TidBITS#893/20-Aug-07
=====================
Issue link: <http://db.tidbits.com/issue/893>
The MacHack conference may be history, but its spirit lives on in
C4, an event for indie Mac programmers. Adam reports on the
proceedings (where he was also a speaker) and discovers some gems
such as Lights Off, a native game for the iPhone, and the
software-updating framework Sparkle. Elsewhere in this issue, Glenn
Fleishman notes improvements to the AirPort admin utility, Jorg
Brown looks at the preposterous international data-roaming charges
that some iPhone users are being asked to pay, Matt Neuburg adds
some audible cues to his keys with Keyclick, and Joe Kissell updates
his coverage of the Safe Sleep feature of current Apple laptops.
Articles
AirPort Base Station Update Tweaks Admin Utilities
Lights Off for the iPhone
iPhone Billing and International Issues
C4 Conference Rethinks MacHack
Sparkle Improves Application Update Experience
The Subliminal Snap of Keyclick
Safe Sleep Revisited
Hot Topics in TidBITS Talk/20-Aug-07
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AirPort Base Station Update Tweaks Admin Utilities
--------------------------------------------------
by Glenn Fleishman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
article link: <http://db.tidbits.com/article/9119>
An update for the AirPort Utility software offers what Apple
describes as "general fixes and compatibility updates" for the
802.11n-capable AirPort Extreme Base Station. The AirPort Base
Station Update 2007-002 for Mac also updates the AirPort Disk
Utility and adds the AirPort Base Station Agent. The AirPort Disk
Utility manages mounting volumes attached via USB to a new base
station; the AirPort Base Station Agent provides monitoring of base
stations on the network.
<http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/airportbasestationupdate2007002formac.html>
Apple is shipping a revised version of its new AirPort Extreme Base
Station shortly - some people may have received it already - with
the only stated upgrade being a move from "Fast Ethernet" (100 Mbps)
to gigabit Ethernet (1000 Mbps). (See "AirPort Base Station Upgraded
to Gigabit Ethernet," 2007-08-13.) I expect a firmware upgrade will
follow this software upgrade as there are many documented bugs and
inconsistencies in the 802.11n AirPort Extreme. I've described them
and a number of workarounds in "Take Control of Your 802.11n AirPort
Extreme Network." (I'll be updating the book if there are enough
changes beyond gigabit Ethernet to warrant it.)
<http://db.tidbits.com/article/9110>
<http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/airport-n.html?14@@!pt=TB893>
A quick look at the AirPort Utility 5.2.1 that's part of this update
shows that Apple added a couple of controls near password entries
for administrative access (Base Station Password) and Wi-Fi security
(Wireless Password). There are now checkboxes to choose
independently whether either password is stored in the Mac OS X
keychain. Apple also added a Password Assistant icon to help choose
a strong password.
<http://www.tidbits.com/resources/2007-08/airport-password-asst.jpg>
Beware, though: if you click the key icon just to see what the
assistant looks like, the password that the assistant initially
recommends is placed in the main password field when you click the
assistant's Close button. You can restore the previous password by
clicking the Revert button at the bottom of the AirPort Utility.
The software also expands the Preferences dialog, adding choices
about when to check for updates (daily, weekly, or monthly), and to
"monitor base stations for problems." That last option relies on a
daemon, the AirPort Base Station Agent, which is installed with this
update and keeps track of the health of base stations that are
either configured by AirPort Utility or reachable on the network.
You can check a box to ignore base stations you didn't configure,
potentially useful on larger networks.
AirPort Utility is backwards compatible with all AirPort Extreme and
AirPort Express models, but can be obtained only by installing it
from the disc that comes with a new 802.11n AirPort Extreme base
station.
Lights Off for the iPhone
-------------------------
by Adam C. Engst <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
article link: <http://db.tidbits.com/article/9120>
Apologies for the potentially alarming headline! Lights Off is
actually an iPhone game, but unlike PopCap's Web-based Bejeweled
(see "PopCap Pops iPhone Productivity," 2007-08-06), Lights Off is
the first truly native iPhone game. Created by Lucas Newman and Adam
Betts of Delicious Monster for the Iron Coder Live hack contest at
the recent C4 conference (it took second place), the free Lights Off
provides a deceptively simple set of puzzles to solve. You're faced
with a grid of lights, some lit, some not. Tapping a light toggles
it, along with the four adjacent lights. Your goal is to switch all
the lights off, at which point you move on to the next level - there
are 200 levels all told.
<http://deliciousmonster.org/>
<http://db.tidbits.com/article/9093>
Lucas and Adam developed Lights Off with Apple's UIKit development
framework, which is what Apple used to create the iPhone's built-in
applications, but they also leveraged the various community efforts
to open the iPhone to independent developers. So although Lights Off
is an entirely native iPhone application, installing it requires
opening access to your iPhone with iActivator, uploading Lights Off
to the iPhone with iPHUC, installing an SSH server on the iPhone,
and changing the permissions of the Lights Off application (full
instructions are available on the Lights Off Web page). Of course,
because Lights Off is such a hack, it's likely that installing an
update to the iPhone software will render Lights Off inoperative.
Installing Lights Off could also violate the iPhone's warranty, but
it seems to me that in the worst case, you could simply reset the
iPhone to factory defaults and restore data from your computer.
<http://iphone.fiveforty.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page>
<http://iphone.fiveforty.net/wiki/index.php/IActivator>
<http://iphone.fiveforty.net/wiki/index.php/IPHUC>
<http://www.kdbdallas.com/index.php/2007/08/04/iphone-ssh-install-for-mac-shell-script/>
I've heard a number of early iPhone users complain about the lack of
games, though most seem a bit embarrassed by their desire to play
games when Apple didn't see fit to include any. Perhaps Lights Off -
and other native iPhone applications that are coming - will be
sufficiently popular to encourage Apple to open up the iPhone to
developers of both games and more useful programs that can't be
developed as Web 2.0 applications.
And, with apologies to Arlo Guthrie, if just one iPhone user walks
into an Apple Store and says, "Why can't I get anything I want on my
iPhone?" they'll think he's really sick and won't help him reinstall
his game after updating the iPhone. And if two iPhone users do it,
in harmony, they'll think it's a stunt, and they won't help either
one of them. And if three people do it, three, can you imagine,
three people walking into an Apple Store and asking why they can't
install anything they want on an iPhone, and walking out, they may
think it's an organization. And can you imagine fifty people a day,
I said fifty people a day walking in and asking why they can't
install anything they want and walking out, why friends, they may
think it's a movement. And that's what it is, the iPhone Application
Anti-Massacre Movement. And all you got to do to join is sing it the
next time it comes around on the guitar. With feeling.
<http://www.arlo.net/resources/lyrics/alices.shtml>
iPhone Billing and International Issues
---------------------------------------
by Jorg Brown
article link: <http://db.tidbits.com/article/9116>
There are two big controversies brewing in the iPhone world right
now, both squarely in AT&T's purview.
The first is that AT&T defaults to sending you detailed information
about your phone use, including a printout, arriving through the
mail, of every text message you send or receive, as well as every
block of data; they do this even if you have unlimited service. The
canonical example is a customer whose 300-page phone bill cost AT&T
$10 to send.
<http://youtube.com/watch?v=UdULhkh6yeA>
This is an idiotic waste of paper (blogger Muhammad Saleem estimated
it at nearly 75,000 trees per year), but reportedly customers
signing up after 10-Aug-07 will instead receive summary bills that
basically just say how much you owe. You can also ask AT&T to switch
your account to summary billing or to paperless billing, though an
email message sent to Muhammad purportedly from an AT&T call center
employee claimed that paperless billing would cost $1.99 per month.
<http://muhammadsaleem.com/2007/08/15/att-goes-on-a-rampage-will-destroy-74535-trees-to-make-iphone-service-bills/>
<http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2007/08/att-saves-the-t.html>
But that's not a big deal - AT&T will work it out eventually.
The bigger problem is that, while iPhone data usage is flat-rate in
the United States, in every other country it's charged by the byte,
and the charges are quite high. Same thing with text messages.
On top of that, many people have their iPhones set to check email
automatically every few minutes, something that's not a problem when
in the United States, but which generates huge charges when you're
in another country.
Consider, for example, that in Canada the charge for outgoing text
messages is 50 cents per message, while the data rate is about $1
for every 50K, or $20 per megabyte. Now go to Home > Settings >
Usage on the iPhone and multiply your data use, in megabytes, by
$20, and contemplate how high your phone bill might be.
There are a few ways you can avoid the high bills that jet-setting
iPhone users have been seeing:
* Turn off Mail in Home > Settings, which should reduce the use of
EDGE data to nearly zero (just a few packets when you move between
EDGE and Wi-Fi). Then, before you check on stock quotes, use Google
Maps, watch a video at YouTube, or check the weather, make sure you
have a good Wi-Fi connection.
* Remove the SIM card while you're away (see Apple's instructions).
You won't be able to make calls or use EDGE, but you will be able to
use Wi-Fi. You can even put the iPhone SIM that you just removed
into some old AT&T phone, and use that for communicating while you
use your iPhone for everything else.
<http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=305746>
* Put the iPhone into Airplane Mode. That way, you can still listen to
music and play video, but you can't make calls or do anything
requiring Internet access.
* Call AT&T and sign up for the International Data Global Plan for
iPhone, which, for $24.99 per month, provides 20 MB of data usage
per month in 29 countries, with overage at half a cent per kilobyte
($1 for 200K) and other countries at the usual $.0195 per kilobyte
(about $1 for 50K). A friend was told by AT&T that the International
Data Global Plan _replaces_ the domestic data plan, but AT&T's Web
site seems to contradict that, so be sure to confirm with AT&T. You
do have to sign up for 12 months at a time.
<http://www.wireless.att.com/learn/international/roaming/affordable-world-packages.jsp#5b>
<http://www.wireless.att.com/learn/international/dataconnect-global.jsp>
C4 Conference Rethinks MacHack
------------------------------
by Adam C. Engst <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
article link: <http://db.tidbits.com/article/9121>
I recently returned from a weekend in Chicago, attending the second
C4 conference for independent developers. Created by Jonathan "Wolf"
Rentzsch, a Chicago-area developer, occasional TidBITS contributor,
and all-around good guy, C4 in many ways picks up where the
venerable MacHack programmer's conference left off several years ago
while rethinking and refining the things about MacHack that caused
it to fade away.
<http://c4.rentzsch.com/1/>
<http://www.rentzsch.com/>
<http://db.tidbits.com/author/Jonathan+Rentzsch>
Holding C4 in Chicago, rather than MacHack's traditional location of
Dearborn, Michigan, made it easy for many people to attend, given
Chicago's central location and massive airports. Plus, Chicago is a
bit more of a destination than Dearborn (though I'll never speak ill
of Dearborn again, after having been given a personal tour by the
head of the Chamber of Commerce; see "Adieu ADHOC," 2005-08-01).
<http://db.tidbits.com/article/8197>
Wolf organized a number of excellent sessions in a single track,
starting off with Wil Shipley's (Delicious Monster) tremendously
amusing keynote entitled "On the Creation and Maintenance of Hype."
A number of other sessions focused on the business end of things,
including Daniel Jalkut's (Red Sweater Software) talk about
acquiring applications, my updated talk about "Hacking the Press,"
Allen Odgaard's discussion of the development of TextMate, and Cabel
Sasser's wonderful recounting of the story behind the founding of
Panic and the creation of their Coda Web development software (see
"Coda Plays Web Developers a New Tune," 2007-04-30).
<http://www.delicious-monster.com/>
<http://www.red-sweater.com/>
<http://db.tidbits.com/series/1172>
<http://macromates.com/>
<http://www.panic.com/>
<http://www.panic.com/coda/>
<http://db.tidbits.com/article/8969>
On the more technical end, Shawn Morel of VMware gave a good
explanation of virtualization that was highly technical but
understandable to the non-programmer. Several other talks were
totally over my head, such as Bob Ippolito's introduction to Erlang,
a new language and environment that provides hot code reloading,
fault-tolerant runtimes, concurrency-oriented programming, and
function pattern matching. I haven't the foggiest idea what that
means, but some of the capabilities Bob talked about certainly
sounded impressive. Tim Burks also talked about bridging between
Ruby and Objective-C, though I have to admit to glazing over
somewhat in the aftermath of my own talk and my lack of programming
knowledge. For a better description of Tim's talk and other thoughts
on the C4 conference, see Mike Zornek's coverage.
<http://www.vmware.com/products/fusion/>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erlang_%28programming_language%29>
<http://www.rubycocoa.com/>
<http://blog.clickablebliss.com/2007/08/13/c41-retrospective/>
The most valuable part of conferences often comes outside the formal
sessions, and C4 was no exception. There wasn't a lobby that
attendees could take over as happened with MacHack, but Wolf
cleverly set things up so there were a number of group meals and
receptions for ad hoc networking. I enjoyed being able to catch up
with numerous friends who I see only at industry trade shows, and I
met lots of developers who hadn't been part of the MacHack
community. Others commented on this as well, and if anything, the
next C4 (assuming there will be one, since Wolf hasn't said anything
either way) could use some time between sessions for people to
gather, discuss the talk they just heard, and generally network.
One thing I hadn't anticipated was the constant use of Twitter,
buoyed by the presence of Craig Hockenberry of Iconfactory, who
wrote the Twitterrific client that provides a nice Macintosh
interface to Twitter, along with Growl notifications. I haven't been
a fan of Twitter, since most of what I've seen has been truly inane,
but C4 used Twitter to create a group chat room with persistent
messages. In other words, anyone could send a Twitter message that
would be seen by everyone else who was following the C4 user; since
messages are kept, that made it possible to follow what was said not
just while you were connected, but the entire time. Such a use isn't
entirely innovative; there are plenty of group chat systems, but the
Twitter system was used heavily, whereas a parallel IRC chat room
received much less attention. In a discussion toward the end of the
conference, several Twitter fans explained to me that the trick with
Twitter was to follow only those people who had something
interesting to say (as opposed to updates on their meal choices or
transportation woes), to limit it largely to non-working hours, and
to be ruthless about ignoring missed messages (called "tweets").
Heck, I'll give it a try; for anyone who's using Twitter, feel free
to follow me, or, if you want instant notification when we post new
TidBITS articles, follow TidBITS.
<http://twitter.com/>
<http://iconfactory.com/software/twitterrific>
<http://growl.info/>
<http://twitter.com/adamengst>
<http://twitter.com/TidBITS>
C4 closed with Iron Coder Live, a hack contest along the lines of
the MacHax Best Hack Contest from MacHack. Most of the 11 hacks
involved the iPhone, that having been the proposed theme, though the
third place hack, independent consultant Dave Dribin's The Bouncer
was instead an Input Manager hack that caused a selected
application's Dock icon to bounce. While that wasn't too impressive
on its own, Dave then showed how he could make multiple Dock icons
bounce in various synchronized ways, and then made them bounce to
music, all to loud applause. Second place went to Lucas Newman and
Adam Betts of Delicious Monster for Lights Off, the first native
iPhone game (see "Lights Off for the iPhone," 2007-08-14) which they
released to the public. Impressive as Lights Off was, first place -
and Wolf's Golden Dog Tags prize - went to Ken and Glen Aspeslagh of
Ecamm Network for Squidge, a hack that enabled two-way
video-conferencing on the iPhone, using its built-in camera.
Impressive stuff! The main problem with their demo is that Glen and
Ken are identical twins, so it wasn't easy to see who was who on the
tiny iPhone screens projected on the wall.
<http://www.dribin.org/dave/blog/archives/2007/08/14/the_bouncer/>
<http://deliciousmonster.org/>
<http://db.tidbits.com/article/9120>
<http://www.ecamm.com/>
<http://macdaddyworld.com/?p=38>
Overall, and from the comments I heard from other attendees, C4 was
a smashing success. The first one last year attracted 98 attendees
(Wolf had initially capped attendance at 75, but had to expand due
to interest), and I gather this year's attendance grew to about 140.
That's a good size, and if there are future incarnations, we'll have
to see if Wolf and his crew - who did an excellent job with the
logistics of scheduling, food, audio, and room setup - can handle
more people as the word continues to spread.
Sparkle Improves Application Update Experience
----------------------------------------------
by Adam C. Engst <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
article link: <http://db.tidbits.com/article/9122>
At the C4 conference, I ran into David Teare, who publishes the
1Passwd utility, and I complimented him on how smoothly 1Passwd
updates itself. Although it does have to interact with the user to
quit open browsers (since 1Passwd is a browser plug-in), the rest of
the process is nearly seamless. When you launch the 1Passwd
application and an update is available, it displays a window showing
release notes for the latest version, nicely color-coding the
headings for new features, changed features, and fixed bugs. You're
given the choice of being reminded of the update again later, if
you're too busy to think about it, skipping the update entirely, or
installing it. If you choose to install the update, 1Passwd
automatically downloads the new version, copies it over the old one,
and relaunches itself to load the new code. It's ever so easy.
<http://www.tidbits.com/resources/2007-08/1Passwd-Sparkle-window.jpg>
When I expressed my admiration for his update process, David looked
a little embarrassed and said, "Oh, that's the open source Sparkle.
We just added it to 1Passwd." Not being a developer, I'd simply
never run across Sparkle before, so I went spelunking for it on the
Web. It turns out that Sparkle is used in a large number of
applications, including SubEthaEdit, iStumbler, MarsEdit, and nearly
200 other Macintosh programs.
<http://sparkle.andymatuschak.org/>
From what developers at C4 told me, and from what I see on the
Sparkle Web site, it's a well-thought-out implementation of
self-updating. Most important, the user doesn't have to do anything
at all, although it's more common (and generally more respectful) to
give the user the option of updating at a later time. Sparkle
displays release notes in a detailed update status window via
WebKit, supports DSA signatures for secure updates, and can extract
updates from a number of different archive formats. Also key is the
fact that Sparkle integrates into applications seamlessly and can be
added to an application without any code whatsoever (it's all done
via Interface Builder and plists). Although Sparkle itself works
only in Cocoa applications, a separate version has been created for
use in Carbon applications.
I of course realize that most people reading TidBITS are not
developers with applications that need self-updating capabilities,
but I'll bet that almost all of you have had to deal with the usual
upgrade rigamarole: learn about an update (perhaps from the
application, perhaps elsewhere), go to its Web site, find the right
page, download and expand the file, copy the new version of the
application over the old one (quitting first, if the old application
was active), launching the new version, and then cleaning up all the
downloaded files.
It's not rocket science, but it is tedious and time-consuming. The
only good part about it is that you remain in control the entire
time and can decide when to install the update, whether to keep the
old version of the application around, and if it's worth keeping the
downloaded archive as well. Realistically, the main downside of
self-updating, whether done through Sparkle or any home-brewed
mechanism, is that you would have a hard time reverting to the
previous version if the update suffered from some unexpected
problem.
So, if you'd like the applications you use on a regular basis to
update themselves with a minimum of fuss or interaction from you,
much as happens with Mac OS X and Apple's applications via Software
Update, tell the developers to check out Sparkle. It's free, it's
easy, and it's a boon to users everywhere.
The Subliminal Snap of Keyclick
-------------------------------
by Matt Neuburg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
article link: <http://db.tidbits.com/article/9102>
Long before I owned a personal computer, I had an IBM Selectric
typewriter, and all was right with the world. What I loved wasn't
just its changeable fonts (though these were essential to my work,
letting me type in both Ancient Greek and English); something about
the feel of the keyboard, shared also with IBM's card-punch machines
of a slightly earlier era, was uniquely satisfying, clear, and
positive. With it, I could type very fast and accurately. In a way,
I've sought ever since to recover that same keyboard feel.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selectric>
<http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/029.html>
Here at TidBITS, we're all heavy keyboard users, and we've run
occasional stories about keyboards we found particularly satisfying.
In "The Majestic Alps and the King of Keyboards," 2004-03-29, Adam
waxes nostalgic about the Apple Extended Keyboard and enthusiastic
about its reincarnation in the Matias Tactile Pro. But when you're
on the road with your portable (and "the road" could be merely one
end of your living room), and can't attach an external keyboard, you
must "dance with the one that brought you." I'm not particularly
negative about my new MacBook's keyboard (discussed, when the first
model appeared, in "MacBook Fills Out Laptop Line," 2006-05-22), but
I'm not all that positive about it either. That's why I'm so
enthusiastic about Keyclick, by Peter Sichel, a developer best known
for his networking utilities, but who is also just an all-around
nice fellow, always willing to share his expertise with total
strangers who approach him at trade shows (guess how I know that?).
<http://db.tidbits.com/article/7607>
<http://db.tidbits.com/article/8534>
<http://www.sustworks.com/site/prod_keyclick_overview.html>
<http://www.sustworks.com/site/prod.html>
Keyclick is a System Preference pane. It doesn't affect your
physical keyboard at all; it just makes noise when you type. So how
can it be helpful, as claimed on the product's Web site, "if your
keyboard seems mushy, or you've ever longed for the crisp feel of an
older keyboard"? Why does it make me a better typist on my MacBook?
It's because the noise it makes, though little more than a faintly
detectable pop each time I press a key, tells me almost subliminally
that I _have_ pressed a key. Even more, Keyclick tells me (by its
silence) when I've _failed_ to press a key, or when I've held down a
key long enough to produce multiple, repeated characters. Thus, as
if I were a rat in a maze being rewarded for my successes, my brain
and my fingers are guided to press just the right amount to produce
that satisfying pop. And so, in short order, I run the maze better
and better.
Actually, Keyclick helps me even more with two further bits of
functionality. First, it makes a noise when I click the trackpad
button, and when I release it. That's very important, because the
MacBook trackpad button is extremely firm, so I often think I've
clicked it when I haven't. Before Keyclick, in such a situation I
was left slowly noticing that nothing on the screen had changed and
wondering why; now I get instant feedback. Second, Keyclick makes a
noise when I use the scroll wheel. On the MacBook, that means
stroking the trackpad with two fingers; thus, it's important to
distinguish this from a single finger, which moves the cursor.
Again, sometimes this fails, and I used to wonder why: was the
cursor not over the window I thought it was, or was my gesture not
understood as scrolling? Thanks to Keyclick, I now know much better,
and much sooner, what the computer thinks I did. I make fewer
miscommunications with my machine, and when I do make one, I know
immediately and can react quickly.
Only experimentation can tell you how to set Keyclick's various
options in order to make it most useful. You can turn the keystroke
noise on or off, and adjust its volume and pitch; you can turn the
scroll wheel noise on or off, and adjust _its_ volume and pitch; and
you can turn the mouse click noise on or off, and adjust its volume.
(You can also elect to have a different pitch produced when a
keystroke includes a modifier key such as Command or Shift, and you
can elect to silence Keyclick when certain applications are
frontmost.) The matter is purely one of psychology. Indeed, on my
iMac G5, where I have a clicky keyboard, trackball, and scroll
wheel, Keyclick's noises feel like an annoying distraction, and I
don't use it! Yet on my MacBook the very same noises seem both
essential and all but unnoticeable. So download it and give it a
try; that's the only way you'll discover whether Keyclick is that
little extra that you needed all along to increase your happiness
and productivity.
You can try Keyclick free for 21 days. It's a 312K download, and
requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later. (Incidentally, Keyclick performs
its magic through a little-known technology, new in Tiger, called
Quartz Event Taps; these are essentially hooks that let the
programmer receive and modify user input before it reaches any
application's event loop. A neat tool for experimenting with event
taps is PreFab Software's freeware Event Taps Testbench.) You can
register Keyclick for a mere $5, yet another example of Peter
Sichel's generosity. Plus, Peter is very responsive to his users'
feature requests and suggestions for Keyclick. This utility is a
pleasure to use and the developer is delightful to work with; what
could be better?
<http://www.sustworks.com/site/downloads.html>
<http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Carbon/Reference/QuartzEventServicesRef/Reference/reference.html>
<http://prefabsoftware.com/eventtapstestbench/>
Safe Sleep Revisited
--------------------
by Joe Kissell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
article link: <http://db.tidbits.com/article/9115>
My recent article "Stewing Over Safe Sleep" (2007-07-30) seems to
have touched a nerve. It provoked lots of discussion on TidBITS
Talk, not to mention numerous email messages, prompting me to write
a follow-up post on my personal blog. Now it seems that even the
follow-up needs a follow-up, as new information has emerged and
various helpful hints have been offered. Here, then, is the rest of
the story (or as much of it as I know at the moment).
<http://db.tidbits.com/article/9090>
<http://alt.cc/jk/118>
**A Quick Review** -- In Apple's current implementation of Safe Sleep,
simply putting your laptop into (ordinary) sleep mode triggers it to
save a copy of your RAM onto disk - taking up as much as 4 GB of
disk space and delaying the onset of sleep by as long as 49 seconds
(depending on your laptop's configuration), during which, Apple's
documentation cautions, you must not move your computer. The RAM is
cached so that if, later on, your battery drains completely, you can
return to your previous state quickly (a bit slower than waking up
from ordinary sleep, but much faster than restarting), without
having lost any unsaved work. This default setting can be modified
only by mucking around in Terminal or with third-party hacks. If you
don't like waiting almost a minute before moving your computer every
time you put it to sleep (and I certainly don't), you must go to
considerable effort to change that behavior.
**When Safe Sleep Is Good** -- In my earlier article, I complained
that cases where Safe Sleep would actually be valuable are rare, at
least for me, making it all the more irritating that saving RAM to
disk is the default. However, several people pointed out usage
scenarios in which someone might be delighted to have a copy of
their RAM cached to disk, even if it meant taking a minute extra for
their laptop to sleep. Although I may not encounter these situations
myself, I grant that they make Safe Sleep more useful. A
trans-Pacific flight during which you might burn through several
batteries, for example, is a good time to have Safe Sleep available.
The same is true if you know your laptop's battery is easily jostled
out of place (losing electrical contact and thus depriving your
computer of power) during travel to or from work.
Another good example: swapping batteries. If I put my Titanium
PowerBook G4 to sleep, I can swap batteries (even without an AC
adapter attached) and not lose the contents of my RAM. However, some
Mac laptops (including the new MacBook Pros) lack any sort of
short-term power supply that can enable a live swap like that. With
these models, if you can't connect an AC adapter or put them into
Safe Sleep, your only other alternative is to shut down completely
before changing batteries and restart afterward - quite a hassle,
not to mention a step backward in usability. (One could even imagine
that the Safe Sleep feature was someone's idea for saving a few
cents on hardware components - why have extra parts to preserve the
RAM when we can accomplish the same thing in software? - but I sure
hope that wasn't the case.)
In addition, a number of readers mentioned that if your battery
drains completely without a RAM cache being created, you'll lose
more than unsaved documents. Window and palette positions, the
contents of the Clipboard, open tabs in your Web browser, and
various other things might disappear too. Even the time required to
restart and open a bunch of applications again can be a drag, and
recovering from Safe Sleep is much faster, even if you've previously
lost some time waiting for the RAM to be saved to disk.
So on the one hand, there are times when a typical user might
greatly benefit from Safe Sleep; on the other hand, during periods
when you know you won't need it, it's still preferable to be able to
put your computer to sleep instantly (and save a few gigabytes of
space on your hard disk). And although you could enter commands in
Terminal whenever you wanted to switch modes, that's not very
convenient. Greg Nicholson emailed me with a solution he uses, which
I thought was quite clever. He has cron run a shell script every 10
minutes. But unlike the simple script I provided in my earlier
article, Greg's has some smarts: it does different things depending
on your battery level. If your battery is running low, it turns
hibernatemode on, so that when your computer sleeps, it will save
the RAM cache. But when your battery level is high enough again, it
turns hibernatemode off and deletes your RAM cache. That way, you
can have the best of both worlds, more or less.
My version of Greg's script follows; you can change the values 30
and 50 (as in, activate hibernatemode when battery level is less
than 30 percent and deactivate it when battery level is over 50
percent) to your preferences.
#!/bin/sh
MODE=`/usr/bin/pmset -g | awk '/hibernatemode/ { print $2 }'`
LEFT=`/usr/bin/pmset -g batt | grep Internal | awk '{ print $2 }' | awk -F
% '{ print $1 }'`
if [ $LEFT -lt 30 ] && [ $MODE != 3 ] ; then
{
/usr/bin/logger -t "hibernatemode" "Battery level less than 30%;
setting hibernatemode to 3"
/usr/bin/pmset -a hibernatemode 3
}
elif [ $LEFT -gt 50 ] && [ $MODE != 0 ]; then
{
/usr/bin/logger -t "hibernatemode" "Battery level greater than 50%;
setting hibernatemode to 0"
/usr/bin/pmset -a hibernatemode 0
rm /var/vm/sleepimage
}
fi
As with any shell script, you must save this as a plain text file
and make it executable. One way to do that is to type:
sudo chmod ug+x your-script-name
In addition, if you plan to use cron to schedule this script to run
automatically, bear in mind that it requires root privileges. My own
solution is to put the file in my system crontab (in which all
scripts run with root privileges), but a safer tactic (and the one
Greg recommends) would be to add the following to your
/private/etc/sudoers file:
ALL ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/pmset -a hibernatemode 3
ALL ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/pmset -a hibernatemode 0
ALL ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: /bin/rm /var/vm/sleepimage
Safer still would be to replace the first ALL in each line with your
short user name.
**A Question of Encryption** -- In my earlier article, I mentioned
that when changing the hibernatemode setting manually, you should
use a value of 0 to turn it off; 3 to return it to its default state
(on only when needed, but always save the RAM state when sleeping);
or 1 to make your computer use Safe Sleep, rather than ordinary
sleep, all the time. Then I went on to say, "And if you have Use
Secure Virtual Memory selected in the Security pane of System
Preferences, replace the 1 or 3 with 5 or 7, respectively." That
last sentence, it turns out, was not merely mistaken but a very bad
recommendation indeed. Please forget that I suggested it. Don't ever
use 5 or 7.
Ordinarily, when Mac OS X uses virtual memory (VM) - temporarily
storing a portion of your RAM on disk - it writes out the data
unencrypted. The problem with this is that if your RAM happened to
contain something confidential, such as a password, then even after
you shut down your computer someone could extract that data from the
VM swap file on your disk. Security experts regard this as a huge
risk, and recommend that virtual memory always be encrypted when
written to disk. In Mac OS X Tiger, you can do this by opening the
Security pane of System Preferences and checking Use Secure Virtual
Memory. (In fact, everyone go do this right now. I'll wait.)
How does Secure VM relate to hibernatemode? Well, with hibernatemode
settings of 1 or 3, your RAM is saved to disk according to the
Secure VM setting you're using. So, if Secure VM is off, a setting
of 1 or 3 writes your RAM cache unencrypted, whereas if Secure VM is
on, a setting of 1 or 3 encrypts your RAM cache. That is as it
should be.
Once upon a time, however, when hibernatemode was new, it didn't
work correctly with Secure VM. So the 5 and 7 settings were added to
*prevent* your RAM cache from being encrypted even if Secure VM was
turned on! That problem, however, was short-lived, and now that
modes 1 and 3 work as they ought to, you should avoid using 5 or 7,
which would effectively eliminate the value of Secure VM in the
first place.
Suppose, however, that you not unreasonably took my earlier advice
and thereby unwittingly wrote an unencrypted RAM cache to your disk
- or that you never had Secure VM turned on in the first place and
have an unencrypted RAM cache for that reason. Merely erasing that
sleepimage file won't overwrite its contents; any moderately skilled
hacker could still read its contents quite easily. So instead of
issuing this command:
sudo rm /var/vm/sleepimage
use this one:
sudo srm -s /var/vm/sleepimage
The srm command is the secure version of rm ("remove"). By default,
srm overwrites files 35 times (just like the most secure version of
the Erase Free Space feature in Disk Utility). And that's definitely
secure, but it also takes forever, and probably has no practical
benefits for most of us. The -s flag is for simple security - a
one-pass overwrite - which should be adequate for most ordinary
citizens. If you prefer to be more cautious, you can replace -s with
-m ("medium") for a 7-pass overwrite.
Note, however, that if you're running a script (either Greg's or
mine) to turn off hibernatemode when needed, you need not use the
srm command in that script. The reason is that when hibernatemode
turns on, it creates a blank sleepimage file. Although that file is
as large as the amount of RAM you have installed, it contains no
data until your computer enters sleep mode. So as long as your
script catches it and deletes it before your computer sleeps, you
need not spend the extra time to overwrite a blank file securely.
Hot Topics in TidBITS Talk/20-Aug-07
------------------------------------
by TidBITS Staff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
article link: <http://db.tidbits.com/article/9127>
**Plastic bags vs Canvas Bags** -- An off-topic comment in another
thread starts a discussion of how plastic bags are harmful to the
environment. (20 messages)
<http://emperor.tidbits.com/TidBITS/Talk/1423/>
**56Kbps modem options for MacBook Pros** -- Now that Apple no longer
builds modems into its machines, does the Apple Modem perform well
enough, or are there other options? (7 messages)
<http://emperor.tidbits.com/TidBITS/Talk/1425/>
**Music composition for the music illiterate** -- A musical goober
(and friend of TidBITS) wants to create a ringtone; can GarageBand
do what he wants? (4 messages)
<http://emperor.tidbits.com/TidBITS/Talk/1426/>
**DVD to iMovie?** Readers suggest options for capturing footage from
Hi8 tapes to DVDs and then to iMovie. (7 messages)
<http://emperor.tidbits.com/TidBITS/Talk/1427/>
**Replacing Microsoft Office with iWork '08** -- Apple's new
production suite looks to be a more serious contender to Microsoft
Office, but does it stack up as a replacement? The lack of Visual
Basic in the next version of Office could be a deciding factor. (34
messages)
<http://emperor.tidbits.com/TidBITS/Talk/1428/>
**iPhoto '08 and shared galleries** -- In anticipation of buying iLife
'08, a reader asks about the Web gallery features in the new iPhoto
'08. (3 messages)
<http://emperor.tidbits.com/TidBITS/Talk/1429/>
**Safe Sleep Revisited** -- Joe Kissell's ongoing look at the Safe
Sleep feature of Mac laptops brings up a minor scripting correction
and clarification on when the computer is actually going to sleep.
(3 messages)
<http://emperor.tidbits.com/TidBITS/Talk/1430/>
**iPhone Billing and International Issues** -- A reader gives his
first-hand account of being charged for international data usage:
$1,700! (6 messages)
<http://emperor.tidbits.com/TidBITS/Talk/1432/>
$$
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