read this article before you upgrade to Lion. You’ll need to export your financial data before upgrading because Lion does not support the older versions.

I think I’ll wait for a couple of weeks before upgrading. This is a major release and I prefer to watch the blogs for a while to see if there are any other incompatibilities or performance issues to be aware of. I don’t like surprises.

Related info

All of TUAW’s Lion tips in one place. Handy resource.

Lion Mail — Improved speed, some UI updates, full screen option, conversation threads.

Mission Control — The evolution of OS X’s Spaces, Dashboard and Exposé.

Make an OS X Lion boot disk — This is the first time an OS X update has been delivered exclusively as a download (from the Mac App Store), so there’s no physical installation media. When Lion installs it creates a 650 MB boot/recovery partition, but some of us still like to have an installation disk.

List of new features in Lion including OS Recovery.

Lion: 10 (or so) things that bug me — Erica Sadun’s thoughts on some of the new features.

A few nasty gotchas, including issues with Mail.app (receiving from POP account) and Network Attached Storage (NAS). Comments on this post also mention problems with VNC and Remote Desktop.

The Mac mini no longer ships with an optical drive. CDs and DVDs are going the way of floppy disks.

Dropbox updates Terms of Service

Dropbox announced on their blog today an update to their Terms of Service (TOS) in response to some unhappy customer feedback. Previously the TOS wording gave the impression that Dropbox was claiming ownership rights over customer data. This didn’t go over well, so they have revised the language to be more clear about their intentions.

I’m glad because I really like Dropbox. There are other cloud storage and sync services out there but Dropbox has really executed well with ease of use and reliable sync across multiple devices.

We’ve never been interested in rights broader than what we need to run Dropbox. We want to get this language right so that you’re comfortable using Dropbox with no reservations: what’s yours is yours.

If you’re interested in getting a Dropbox account use this link to join and we’ll both get extra storage as a referral bonus. You can sign up for a free 2 GB account and then upgrade to a paid account, or just stay at the free level.

Card.io: Mobile Credit Card Scanning

Card.io is another new mobile credit card processing solution, similar to Square except that it doesn’t need additional hardware to swipe the card—instead, it uses a mobile app to scan the front of the card. There’s a little more info on the How it works page but apparently it’s targeted to software developers to integrate credit card processing into their mobile apps.

They are currently accepting early access requests on their web site: www.card.io. SDK (Software Development Kit) available now for iOS, coming soon for Android.

Pricing info:

• 15¢ per scan
• $30 free credit
• No contracts or monthly fees
• Nonprofits use it at no charge

Short introductory video below.

Stuxnet: Anatomy of a Computer Virus

Saw this on Vimeo recently. An interesting infographic video detailing the Stuxnet virus that shut down Iran’s nuclear facilities. It’s the first weapon made from computer code.

Direct link: vimeo.com/25118844

Final Cut Pro X is out

Final Cut Pro X (FCPX) was released today and I’m looking forward to seeing what it’s got. Some initial previews and articles I’ve seen show an impressive re-engineering of the application and workflow. Dropping the price from $1,000 to $300 is going to get this app into a lot of hands—I think I’ll wait a few weeks to see if there are any early-release bugs to steer clear of, but I’ll definitely be making the upgrade from Final Cut Express.

Interesting that it’s only available as a download from the Mac App Store. Some early trending in the Twitterverse stating that it has a Vimeo export option and that the project format is a SQLite database like in Aperture, but many pro editors are disappointed with the lack of some key features from FCP7.

Larry Jordan’s blog is probably one of the best places to get the details. Another good writeup over at Creative Cow and Steve Martin’s review at KenStone.net.

Apple’s online FCP User Manual here: help.apple.com/finalcutpro/mac/10.0/

Make your own link shortener

With the popularity of Twitter and the need to keep ‘tweets’ within the 140-character limit, someone came up with the clever idea of a link-shortening service. The idea is that sometimes you want to include a link in your tweet, but some URLs are really long, like the following link to a Wikipedia article which has 67 characters in the URL:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL_shortening#Registering_a_short_URL

If you wanted to include this URL in your tweet it would take up almost half of the available characters, so you might have to shrink your message to accommodate the link. Link shortening services like bit.ly and goo.gl and others provide you with a unique short URL that will redirect to the longer one, so you drop the short link into your tweet—or in your email or web page: you can use them anywhere you would use a link—and when someone clicks the short link it directs them to the longer URL. This leaves more room in your tweet for your message, and minimizes the number of characters used for links.

For example, I shortened the Wikipedia article URL above using my own shortening service I set up yesterday, which uses only 17 characters: http://stacy.cc/4

I used a free PHP script-based tool called YOURLS (Your Own URL Shortener) found at yourls.org. You can register a short domain name of your own, install and configure the YOURLS software on the domain, and you’re up and running with your own service. Domain registrations are pretty cheap as well, so this is a very low-cost solution if you need it. I registered the stacy.cc domain through my hosting provider, Dreamhost, for $25. I had the whole thing up and running in less than two hours.

Why create your own rather than use one of the freely-available services already out there? The best reason I can think of is control. If you use someone else’s service to handle link redirecting for you, then you run the risk of losing this function if the service shuts down, and your shortened URLs will no longer work. For most people I don’t think it’s a big deal if they’re just using it for Twitter, but if you like the idea of running and controlling your own service, and you’d like to use a custom/branded domain for your redirects, setting up a service like this is a quick and inexpensive option.

Website Planning Guide

A helpful post over on Smashing Magazine about planning a web site. There are some good principles to think through, including:

• Needs & objectives assessment
• Alignment with marketing
• Roles & responsibilities
• Content
• Site design & structure
• CMS (Content Management Systems)
• Ongoing maintenance & updates

I’ve had people ask me “how much will it cost to build a web site?” That’s like asking a home builder “how much for a house?” — there are so many variables involved, and it all depends on what it is you want to accomplish with your site. It could be anything from a simple one page ‘brochure’ site to a complex database-driven e-commerce machine.

Some content options to think about when considering what your site might need:

• Articles
• Blog posts
• Advertising
• Discussion forum
• Images
• Documents (usually PDFs)
• Audio
• Video (embedded from YouTube or Vimeo, or self-hosted)
• Flash animation (I don’t recommend it)
• Content feeds/integrations from other sites
• Photo gallery
• Twitter stream
• Facebook ‘friends’ list
• RSS feeds
• E-commerce
• Forms for contact, quotes or something else
• Physical products (how many?)
• Digital content (what kind and how many?)
• Email newsletter
• Event calendar
• Event registration
• Search
• Social media sharing links (Twitter, Facebook, etc)
• Personnel directory

Planning and building a web site is much easier when you’re clear about what it is you want from the site.

Apache Web Server leads all others

According to Netcraft’s June 2011 Web Server Survey, the open source Apache web server software is far and away the leading platform today. It’s a powerful statement for the viability of FOSS (free and open source software) when the majority of the web is running on it.