There's a new and potentially disasterous bug in Terminal (of all things) under 10.2 that allows a remote user to take over your system. Apple isn't saying much about the exploit (which is reasonable), and Software Update is already on top of it. More info is here.

<rant>So, I just used Software Update to update to iTunes 3.0.1, and it required a frigging reboot of the computer. What the hell is this, Windows? Why should I have to reboot my OS when I update a music application? Does iTunes have its tenticles so far into the OS that a reboot is required? If so, someone at Apple needs to be fired, quickly; I'm sure they can find a job in Redmond.</rant>

Westwind Computing has written up a list describing what the invisible files in your Mac OS X system are for. (Via Hack the Planet!)

Perl hackers ahoy: CamelBones is a set of bindings between Carbon and Perl on OS/X. As the blurb says:

CamelBones is a framework that allows many types of Cocoa programs to be written entirely in Perl. It also provides a high-level object-oriented wrapper around an embedded Perl interpreter, so that Cocoa programs written in Objective-C can easily make use of code and libraries written in Perl.

Find it here: http://camelbones.sourceforge.net/.

My friend Dirk sez:
The recently released iCal can publish calendars, either to your .mac account or to any DAV-enabled webserver. Apache 2.0 will work just fine out of the box; for apache 1.3 - you'll need to take a recent (newer than 10/9/02) snapshot or CVS release because apache was a bit too strict in its digest-authentication parsing. To publish to a site, follow the receipe at http://www.webweaving.org/ical/.

It looks like Apple is trying to make the $100 (or $50 for the early birds) .mac accounts go a bit further than most people initially thought.

• 100 Free Kodak Prints (4x6 only)
• Backup app that will span CDRs
• Free download of the Popcap game Alchemy
• $5 off Bejeweled
• and finally the .Mac Slides Published

At first I thought it was quite a list. Then I took another look. Both Alchemy and Bejewled are available online from MSN's The Zone. Even Adam over at The Flangy News thought it was odd that games available online for free were being sold in a box.

The new Backup app is just an update that most paying customers would expect anyways.

I gave the .Mac Slides a test drive and boy was I under whelmed. The pictures get scaled down for uploading, then when run at full screen look horrible. You can subscribe to more than one slide show, but from my tests, you can only publish one slide show at a time.

But the one that makes it all worth while is the 100 free prints. Now there is something I can actually use. Of course, you only have until Dec. 31st to use up your 100 free 4x6 prints.

If these little gems keep showing up in my .mac account, I may start to feel like it was almost worth paying for... ;-) Link Discuss

Karelia has released Watson v. 1.5.5, an upgrade to their excellent, indispensable web-services app. And to jump feet-first into the Watson/Sherlock wars going on right now: Watson is better, end of story.

Barebones Software have released a maintainence update for BBEdit, the Mac text-editor most likely to be used by a supreme being to write the requirements docs for Heaven. Link Discuss

Ryan Schmidt has posted instructions for hacking your 10.2 boot screen.

Am I the only one that thinks the grey Apple logo is quite possibly the most boring, uninspiring graphic Apple could have chosen to replace the Happy Mac(tm)? From bringing joy to millions to boring the crap out of people in one easy upgrade.

As always: hack at your own risk. Discuss