the Spiggott » Apple

WWDC Sold Out

Scott Piggott — Fri, 07 May 2010 04:14:22 +0000

Apple’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference sells out for the third straight year in a record-breaking eight days. Not a good sign for Flash.

Fixing SNMP in Mac OS X Server 10.5.7

Scott Piggott — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 02:39:48 +0000

I monitor my network with PRTG Network Monitor. After recently upgrading our Xserve from 10.5.4 to 10.5.7 (server), its status changed in PRTG to “in alarm” and was unable to connect via SNMP to collect any data. It turns out that the default configuration of the SNMP agent changed with the 10.5.7 upgrade, tightening access restrictions for the community string “public”. The fix is fairly simple. Edit line 97 of /etc/snmp/snmpd.conf and restart the SNMP daemon to reload the config file.

The default SNMP configuration in 10.5.7 and above limits unauthenticated access to the system contact info as shown in lines 96 and 97 of /etc/snmp/snmpd.conf:

# We limit unauthenticated requesters to the system contact info rocommunity public default .1.3.6.1.2.1.1.4

To allow access to MIB-2 info only, edit line 97 as follows:

rocommunity public default .1.3.6.1.2.1

To allow unlimited access, edit line 97 as follows:

rocommunity public

Then restart SNMP:

sudo killall -c snmpd -HUP

NOTE: The new default configuration of SNMP in 10.5.7 is the same in Snow Leopard.

In-Depth Review of Snow Leopard

Scott Piggott — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 15:06:12 +0000

John Siracusa has posted an exhaustive review of Apple’s latest OS release, Snow Leopard. Great read if you really want to learn why you need to upgrade.

WWDC Sold Out!

Scott Piggott — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 01:17:56 +0000

For the second time in history (and second year in a row), Apple’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference has sold out. This seems to support my theory that WWDC is “the” Mac conference – eclipsing the once-mighty MacWorld Expo.

Apple Reports $1.21 Billion Profit for Q2 2009

Scott Piggott — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 21:40:14 +0000

“We are extremely pleased to report the best non-holiday quarter revenue and earnings in our history,” said Peter Oppenheimer, Apple’s CFO, in announcing the company’s March quarter financial results. In its fiscal 2009 second quarter, Apple posted revenue of $8.16 billion and a net quarterly profit of $1.21 billion, or $1.33 per diluted share. Gross margin was 36.4 percent, up from 32.9 percent in the year-ago quarter.

Apple shipped 2.22 million Macintosh computers during the quarter, a unit decline of 3 percent over the year-ago quarter. The company also sold 11.01 million Pods during the quarter, representing 3 percent unit growth over the year-ago quarter. Quarterly iPhone unit sales reached 3.79 million, up 123 percent from the year-ago-quarter.

Safari 4 Beta Initial Benchmarks

Scott Piggott — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 14:50:02 +0000

Safari 4 benchmarked: 42x faster than IE 7, 3.5x faster than Firefox 3. Wow! See the full article here. Via Smashing Magazine on Twitter.

Why Apple Is Dropping Macworld

Scott Piggott — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 01:27:50 +0000

One word (or acronym)… WWDC. I quit going to Macworld years ago in favor of WWDC. Don’t get me wrong, Macworld is fun. It’s a big show with lots of vendors, lots of big booths, lots of geek loot, lots of good parties, the occasional booth babe (anyone remember the Iomega chics in the rubber suits at Macworld Boston or Lara Croft at the Apple party at Macworld New York?). But if you really want to learn something, WWDC is The Show. This is beside the fact that it makes much better business sense for Apple to put it’s money behind its own developer’s conference. It doesn’t hurt that it sold out for the first time ever last year.

WordPress iPhone App

Scott Piggott — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 22:43:26 +0000

Posting from my iPhone was never so easy.