The net has been abuzz with talk about the ARDAgent ’setuid root’ problem on Mac OS X. While I think I’m a pretty good judge of character when it comes to an application I’m installing, I think I’ll opt for the safe solution for now and disable the remote application. I’ve never used it, so being safe is an easy win for me. If you use a Mac and are worried, simply execute the following in terminal:

sudo chmod -R u-s /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app

I recently cleaned out my laptop by doing a complete reinstall of OS X, which means that I have to go back and reload all of the goodies I’ve spent years finding.

One of those goodies I had forgotten about until today was my screensaver. Soundstream is just one of those things that makes my mac so much fun.

Rather than your typical screensaver with a blob moving around on a black background, this screensaver takes input from your microphone and reacts to the sounds. Go ahead and boop or bop or beep. It responds to everything and makes idle time just that much more fun. It’s like an iTunes visualizer for everything. I love it!

I never new, but the combination of Apple + Shift + 4 gives you a cursor that will take a snapshot of whatever you lasso and automatically saves it to the desktop. Nice. No need for the grab utility anymore. Thanks, evhead!

Update: On May 10, 2006 Apple posted information on this shortcut in the quick tip section of their website. Hooray!

If it wasn’t for the fact that Thunderbird felt so sluggish in OS X, I’d ditch Mail.app (hereby known as Mail) right now. I just spent hours and I mean hours trying to figure out what was wrong with the “Sent Messages” mailbox I store on my imap server. Messages for the last 7 days were not appearing and to top it off, messages from 2002 were appearing either as duplicates or as something other than what the subject line said. Obviously it was having some serious issues reading the file and I thought things were bad, bad, bad I tell you. Then I realized how if I coped “Sent Messages” to a new file called “Sent2″ and read it in Mail, all my messages appeared properly. To top it all off, Thunderbird was reading everything just fine! Why must Mail be so finicky?

The end problem was that my mailbox file (which I keep in mbox format) was a little too unorganized for Mail to properly read. Normal people probably will never have this issue but because I’ve migrated from multiple mail accounts over the years, messages from 2003 come before messages from 2001 and then 2006 is just clumped together here and there. It’s a mess but technically, it should not matter because a mail application just reads these items while sorting is done locally by the applicaiton — not on the server. Guess not in Mail’s case.

Fix: I loaded Thunderbird, moved all “Sent Messages” to a new folder called “Temp” then moved them back to “Sent Messages” in hopes that it would slightly reorder the contents of the file. It did, and now Mail is happy and I can continue using Mail. Sheesh.

And so my search begins. For the life of me, I cannot figure out how to prevent Terminal.app from beeping at me whenever I make an error. It’s seriously annoying, and I don’t want to find an alternative application, I just want to mute Terminal.app.

So I’ve been using a Powerbook G4 for the past week. So far, I’m digging the whole Apple thing. My favorite part about it has to be Garage Band. There are a lot of other neat things but it’s so awesome to be able to make music when I’m bored without picking up a guitar or anything. I’ve made two songs so far but I’m not willing to share (unless you’re really nice).

Jason and Stu are about to leave for the weekend. They are going up north to Connecticut. It’s gonna be so cold. I’ll be here, probably bored as hell if anyone wants to come keep me company!