I recently acquired a Mac PowerBook G4 for software development and I have to report that I’m really enjoying the system. As a software developer, I’ve been pleased to have a real development environment — one that works like Un*x — real make files, a full set of typical Un*x tools, and forward slashes. It’s also pleasant to be able to buy a computer system where I don’t have to pay separately for the development environment. It’s all free — just download from the Apple website.

Apple supplies an integrated development environment called Project Builder which is an adequate editor and visual debugger. But underneath that is gcc, so most of what you shake out on a Mac should port well to any other Un*x or Linux system.

My biggest disappointment in the system is the display. I decided to get the 15-inch model. The 17-inch was just too ugly and large to seriously consider carrying around and the 12-inch just didn’t have the resolution. The 15-inch display, while very bright and pleasant looking, is only 1280 x 854. So that means that the display on the Mac is less than that of my IBM ThinkPad, whose 14-inch display has a resolution of 1400 x 1050. I’m also not that happy with the keyboard, which feels a little mushy and small compared to the ThinkPad. But that’s understandable — no one makes keyboards as good as IBM does.

Operationally, I’ve toned down some of the cutesy stuff like bouncing icons and the like. I’m having trouble with the touchpad mouse, but that’s just because I’m used to the IBM eraser cap mouse. I guess I also miss the right mouse button. The PowerBook ships with a single button mouse, traditional for Apple, but “control-mouse click” is usually mapped to the right mouse button on other external pointing devices like the Logitech trackball I use when I’m at my desk.

I’ve been using Safari instead of Internet Explorer and the built-in Mail program. Both work well and in some ways Safari is a better browser than IE. However, I have found a couple of web sites where it fails, most notably with a firewall product that I use.

One of my colleagues made a comparison of Apple to Bang and Olafsen which is pretty fair. Apple’s emphasis on cool design sometimes overtakes the real needs of a machine like this. For example, there is enough real estate in this laptop to put more keys on the keyboard. The display could have a higher resolution. There could be a second mouse button. But that’s not typical Apple — they’d rather have perfectly clean lines instead of more functionality.

But overall, I’m pretty happy with this. There’s nothing like opening up a terminal window and getting a real command shell, not that piece of garbage that opens up on Windows. There’s a good chance that this system will become my primary laptop.

The Washington Post posted this story a few days ago regarding the FTC’s Do Not Call web site. The most amusing part of the article references a comment I made in a previous post about the lack of security in the process, as anyone could conceivably register or unregister a phone number, even if it wasn’t theirs.

The article contains the following quote:

After looking over the registration site online, Aswath Rao thought its verification and unregistration processes could pose problems. "It looks like one can verify the status of the registration of any telephone number," the Holmdel, N.J., resident wrote. "Worse, any telephone number can be maliciously unregistered."David Torok, the Federal Trade Commission's director of the Do Not Call Registry, says Rao is right, but he doesn't anticipate a big problem.

Now, this seems to be the silliest thing I’ve ever heard of. A limit on the number of times one can use an e-mail address? What happens when I legitimately use my e-mail address too many times? Who corrects that? Even funnier is the fact that Torok seems to not be aware how spammers use millions of e-mail addresses to avoid spam filters. Does he not believe that anyone can do exactly the same thing and create dozens of e-mail addresses on the fly?

It was suggested to me that an amusing experiment would be to unregister a particular exchange to prove the point. That’s a mere 10000 phone numbers and it would be almost trivial to do in Perl. The web site uses a simple URL scheme to post the phone numbers that you want on or off the list. In sendmail, it’s easy to redirect the email from a single domain (“@yourdomain.com”) to a single e-mail address, so generating 10000 e-mail addresses would be no problem. You’d get 10000 e-mails in, each with a URL to validate — easy to collect and process using a trivial piece of POP3 client software. The messages are in text, so processing the message would be similarly easy.

The fact is that this “feel good” service isn’t really going to be that useful. Hackers outside the country will be hired to destroy this service considering how easy it is. Since they will be off-shore, prosecuting them will be difficult at best. The FTC feels so good about this service that they are going to try to set up the same thing with spam. Again, more silliness — spam is even easier to take outside the US. Just think — these are your tax dollars at work.

The FTC’s Do Not Call list has to be one of the silliest exercises that I’ve seen in a long time. This feel good service allows you to register all of your phone numbers (both landlines and cell phones) that you want removed from the telemarketing call lists. I registered the five phone numbers that I possess and walked away with several observations.

First, there’s no security on the process. Anyone can conceivably register a phone number on the list, whether it’s yours or not. You are asked for an e-mail address for confirmation, but there’s no correlation between e-mail addresses and phone numbers anywhere. Where’s the harm here, you ask? After all, we’re talking about the most evil of problems — telemarketing. Well, it turns out that anyone can just unregister a phone number also. It’s trivial to obtain an anonymous e-mail address through Yahoo or HotMail. If I want you back on my list, I’ll just unregister you and then call you. There’s no protection. It would be trivial to write a program that registered every phone number and equally trivial to unregister them.

Second, this list of exclusions is equally silly. The following companies are exempt from the program —

• long-distance phone companies 
• airlines
• banks and credit unions; and
• the business of insurance, to the extent that it is regulated by state law.

Frankly I get more calls from long distance companies and banks offering credit cards than I do from anyone else. I feel bad for the local carpet cleaner who calls once a year because that’s who’s going to have to check the list, not the big banks who call incessently.

I think there’ll be a small, offshore company with a couple of hackers that undoes all of this for the banks. They can afford it and it’d be hard to beat until the phone companies themselves actually get involved in the verification process. Of course, they won’t because they are exempt and this is a huge source of revenue for them.

Honestly, if you want to beat the telemarketers you really have two options — telezapping and call intercepting. I used a telezapper for about two years and it significantly cut down the number of telemarketing calls I got. I still had to answer the phone, but most of the time the caller had already disconnected. I just recently got call intercept, which was offered through my Verizon service. That turned out to be a great option — no one gets through without a valid caller id. If you don’t have a valid caller ID, you need to announce yourself, which the telemarketers don’t do. Even if they do, you have the option of pressing a button telling them not to call again. This works.