Mac

Apple added a lot of functionality to OS X’s built-in email client Mail.app, some useful like the GTD inspired ability to highlight snippets inside an email and turn them into To Do list items. Many are utterly frivolous, however, such as the ability to use “stationery” on emails. There are some basic functions Mail.app does not do, however, and they should get their priorities straight:

• Change the default sort order from being “Date Received Ascending” to descending, so newer items are on top.
• When replying to an email in a folder, put the reply in the same folder instead of the catch-all Sent Items folder.
• Often you send an email to someone to ask them to perform a task for you, then a few days later you want to send them a reminder. The normal way to do this is to select the previous email and click “Reply”. Unfortunately this sends the follow-up email back to yourself rather than the recipient of the origina request. Mail.app should be smart about replies or forwards when the sender and/or recipient or the recipient of the original email is yourself.

I received my late 2013 black cylinder Mac Pro last Monday. I ordered the 6-core model with D700 GPUs, since the higher-core models can’t Turbo boost to the full 3.9GHz the 4-core and 6-core ones can, and thus for most poorly-parallelized apps will underperform. I had to get a Promise Pegasus J4 with a pair of Samsung 840 Evo SSDs to hold my files, as I need nearly 2TB to do so and that is not available on the internal SSD, and it would be a shame to hobble this machine with spinning rust.

Some notes I have not seen in the many reviews sloshing around the Internet this far:

• It is not actually black, rather a dark metallic gray, the color of hematite.
• The TOSlink digital optical out is now capable of 192kHZ/24 bit audio, whereas the old Mac Pro was limited to 96 kHz. Unfortunately, it is very hard to find POF cables and DACs that can reliably sustain that data rate.
• It is dead quiet compared to the old Mac Pro, and even my work iMac.

Software Update for system components on my home Mac Pro has not worked in a while, and I have had to resort to manually downloading and applying updates. The updates just wouldn’t appear in the Mac App Store app where they normally should.

After upgrading to Mavericks, I finally figured out why. Instead of silently ignoring the updates, Mavericks displays a not-so-helpful error message “NSURLErrorDomain Error -1012”. On inspecting network traffic from the App Store app, I noticed it connects using TLS 1.2 to swdist.apple.com, then aborts. It then hit me – in 2011, after Comodo was hacked, apparently by elements affiliated with the Iranian government, I revoked the trust setting on their root certificates. The certificate for swdist.apple.com is signed by Comodo, and thus Software Update could no longer establish a secure connection to Apple and that’s why it was failing.

This is not the only time a Certificate Authority was hacked. Dutch CA Diginotar, which included the Dutch government among its clients, suffered a breach, apparently also involving Iran. Microsoft, Mozilla, Google and Apple promptly revoked Diginotar’s root CA certificates, which quickly led to the company going out of business. I guess Comodo is larger (the EFF calls them “too big to fail”) and better politically connected (it helps when you have people like Phillip Hallam-Baker on the payroll), and managed to elude the same punishment it richly deserved.

Apple should really step up its game and ditch a security provider which demonstrated incompetence at its alleged core competency, and I filed Radar bug report 15328323 to urge them to do so. In the meantime, the way to fix the error message is to temporarily reinstate trust in the Comodo root CA.

Update (2015-10-29)

At some point in the last 2 years they switched from Comodo to Symantec (probably 2014-04-13 when the current certificate was issued). Unfortunately, Symantec has its own problems.

San Francisco sweeps streets twice a month in residential neighborhoods, and you will be fined if your car is parked on a street being swept. On my street, the schedule is the first and third Monday of each month, between 9am and 11am. I was trying to create reminders to myself in my calendar. Unfortunately, iCal does not have the ability to specify a recurring event with that definition.

No matter, Python to the rescue, the script below generates a year’s worth of reminders 12 hours before the event, in iCal vCalendar format. It does not correct for holidays, you will have to remove those yourself.

#!/usr/bin/python
"""Idora street sweeping calendar - 1st and 3rd Mondays of the month 9am-11am"""
import datetime
Monday = 0
one_day = datetime.timedelta(1)
today = datetime.date.today()
year = today.year
month = today.month

def output(day):
  print """
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTEND:%(end)s
SUMMARY:Idora street sweeping
DTSTART:%(start)s
BEGIN:VALARM
TRIGGER:-PT12H
ATTACH;VALUE=URI:Basso
ACTION:AUDIO
END:VALARM
END:VEVENT
""" % {
    'end': day.strftime('%Y%m%dT110000'),
    'start': day.strftime('%Y%m%dT090000')
    }

print """BEGIN:VCALENDAR
CALSCALE:GREGORIAN
VERSION:2.0"""

for i in range(12):
  day = datetime.date(year, month, 1)
  while day.weekday() != Monday:
    day += one_day
  output(day)
  output(day + 14 * one_day)
  month += 1
  if month > 12:
    month = 1
    year += 1

print "END:VCALENDAR"

This is a popup the iOS6 App Store shows me when I try searching for a Google Maps app.