Archive for June, 2006
QXL disregard their own privacy policy
On the 16th of June an email appeared in my inbox with the subject “Love football, gambling and DVDs?”. Strange, the gMail spam filter normally does a sterling job of blocking these.
Dear entertainment lover, It’s not long now until the first England game, and everyone’s talking about football and making bets. Well we at ScreenSelect.co.uk are no different but we also realise that there’s plenty of time between games for other forms of entertainment. “
A quick scan showed it was for DVD rentals from a company called ScreenSelect but claimed;
You have been sent this email as you have previously registered at QXL.com. If you do not wish to receive QXL.com emails anymore please click here. To view our Privacy Policy click here.”
That’s strange, I clearly remembered unchecking these boxes so I shouldn’t get them. I logged back and in lo and behold both check-boxes to accept own mailings and third-parties were unchecked…
I fired off an email to enquiries@qxl.com about this discrepancy and got the following response;
Thank you for your email and we welcome your enquiry.
We have now removed you from all QXL mailing lists as requested.
Should you have any further questions please do not hesitate to contact us.
Kind Regards
Stuart
Which of course totally fails to address my question as to why they are ignoring their own privacy and mailing policies. I rephrased and resent my previous email – after all I shouldn’t hesitate to contact them.
That was on June 17th and I’ve yet to receive a response.
[)amien
Keeping an eye on the MacBook/Pro temperature
As most people know these things run quite warm but at last two applications are available for getting hold of those elusive CPU temperature figures.
When in Mac OS X grab a copy of the free CoreDuoTemp.
In Windows the excellent (but not free) Everest 3.0 will reveal each core’s temperature individually as well as more detail about your machine than you ever cared to know.
[)amien
MacBook Pro the ultimate developer machine?
I’ve been using my MacBook Pro now for about a month and think it’s the ultimate developer machine. You really are spoilt for choice and everything you might want is at your fingertips.
Mac OS X + Cocoa
Every Mac ships with the XCode developer tool set. This gives you the native preferred Mac development platform called Cocoa which uses Objective-C at it’s core. The actual tools are based around the GCC 4 compiler and GDB debugger with a rather nice XCode IDE and Interface Builder GUI designer from it’s NextStep origins.
Out of the box these developer tools include compiling for both Intel and cross-compiling for PowerPC and support C, C++, Objective-C and Java.
Windows + Visual Studio / .NET
Windows is at your fingertips either via Apple’s BootCamp dual-boot solution or the virtualisation through Parallels Workstation 2.1 for OS X or VMware’s forthcoming MacIntel solution. Both virtualisation products are helped by Intel’s Core chips having hardware virtualisation features.
This gives you the abilitity to install whatever Windows developer tools you want such as the heavyweight Visual Studio 2005 or freebie Visual Studio 2005 Express C# Edition.
Linux + GCC
While I’m not a fan of Linux these individuals have a live boot Linux CD for the MacBook or you can run Linux under Windows or OS X using your favourite virtual machine.
Mono’s .NET
The Mono project support many platforms but their recommended IDE, MonoDevelop, is still quite far off being able to run on Windows. Either way you can test your app on Windows, Mac OS X or Linux.
Mac OS X + *nix command-line
It’s no secret that OS X is built on various BSD technologies and Apple include a bunch of the developer tools. For those tools that are missing grab Fink which will let you add everything important that’s missing as well as providing newer updated versions of the tools Apple include.
If what you’re looking for isn’t covered by Fink as default, try switching to the unstable packages. If that fails then try downloading the tarball then ./configure and make.
Mac OS X + X11
Apple provide an X11 implementation as an optional installation with appropriate library headers. Another base covered.
Web development with *AMP
OS X ships with Apache installed as default and you can add the MySQL and PHP elements if you so desire. Then you can choose between LAMP or MacAMP ;-)
Web testing
For testing web applications the Mac has you spoilt for choice.
On OS X you can test in Safari to exert your app against the KHTML+WebKit engine, Firefox or Camino to test compatibility with the Gecko engine, IE for Mac or Opera’s Macintosh offering to name but a few.
Switch to Windows and you’ll have your IE6/IE7 engines at your fingertips as well as checking with the Windows versions of Opera and Firefox.
For running stress or penetration testing Mac OS X means you can get your hands on Nessus, NMap, Snort, Hydra and other *nix based tools.
[)amien
Firefox armed & primed
I’ve suggested many extensions and add-ons for Firefox over the last few months.
Here’s what my current install looks like – click to drill through to Flickr where you can hover over the various areas to see what’s-what.
[)amien