MacHomeworld

Benjamin SchollnickNo Comments

MacHomeworld.
A site that is dedicated to playing the Homeworld series of games on the Macintosh.  The site includes the Mac port of the original Homeworld, as well as the Raider Retreat supplement.  Details on Cataclysm, and links to the HomeWorld 2 commercial port.
By the way, HW2 was extremely good…  A tad bit difficult at times, but well worth the time and effort…

Beyond the Red Line: BSG space Combat

Benjamin SchollnickNo Comments

The Beyond the Red Line demo is a stand-alone conversion of Freespace 2. A test run; an experimental release; you know, just a demo.

Is this all free and stuff?

Yes, and it\’s a two-part ordeal. Once upon a time, the Beyond the Red Line development team had a demo phase that established many things. Those established things evolved, and resulted in a focus to obtain what was once thwarted: a full game. The full Beyond the Red Line game is a separate entity in that it is being made by discriminating fans… for the discriminating fan.
Beyond the Red Line: Under Construction.

The CAPTCHA GOTCHA Dilemma

Benjamin SchollnickNo Comments

A recent wave of admiration for new 3D-flavoured CAPTCHAs got me thinking about CAPTCHAs. The whole model just doesn\’t hold up to technological or economic scrutiny. CAPTCHAs are doomed, because of three important \”CAPTCHA gotchas\”.
The CAPTCHA idea sounds simple: prevent bots from massively abusing a website (e.g. to get many email or social network accounts, and send spam), by giving users a test which is easy for humans, but impossible for computers. Then the account-opening process can\’t be automated, which slows down the spammers and other Net nuisances. But does such a test really exist, and will it save us from cybercrime?
via TechnoBabble Pro: CAPTCHA GOTCHA.

How to identify a remote device…

Benjamin SchollnickNo Comments

A relatively easy way to get a Mac address… On an unknown device without having physical access to the computer or device.  The only caveat is that the device must be on the local network, if it is not on the same subnet, you will not be able to get the MAC address of the device.
So, assume you have some unknown device hanging off your network. How you came to know about it irrelevant. Maybe you noticed some unusual protocols or traffic volume, maybe you suddenly lost connectivity to an entire segment. The next step is finding out what the device is. Is it a regular PC? Some sort of server? A switch, or perhaps a router?
Who made it?
One of the first – and easiest – things to find out about a device is who made it. All you need for this is the MAC address (or at least its IP address, for starters), which you can then check against the IEEE\’s Organization Unique Identifier listings at http://standards.ieee.org/regauth/oui/index.shtml. If you only have the IP address, you can easily obtain its MAC address. Provided you\’re currently on the same switched LAN and VLAN as your target device, all you need to do is create some traffic between yourself and your target. A simple ping will suffice. Then, retrieve the MAC address corresponding to its IP from your system\’s ARP cache.

C:\\> ping -n 1 192.168.10.16
Pinging 192.168.10.16 with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 192.168.10.16: bytes=32 time=4ms TTL=64
Ping statistics for 192.168.10.16:
Packets: Sent = 1, Received = 1, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 4ms, Maximum = 4ms, Average = 4ms
C:\\> arp -a 192.168.10.16
Interface: 192.168.4.2 — 0x2
Internet Address      Physical Address      Type
192.168.10.16         00-0c-41-45-a9-d6     dynamic
For a Macintosh, the ARP command would be:     arp 192.168.10.16   (no -a flag)
Now head over to http://standards.ieee.org/regauth/oui/index.shtml. The first three segments of the mac address identify the hardware manufacturers identity…  For example, 00-30-48 is manufactured by Sun Micro Computer…  The 00-0c-41 is made by \”Cisco-Linksys\”.  If the Mac address starts with \”00-50\”, it is an IAB, otherwise it is an OUI.
What is an OUI?  It is an Organization Unique Identifier, in otherwords, it identifies what manufacturer made the product.  An IAB, is similar but has a small block for unique IDs…
Once you have the manufacturer, it should be easier to be able to identify the mysterious hardware….

The Necessity of Defragmentation with Mac OS X?

Benjamin SchollnickNo Comments

Do you really need to defragment your hard drive with modern versions of Mac OS X (eg. 10.4 / 10.5)?
The answer really, in most cases, is no.  A simple reboot or logout / login may solve the problem with very little effort.  Apple has even written a tech note, specifically on this topic, see Tech Note # HT1375.
In summary, if you have a reasonable amount of free space on your hard drives, often Mac OS X\’s efforts are enough to prevent fragmentation.  But here are a few tips based off that Tech Note:

  1. Always format your drives as Mac OS Extended (HFS Plus), if you do not need to share data with non-Macintosh systems.  HFS Plus attempts to avoid reusing space from deleted files, which helps reduce the amount of fragmentation.
  2. If you are running MOSX 10.2 or greater, the OS defaults to using delayed allocation, which also assists by taking groups of small allocations and writing them to a single large allocation in a empty section of the drive.
  3. MOSX 10.3 (Panther) and higher, use \”Hot File Adaptive Clustering\” to automatically defragment files that constantly being appended to.
  4. MOSX aggressively caches both hard drive reading (read-ahead) and writing (write-behind) which means that minor fragmentation has very little apparent effect on system performance.
  5. Do not use File vault if you are manipulating large files in your encrypted home folder.  This includes your desktop!!! Instead save the large files outside of your home directory….
  6. Try to keep at least 15% of your hard drive space free.  For a 300 gigabyte hard drive that would work out to be 45 Gb free minimum.  This allows the OS to perform any clean up tasks it needs to, and gives it room to be able to automatically defragment files as it encounters them…

This does not mean that MOSX can\’t get into a state where the drive is fragmented…  So defragmentation tools can still help, but they may also hinder.  MOSX consists of a tremendous number of Small to medium size files, approx 72,000+ files, and defragmenting many of those rarely access files will take quite a bit of time for very little gain.
Try either Logging Out and Logging back in, or rebooting.  Often slow system performance is caused by an application that has a memory leak, and Logging Out/In or rebooting will force the majority of that memory to be released back to the OS.