The Design and Implementation of laffer1

 I had a problem with a server at work recently.  I used to use a hint from the macosxhints site to reverse ssh into my home mac.  However, I can't do that anymore because my mac is behind NAT.  What I needed was a way to connect to the mac at work which was behind a firewall (but not nat).  I had another machine running FreeBSD with SSH open.  

Solution:

Connect to machine one

ssh -C -4 -L 5901:127.0.0.1:5900 remotehostyouwant  Connect to work mac: 
ssh -C -4 -L 5900:127.0.0.1:5900 macatwork   

I just setup foolishgames.org to be a pointer to my .mac site. It should be much easier to get to.

I realized I can't put off updating mediawiki any longer at work.  I'm in the process now.  It's taking forever to install all the dependancies for the new version.  I'm going from like 1.9.3 to 1.12 or something like that.  Ugh I hate complex webapps.  

The newer portupgrade versions suck.  portversion doesn't report the version you have installed currently.  I hate that.  It was handy to check how out of date freebsd ports were and for comparison with mports.  It make look simple now, but it's not useful.  I don't get toning down command line tools.  Stupid people won't use them anyway.  

I still need to check the os x boxes for updates, although after last time i'm favoring leaving them unless there is a big patch.  I'd rather be there when I do it.  This remote stuff is for the birds. 

Pystar lost their case with Apple regarding the sale of Mac clones.  The EULA was upheld in court.  Most people assume EULAs would not hold up in court.  You can't read them before purchase, and many including Pystar assumed that first sale doctrine would protect them.  This legal victory is a new era in software distribution because the software industry has been given the green light to write very nasty EULAs. 

I did not agree with Pystar selling Macs.  I had hoped they would previal on the EULA aspect of the case as it would have been better for consumers.

So I finally got a call from the Apple store yesterday to pick up my iMac.  I was told 5-7 days if they had to order a hard drive.  I was expecting them to replace the hard drive.  I get there, and they have not replaced the hard drive.  They used a third party program to partition the disk and some how got 10.5 on it.  They claimed it was good to go.   I was a bit skeptical because I know how to work on a Mac myself and if it was indeed just a simply formatting problem I would have felt very stupid.  At 75 dollars, I felt a bit ripped off anyway.  I mean, they just formatted the drive and put 10.5 on it.  Why did it take 6 days to do that?  

I brought the iMac home.  It did boot into 10.5.8 and run through the setup wizard.  I was a bit annoyed already because I told the guy I had snow leopard.  My time machine backup is for snow leopard!  I noticed the drive seemed slow, but it did get on the internet and things appeared to work.  I rebooted onto snow leopard media to install snow leopard.  It failed.  I then tried to reboot and format the drive.  That failed with an IO error!  I got a bit pissed and did a format while zeroing the drive and went to bed.  That actually completed.  I started the 10.6 install and it failed after about 2 minutes.  It's obvious that my iMac is not functioning correctly.  I would assume it was a compatibility problem with 10.6 except that it worked fine since release day and the apple store employee booted 10.6 on it at the store in front of me the day I brought it in.  So either there is a massive bug in snow leopard or my hard drive is failing.  I'm assuming the latter.  

Thus apple ripped me off for 75 bucks and I'll have to rip the damn thing apart myself which I wanted to avoid.  Lesson learned: Apple store can't fix macs.  I just wonder what totally clueless people do with these situations.  I lost a week of time with my iMac and i have to go look for suction cups and torx screwdrivers today plus buy a hard drive.  I'm not happy.  

Of course we bought a new mac at the store yesterday for caryn.  She's upgrading her laptop to a new MBP.  I feel annoyed that we gave them a sale.   

The first wild office macro virus for Mac OS X is out.

http://thehackernews.com/2017/02/mac-osx-macro-malware.html