Macking 113

No Longer Alone
We've been waiting for it, bragging about the lack of it, and now Mackers have their very own exploit. It's a serious weakness with the potential to do damage, just like all the Windows victims have had for years. It's called Opener, and is based on a series of scripts discussed on the Macintosh Underground Forum early this year. See these articles, (1) and (2) or read this summary.
Nothing to get hysterical about yet so don't worry, but we can all lose that smug, satisfied smile. To get this, someone has to have physical access to your machine and deliberately plant it. If you have been running OSX without a login password up to now, you should open your Accounts preference pane and give yourself one. Don't forget to fill in the password hint in case you forget to write it down and memorize it.

Another Virus Fighter
Finally, an alternative to Norton Anti-Virus that doesn't require corporate purchase orders: Authentium ESP is only $50 and is available for download or CD purchase. It works with OSX 10.2.8 or later. I have not used it myself but when I buy a new virus program I will go for this.
You know they are serious because they make it not only for Mac and Windows, but also for Linux, FreeBSD, ClearSwift, Novell, SeaChange and Solaris.

The Activity Monitor
This Apple-supplied utility, also known as the Process Monitor under 10.2.x, is one of the more important and useful utilities that most people never even open, let alone use with regularity. This month I want to show you why it's important to every PowerBook user, especially those who avoid all UNIX utilities like diseased meat.

The purpose of the program is to show you exactly what your Mac is doing with all available processes, which include memory, processor time, hard disk space and others. Why it's important is that there are certain processes that can be initiated by poorly designed Web pages that will make the processor run at 100% of capacity, even when the page is minimized to the Dock or simply left in the background.
When this happens, even closing the page won't fix things. Your processor will be running full tilt and your battery life will be less than 25% of normal and you won't know why. Activity Monitor will tell you why and let you do something about it.
To assist the Activity Monitor, you need to download and install a simple add-on called "ceepeeyou," a tiny program that puts a percentage number in your menubar, that shows you at any given second, how much of your processor is active and how much isn't. Normal use, such as I am doing now, should take between 10 and 16%. I have open Eudora, in which I am writing the first draft of this column (and all my open mailboxes), Safari, which has no open windows, InDesign, Spamfire and AppleWorks, which have no open windows, Suitcase and Now Contact, which are open but made invisible, and little applications Temperature Monitor and Clock.
Second by second, ceepeeyou updates with numbers 10%, 7%, 11%, 30%, 18%, etc. The spikes occur because things are happening all the time. This is normal. If the number were to leap to 96% to 100% and stay there, that would be a red flag that something is going on that shouldn't. Right now I have the Activity Monitor open, and it's taking up the most processor usage at about 8%. There are about three dozen process going on at all times, some of which are just sitting there not taking up any processor time because they are not being called. You don't have to care about most of them, which include names like cron, kextd, ioupsd, Host Relauncher, kernel_task and others.
Let's say you visit a Web page with a lot of Java embedded, which causes animated banners, icons, sub-windows and other interactive processes. Your percentage use in ceepeeyou should hit over 55% and jump between there and 90%. Finish with the web page and close the window and numbers should drop back down.
When you are using processor-intensive programs like Photoshop applying a filter, or just launching or opening up a document, the number jumps as well. But it always drops.
When it doesn't, even after you close a web page, and quit all of your unused programs, that means a process has gotten stuck. Normally the cure is to restart your Mac, which clears out the problem and your battery usage goes back to normal. But Activity Monitor lets you see exactly where the problem is and get rid of it without starting.
One of the columns in Activity Monitor is Process Name. This shows the name of all the programs running, and all the internal system processes that you normally don't know or care about. Look for one called (null). Yes, it will be in parentheses. This is a bad process. It should not be running and it is the reason why the machine is heating up, draining the battery and running at 100%.
Click on the process in the list and then click on the Quit Process button. You will get a dialog that asks you if you want to Quit, Force Quit or Cancel. Since this is an aberrant process, quitting won't work. Choose Force Quit. The item will disappear from the list and your CPU use percentage will return to normal. You can continue what you are doing and you won't have to restart.
I must have made use of this utility for this purpose a dozen times since finding out about it several months ago. Without ceepeeyou I wouldn't have even known there was a problem except my battery was running out too quickly.
Find Activity Monitor (or Process Monitor) in your Utilities folder, and download a copy of ceepeeyou from the Unsanity web site. This is the company that makes WindowShadeX and a host of other useful shareware and free utilities. I also use their ClearDock, which makes the white shading behind Dock icons completely transparent; SafariNoTimeout, which makes Safari work better on overloaded web sites; FruitMenu, which adds extra features to the Apple menu; and Xounds, which brings back Appearance sounds similar to those under OS9. Good company and products. WindowShadeX has a number of new features I really enjoy, especially Minimize In Place, which shrinks windows to the size of icons and lets you drag them to anyplace convenient.

iPod Download patch
Have you been using "iPod Download" to move files from your iPod to your Mac? Apple squashed it in its usual way: instead of contacting the author to discuss the issue, they simply ordered his ISP to do the dirty work or they would get sued. So the ISP had to tell the author to remove the file. More information here.
However, if you got your hands on this already and find out that it has been disabled with the iTunes 4.7 update, there is a simple hack to fix it. The details are here and quite clear thanks to a French site.
AppleLegal will never learn. Watch for a future hack to bring the same functionality as the one they destroyed, and look for Apple to try to destroy it again.

No Microsoft products were used in the production of this column.

email mp at moonmac dot com. (I took out the mailto link because that's how the spammers find me.)