Looks like the same Tiff exploit that was used to downgrade the PSP from 2.0 to 1.5 firmware, is going to be used to run code on the iPhone. This news is kind of funny since Sony fixed the Tiff buffer overflow problem a year and a half ago. Guess Apple didn’t get that memo. Ups!!!

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Here is a little script a friend help me put together. It it basically a caching RSS reader for GeekTool. I use it to display my Netflix query on my desktop, as well as My MeeVee listing. Just change the LOG, RSS lines and it will pull the title lines out of RSS feeds. If you want more you can change the curl lines. Have fun.

#!/bin/sh
LOG=/Users/Nathan/scripts/netflix_queue.txt
RSS=”http://rss.netflix.com/QueueRSS?id=P1414648916102002442351662043565655″
size=$(ls -all $LOG | awk ‘{print $5}’)

if [ ! -f $LOG ]; then
curl -s $RSS | grep title | sed -E ‘s/<\/?title>//g’ > $LOG
else
age=$(echo $(date “+%s”) – $(stat -t “%s” $LOG 2>/dev/null | awk -F\” ‘{print $4}’) | bc -l)
if [ "$age" -gt 3600 -o $size = 0 ]; then
curl -s $RSS | grep title | sed -E ‘s/<\/?title>//g’ > $LOG
fi
fi
cat $LOG

This weekend I bought a copy of Bioshock.  A Microsoft only game.  This was fine as I thought all I would have to do is install Boot Camp.  When I got home I fired up the MacBook Pro and went to installing boot camp.  After burning the driver disc I was stuck waiting the the drive to be partitioned.  I went to grab a sandwich and came back to find that the partition had failed.  OSX said it couldn’t move some file and I would have to reformat the drive before I could partition it.  Looks like this isn’t going to be as easy as I thought I said, and went to get out my external hard drive and peruse a reformat.  After booting the OSX install disc I went to Disk Utility and made an image of my drive.  Then booted back into my system and mounted the image just to verify that all my data was there.  All the data was copied, so I reformatted the internal drive.  All well and good so far.  After the format I went to restore the drive from the image I had created, but to my surprise I was unable to do so.  After spending a few hours online trying to figure out how to restore the image Apple.com left me with two options.
One: install OSX on another external drive and boot from that, then restore the internal drive.
Two: boot my Mac into disk mode and connect it to another Mac and restore from the image.

Neither of these options where going to work for me, so I decided I would just mount the image and copy everything to the internal drive.  After that was finished I rebooted to find a black error screen.  This wasn’t what I had hoped for.  By this time my sandwich is long gone and its getting really late, so I say screw it I will just reinstall the OS and spend the next week getting things back to normal.  Off I go on another long operation when I find an option that will copy my old system to a folder and reuse my User folder.  About and hour later I was sitting at the Log In screen for my user account and everything was pretty much back to normal.   Unfortunately I was out of time and didn’t get a chance to try Boot Camp again.  But I would assume it will work.

What I Learned.
1.  I am going to need to find a better way to back up.
2. Through all the madness I somehow gained 5-10GB of extra data.
3.  Games are not always worth it.

I have been using Google Reader since it was updated to the new version about a year ago. Damn it is one nice Rss Reader. Not to long ago I found a theme for it that made the whole experience of reading rss feeds even more enjoyable. The theme is suppose to look like an OSX app but really I don’t know. It’s nice, clean and give the reader more room to read articles. You can head over to http://www.hicksdesign.co.uk/journal/ to find out how to install the theme. Works on many browsers. Hope you enjoy it as much as I have.

The other day I was called an Apple fan boy. If you would have told me a few years ago that I would be the owner of a Mac. I wouldn’t have believed you. See I didn’t know much about computers say 5 years ago. Nor did I care to. But it is a different story now. I will admit the reason I got a MacBook Pro was because I could still use Windows. But really after only about 2 weeks I don’t miss Windows. I never really had any problems with Windows, I just thought maybe I should broaden my scope of computers beyond Windows, and very little Linux. To sum up the reason foe getting a MacBook Pro was not to be a Apple fan boy, but really to learn a different operation system, and since OSX is based on BSD Linux, I can learn more commands and great Linux things also. But I don’t guess its really what i think that makes me a fan boy it is what everyone else thinks. So whatever I guess.