Security Pro News reported about two Viruses spreading on Macs. While one of them is not yet found in the wild and spreads via Bluetooth, the other one is around, but needs a daft user like most of the less subtle PC Viruses.

Leap.A spreads itself via iChat and originally claimed to be screenshots of Mac OS X v10.5 Leopard with the name latestpics.tgz.

I blame two reasons for Mac Viruses emerging:

• The switch to intel, thus making it easier to check the system
• The smugness of a lot of Mac Users about being Virus-free for life. Yes, OS X is UNIX based, but it has hooks *nix hasn’t got – like iChat.

Don’t trust anything you don’t know is the Motto, and it might be a good idea to use the console from time to time to know what all these funky icons really are under the hood.

Update

The lovely Veerle quantifies the information as malicious software and not a Virus, and she has a point. As stated, it needs an uninformed user to execute it and it is not dormant in your system to become active at a certain date.

The clever people who brought us Backpack and Basecamp strike back with Campfire which is essentially like having a chat in an Instant Messenger with several people, but with a fixed URL and logging of the conversation.

This could be a cool replacement for phone conferences for companies like the one I am working at – as the line quality to the India office always keeps you guessing what the other person meant.

I’ll give it a whirl…

via datacircle

German Visitors: Zur deutschen Version gehts hier – auf dem Blog von Jens Grochtdreis

If you are just getting your teeth into JavaScript, or if you used it in the past and re-discovered it in the wake of the AJAX craze you might have been baffled by scripts that come in a new syntax.

While older copy and paste scripts looked like this:

var commonSense=null;
var standardsCompliance="50%";
function init(){
  // code
}
function doStuff(){
  // code
}
function doMoreStuff(){
  // code
}

Newer scripts inside tutorials tend to look like this:

awesome={
  commonSense:null,
  standardsCompliance:"50%",
  init:function(){
    // code
  },
  doStuff:function(){
    // code
  },
  doMoreStuff:function(){
    // code
  }
}

The new syntax is called the object literal and is pretty close to sliced bread. Here is why: (more…)

More good stuff from Yahoo:

• The Design Pattern Library describes patterns to use when you have a certain task to fulfil, taking the idea of patterns into the UI arena. If you have no clue about patterns, check Snook’s bit at Digital Web about them.
• Proving that the developers can walk the walk instead of just teasing you, there is also a User Interface Library to download and use, instead of checking through 23123 different calendar pop-ups to use.

Dang, I need more time. There goes taking in food and sleeping.

Yahoo just released their idea of modern browser support entitled Graded Browser Support . I have been advocating this in my company for a while, although it sometimes is tricky as it is also dependent on the client and their visitors (I had this wonderful degrading CSS-layout with awesome DOM Scripting effects just to realise that the main user group is IE5 and – god forbid – Netscape Communicator).

I was also pretty chuffed to see them linking to my unobtrusive JavaScript course :-)