Some Sage Advice

More and more companies are using Windows servers and SMB shares in a networked environment. This poses a few challenges for Macs. One of the biggest problems is with older, T1 fonts (Postscript). When these fonts are moved from Appletalk shares to SMB shares, they can lose their resource fork and become unusable. They will appear on an SMB share on a Mac as a Unix Executable File with a file size of 0KB.

Here are a few workarounds to this problem.

1. If a font is copied from a Mac to a share via AFP, you can only read it using AFP. If you then mount the share as SMB, the font is corrupted.
2. If a font is copied from a Mac to a share via SMB, you CAN read it using SMB! It is not corrupted.
3. If a font is converted from T1 to OTF, it works either way since Open Type fonts don’t use a resource fork.
4. The problem occurs with existing files on Mac shares. If the Mac share is simply converted or mounted as SMB, the fonts get corrupted. However, it appears that if a Mac mounts the share as SMB and copies the files, they are not corrupted. What the Mac does is copy the data fork as a regular, visible file, and the resource fork as a hidden file. This maintains the integrity of the font. The danger is that Windows users with “Show All Files” turned on, can see the invisible resource forks. If they are deleted then the font is damaged.
5. If the fonts are converted to OTF, then this is a non-issue as OT fonts don’t have a separate data and resource fork. One easy way to convert all T1 fonts to OTF is to use a $99 program called FontXChange. It is fast and can convert and repair fonts.

I know you like lots of fonts, so here is a great site with them!

Mike’s Sketch Pad

There are some Mac fonts and even more Windows fonts. Mac users can use some Windows fonts, otherwise you will need to convert them.

Seems there is a hardware or firmware problem with the new MacBook Pro with the 7200 rpm Seagate drives. Users with the 500GB drives are noticing random occurrences of a clicking sound, then an audible beep, followed by a complete system freeze for several seconds. This happens randomly and doesn’t appear to be related to system load or any activity.

Apple engineers are aware of the problem and a fix should be forthcoming.

You can add your comments to the Apple Discussion forum. As of now there are 88 PAGES of comments! Seems like a big issue!

Apple has released a security patch (3.0.1) for the iPhone OS to fix the recently discovered threats of an SMS (text message, in everyday terms) attack. This vulnerability allows someone to send you a blank text message with specific code that allows them to totally take control of your iPhone. With an unpatched iPhone, a hacker could take control of your phone and use it to make calls, send text messages, and totally wipe out your phone.

From the Apple knowledge base article:

“Impact: Receiving a maliciously crafted SMS message may lead to an unexpected service interruption or arbitrary code execution

Description: A memory corruption issue exists in the decoding of SMS messages. Receiving a maliciously crafted SMS message may lead to an unexpected service interruption or arbitrary code execution. This update addresses the issue through improved error handling. Credit to Charlie Miller of Independent Security Evaluators, and Collin Mulliner of Technical University Berlin for reporting this issue.”

To get the update, plug in your phone to your computer and launch iTunes to automatically download and install the update.

Note that this update is only for the iPhone; the iPod Touch is unaffected since it can’t receive text messages.