Macking 115

Authentium Anti-Virus
A couple of months ago I mentioned the existence of this alternative to Norton Anti-Virus. I contacted the company to get an evaluation copy and they sent it to me. I have been using it for almost a month now and I am pretty happy with it, but with a caveat or two.
It finds viruses. No question. Since I get a lot of spam, some of those include Windows viruses which, as always, land in my Incoming folder looking lost and confused and wondering just where they are.
Authentium AV can be set to automatically scan and delete viruses on sight. I don't recommend that, however, because it might delete something you would want to keep, like an infected Word file or similar object.
The 5-part program puts a symbol in the menubar that gives you control over the rest of the applications. You can have it auto-scan, or simply be off and not run until you tell it to. I recommend leaving it off and running manual scans, because it drives the processor above 95% busy while it's working. This shouldn't matter on desktops, but it will eat your laptop battery quickly. Set StatusBar as a login (startup) item but go to Preferences and turn off automatic scanning.
I set mine to warn me when it finds a virus but do nothing with it. It worked just fine since I installed it, but the Updater application, which should get new virus updates from Authentium, crashes after I type in my password. I was on a conference call with the owner of the company and his chief engineer (ah, the power of the press!) and we worked on solving this issue. I sent him the crashlogs and also discussed the battery drain issue. They liked my suggestion that the menu contain an option "Battery Mode" that would disable the scanning while using the battery.
The program is $50 and available at their site. Authentium has arranged a deal with Comcast to make their software available free to all Comcast subscribers. So far the deal is for Windows victims only, for obvious reasons, but there will be discussions on having Comcast hand out the Mac version as well. Since there are no Mac OSX viruses yet, they have time for negotiation. Remember that this product is available for every currently available OS including ClearSwift, SeaChange, Novell, Solaris and, of course, Linux, FreeBSD and the top two.

Dead Mac Month
What a news-free month it has been in the Mac universe. Deadline for this column is the first of the month, so basically all we are talking about is December, when lots of Macs were sold for Xmas, and lots more iPods.
Only news of note is the 10.3.7 update, which has been causing a lot of grief to a handful of people, but not enough to motivate Apple to pull it and reissue a fixed version later. My own experience with it was a little bit of a mess; it took a number of restarts, fixing of permissions (which you should always do after any update) and reinstalling some of my favorite obscure 3rd-party patches and add-ons, most of which I have written about in past issues.
Given that, I have updated about half of my clients with 10.3.7, mostly the ones who are doing a fresh install or a first-time install of OSX. Figure since they don't have any ongoing issues to deal with, might as well as start them off right.
I have held back on telling everyone to go ahead and install it, just as I have held back on warning against it. There are problems, but not tons of them. I guess I have to state at this point that if you are at 10.3.6, do the update as it fixes important bugs in that version. If you are at 10.3.5, which was solid and stable, stay there for now. If you went ahead and installed the update and have had no problems, breathe a sigh of relief and go open Disk Utility and run Repair Permissions, just because.

The iCheap Mac
ThinkSecret, Macintouch, and other Mac sites have been calling on Apple for years to release a new model, a modern equivalent of the Quadra 605, a tiny pizza-box model that is simple and economical. They figure $499 is a good price point. It would have no monitor but accept either VGA or DVI displays, have the usual collection of ports, and basically be an iBook in a desktop case. This is not an unreasonable desire, because the iBook is pretty cheap in its basic form, with the most expensive part being the TFT display and the fact that the case and guts must be hardened to survive normal laptop abuse.
Using that existing motherboard in a bigger case, one able to accept industry-standard CD-ROM drives and 3.5" IDE hard drives, would keep the cost low. There is a large untapped market for people who want such a box to turn into an audio and video server for their home entertainment systems, or a second cheap Mac for the sprogs that can be plugged into a $79 CRT monitor they may already have, or for educational use, and, dare we hope, office use in corporations that have grown weary of the daily battle against spyware, crackers, worms and viruses in their Windows world.
The rumors are probably true, but due to the fact that Macworld doesn't happen until January 11, I have no actual information for you at all. Keep your eye on the usual web sites, especially ThinkSecret.com which broke the story, and cross your fingers. (See Macking 116 for my take on the new Mac Mini.)

Letter: Apple's Presence at Oracle Open World
Wade Anderson writes, "While not as prominent as compared to the likes of Dell and HP's CEOs that carried keynote speeches, Apple is still a notable presence at Oracle Open World. This conference at San Francisco's Moscone Center has attracted 25,000 attendees hungry for the latest in database and server technology. Apple doesn't list Open World in their "hot news" section of events they are a part of, but they do in fact have a booth on a large and popular tradeshow floor and are a conference sponsor. The tradeshow booth is modest, but includes several XServes, iMac G5s, and PowerMacs running Oracle software. Several of the tradeshow vendors are giving away iPod Mini's in various drawings throughout the week, demonstrating the device's impact on popular culture. Four years ago at a prior Oracle conference I attended, Palm Pilots were the favorite giveaway of the day.
"Apple's hardware also has a presence. A large bank of G5 iMacs are popular with users accessing the web, conference schedules and providing session feedback. Apple is not absent from the technology sessions either Ð with topics such as using Oracle 10G on Mac OS X and grid computing Ð a hot topic at this year's conference.
"With the addition of favorable tests Oracle has performed with Apple's server technology, it is nice to see them also participating in the important space of a backbone for database and application technology key to business.
"Finally, I was pleased to find an Apple Store 10% off coupon that was presented to all 25,000 Oracle Open World attendees in their welcome packet. This grants attendees a nice discount at the Apple Store near Moscone Center. A nice gift that has not gone unnoticed - I visited the San Francisco store and saw several Apps World attendees purchasing products."

Record On Your iPod
A hacker site, Hack A Day tells you what you need to do to make your iPod into a high quality recorder. Apple has crippled the stock 'Pod so you have to add a Belken recorder that can only record at 8KHz. Follow the tricks on this site to undo Apple's restrictions.

Call Amazon
Need to talk to a human at Amazon to resolve a problem? They don't want you to. The phone number is not on their site anywhere. So here it is: (800) 201-7575 and Fax: (206) 266-2950. Lots of useful numbers like this are on a government web site. This info was in a NYTimes article forwarded to me by a friend. Love the net, just love it.

Register Immediately
A long time ago I wrote in a column that a way of slightly extending the length of the Apple warranty is to delay registering until the first time you need to talk to their help line. That is no longer a good idea.
While it may still work, the AppleCare extended warranty is based on when the unit was shipped, not when you first opened the box. This means that if you put off buying AppleCare and get too close to the end of the year, they may not honor the warranty or allow you to buy the extension. So be sure to get AppleCare within the first three months, and you might as well register it as soon as you set it up.

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.)