What's it all about, Alfie?

In a very interesting article from the Financial Times, it seems that Google's recent brush with the Chinese hackers that compromised their systems has left them looking for the real root causes of the incident. To that end, they have decided that it's Windows that is the security threat, not the people:

New hires are now given the option of using Apple’s Mac computers or PCs running the Linux operating system. “Linux is open source and we feel good about it,” said one employee. “Microsoft we don’t feel so good about.”

Indeed, the source points to the security (or lack thereof) of Windows as the primary reason:

In addition to being a semi-formal policy, employees themselves have grown more concerned about security since the China attacks. “Particularly since the China scare, a lot of people here are using Macs for security,” said one employee.

Interesting. It says a lot about Google that they don't go the "lock down" approach to the machines - they realize that people need to be able to do things on their machines in order to get work done. So rather than try to make Windows secure, it's easier to just ban it.

Amazing.

This morning I saw that the latest release candidate of Flash Player for Mac OS X was out, and with the recent announcements of the hardware-accelerated library from Apple, it's been a stated promise from Adobe that they will use this in the final release of the 10.1 Flash PLayer. If so, this may be the cut that includes it. The timing is right, which is just great.

So I'm hoping that soon we'll have a decent Flash Player that uses hardware acceleration on my laptop.

This morning I saw that DataGraph 2.2.3 is out and in this update there are a few bugs fixed with regards to the data importing and grouping. It's got some pretty advanced features for data importing, as I've used it heavily for plotting some simulation runs, so it's good news to see these bugs fixed.

Nice to see the updates, but I'd really like to see him include the 3D plots like isobars and heat maps to the tool. It'd make it a lot more powerful for my simulation plotting.

Well, he finally did it - MarsEdit 3.0 is out with a nice WYSIWYG editor - not that I use that input method, but the HTML syntax highlighting is much improved and that I use. Nice.

The Media Manager is very nice, and it'll make it a lot easier to pick out things to slap in the posts, but it's big, I mean, really big, and I guess that's OK for now, but I'd have liked to see it smaller like the previous version. Oh well... so it goes...

One thing... in the Template Preview, if you reference a file on your machine, like I did:

  <link rel="stylesheet" href="file:///Users/drbob/Sites/CSS/WPdefault.css"
   type="text/css" media="screen" />

then you need to be sure not to use the file:// URL scheme. You have to use the http:// URL in order for it to be read in properly and used:

  <link rel="stylesheet" href="http://peabody.local/~drbob/CSS/WPdefault.css"
   type="text/css" media="screen" />

I seem to remember this a long time ago, but when I looked at my MarsEdit 2.x template it still had the file:// URL, so I let it go. Now I'll have it here and it'll be harder to forget.

UPDATE: I sent this into Daniel and he said he's looking into it. It's odd that I remember this happening a while back, but I can't find it in any of my posts, and I wonder if I imagined it all. In any case, it worked this morning with 2.4.2 and with 3.0 it has to have the http:// URL. We'll see if he comes back with a fix.

As if Transmit 4 wasn't enough for one day, the Bare Bones crew released BBEdit 9.5 today with an impressive list of fixes and new features. What I like the most, however, is the "in-line" Find box that you can activate just like in Safari:

I've been wanting to have this feature in BBEdit for a long time. It's one of the most useful and clever additions to an editor I've seen. Up to now, it was in SubEthaEdit, which is nice, but still not to the point that it supplants BBEdit as my main code writing editor on the Mac.

There are a ton more things to explore in BBEdit 9.5, and I've only had it running for a few minutes, but it's just an incredible day for new software on the Mac. Amazing.

I'm a big fan of the software the Panic crew creates. In my opinion, it's a list of the very best in style, function, and usability for any platform - I'm just tickled pink it's for the Mac. Today they released Transmit 4, the latest update to their file transfer client, and Holy Cow! What an update!

Following their recent update to Unison, it makes sense that they do a completely new UI with much better features, much more usable screen real estate, and a few new GUI "extras" that make it a joy to watch working. Really. But what I didn't expect is the complete transformation of the "connected" GUI to be exactly what I've been wanting them to do: minimal footprint.

The new "connected" GUI looks wonderfully like a simple Finder window:

I've been hoping for this for a very, very long time. It's wonderful.

The connection parameters are very easy to define - but that's no news. What is news in the engine is that they claim to have made it 25% faster than Transmit 3. That's something. Very nice.

One of the other nice features is the menu bar component that allows you to mount any of the connections as a disk in Finder. This means that you can have an SFTP site or WebDAV look like any other disk drive in the system and all the applications of that system see it as a disk drive. No need to have SFTP or WebDAV in any application - with this, it's all there for everyone. Amazingly cool!

I continue to believe that these guys create some of the very best software I've ever seen. Incredible.

This morning after I updated with the Security Update 2010-003, I noticed that Skitch said the beta period had expired and I needed to update. Yikes! I'd hate to be without Skitch, and I typically get these updates long before the beta expires. So I immediately updated and while it took a lot longer than normal (maybe a ton of people in the same boat as me?) it was back up and running.

It's far far too valuable in what I do to not have Skitch.

This morning I noticed that the Flash 10.1 Release Candidate was out - 10.1.53.7. While I typically use ClickToFlash to not view Flash in Safari (my primary browser), when I have to use it, I want to make sure that it's the best and latest version of Flash. This branch of Flash is supposed to be much better performing on Mac OS X, and it's about time - the vast majority of creative professionals are on Mac, why hasn't Adobe made Flash a top-notch player on the Mac?

Well... it's here, and for all I need, it'll do nicely.

For the past several years, Sun's Solaris for SPARC (at least) was "free" - you had to pay for the media and shipping. In that time, I bought Solaris 7, 8, and 9 for my SPARCstation 20. It was a fantastic program as it made sure that people like me would still be running, using, and liking Solaris, long after the linux wagon came to town. Had Sun charged me full price for Solaris, I'd have been running linux on that same box all that time. It was a good move on Sun's part to have this program in place.

Then Oracle bought Sun... and every good thing must come to an end.

This morning I was reading Slashdot and saw that Oracle is suspending the free licenses of Solaris. That's sad.

The funny thing is - I doubt it'll generate much revenue for the company. But it's going to cost them a lot of potential adopters in the kids that get old machines to play with and now won't learn Solaris and thus keep Oracle out of the long-term business. It's just not smart.

But then again, I've never thought that "smart" was a good adjective for Oracle.

Today my web app started moving in a slightly different direction and I started working with the Google Visualization Line Chart. This is really exceptional. While I've liked the AnnotatedTimeLine, and all the things it allowed me to do very easily, it's the speed and ease of use that the Line Chart represents that really blew me away.

This guy is rendered in SVG graphics so there's no Flash to load, it's not got the fancy zoom, but maybe they'll add that at a later time if they get enough requests. Even so, it's fast, lightweight, and very nice visually.

What a great visualization tool!