The BugBlog

What's In the latest iTunes?

According to Apple, iTunes 9.0.2 adds support for Apple TV software  3.0,  and improves support for accessibility. There are also some cosmetic changes. Oh, yeah, one other thing too. It breaks the ability of the Palm Pre to sync with iTunes. PC Magazine covers a little bit of the battle.

Mozilla Busy with Firefox Patches

The recently released Mozilla Firefox 3.5.4 patched 11 bugs, five of which were critical. This includes fixes to both the browser engine and the Javascript engine, third-party media library fixes, and other assorted bugs. Firefox users should be able to get the update via their automatic update function, or you can get it here.

It Was A Bug That Caused Worldwide Lonliness

If you suddenly felt cut off and alone from the rest of humanity this morning, it was because of a bug. In this case, it was a bug that caused Twitter to quit updating sometime this morning. According to Twitter, it was "a bug triggered by an edge case in one of the core services that powers Twitter." They say it is fixed, so Twitter should be back to its rock-solid, always on performance.

By the way, if any FTC informants are reading this, note that I receive for free something of value from Twitter - as does everybody else. That freebie, of course, is Twitter itself.

A Question for the FTC

The FTC wants to regulate bloggers - to curb the abuse of payola and other things. I just have one question for the FTC-

Where's all my payola been all these years?

Wondering about Windows 7 Compatibility?

If you've got 60 minutes to spare, and Silverlight installed on your computer (actually, I have neither) you can find out about application compatibility with Windows 7 by watching this video over at Microsoft TechNet.

Update Quiets a Noisy SuperDrive

If you have a 20 or 24 inch iMac, or a Mac Mini with a SuperDrive, you may notice that the drive is somewhat noisy during startup, or when you wake the computer. Apple has a Firmware Update 3 that's supposed to quiet things down. Before getting this update, there are a couple of other EFI Firmware updates you need to install first. Apple has all the details here.

Faking Out Facebook

Security researchers at AVG have found spyware attacks that seem to be coming from Facebook. They found a number of Facebook accounts that all have the same profile picture, but different names, that all link to malware. Suspicion is that hackers have found ways around Facebook's captcha function on new accounts, allowing them to set up many different fake Facebook pages. Read more about it here.

Snow Leopard and Parallels

If you are using Nova Developments Parallels on Mac OS X, and you are thinking about upgrading to Snow Leopard, note that you have to be using Parallels 4. Earlier versions are incompatible. If you are a registered user of the old version, you may have gotten an upgrade offer for Parallels via email - at least I did. This will be added $40 to the cost of uploading to Snow Leopard.

Using MobileMe with Windows

If you are trying to sync Apple MobileMe with Windows, be aware of some limitations. First, contact syncing will only work with Outlook 2003 and 2007, Outlook Express (Win XP), and Windows Contacts (Vista). You can only sync calendars that are in Outlook 2003 and 2007, and bookmarks can only be synced with Safari and Internet Explorer. (Sort of get the feeling that Apple wants to exclude Mozilla?) You also need the most up-to-date version of iTunes. See more troubleshooting help at Apple.

Even the Fail Whale Has Failed

It appears that Twitter has been down for awhile. It appears to be a more serious crash than normal, because you aren't even seeing the "Fail Whale", you are just getting a 503 error, which is the error code for "Service Unavailable"