Spotify update – an entire post of sarcasm

Hey Spotify, nice job on the latest update to your client on Macs – UI freezes for several seconds when doing complicated tasks like changing to the next song, changing volume and so on; moved the useful now-playing list to an obscure icon, and ditched that easy way to see what the current song is by right-clicking on the app icon.

Can’t wait for the next update where you disable the ability to play music – no one uses that function anyway.

MacBooks and ports

The new MacBook

The big news from Apple’s announcement of the new MacBooks today is the single USB-C port. This could be the beginning of the end for not only MagSafe power connections, but thunderbolt too (although presumably Thunderbolt will remain on high-end devices such as the Mac Pro since it has 20Gbs of throughput compared to USB3’s 5Gbs).

Using USB-C connectors looks like it might finally enable single-cable docking station like functionality for Mac laptops, either through canny third-party manufacturers offering USB/display hubs and chargers or through display manufacturers offering one-cable USB-C connections that can charge your computer, pass audio/video to the screen and offer USB/Ethernet hubs too. For example, the Thunderbolt Display may end up being a USB-C Display instead (5K let’s hope!).

Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Shellshocked

I have a couple of servers running Ubuntu Linux 12.04 LTS that are not getting the new release of bash that resolves the shellshock bug through the standard update mechanism apt-get.

The solution is to download the package and install it manually.

1. Download the package from http://packages.ubuntu.com/precise/amd64/bash/download
2. Run the following command to install it:

   sudo dpkg -i bash_4.2-2ubuntu2.5_amd64.deb

3. You can run the following command to see if you are vulnerable – no output is good!

   x='() { :;};echo Vulnerable!' bash -c true

Apache ProxyPass to the rescue for firewalled ports

When trying to make a web-utility I look after with its own TomCat server available to the public web from a server with only http and https ports accessible through our firewall I stumbled on Apache’s ability to proxy pages internally. This lets me give public access to a web server running on a port that is not open to the public by getting Apache to pass the content back through the publicly available port 443.

This is how it works:

ProxyPass /foo https://privateserver.company.com
ProxyPassReverse /foo https://privateserver.company.com

Will mean going to https://publicserver.company.com/foo will show that URL but actually show content from https://privateserver.company.com.

Or in my case:

ProxyPass / https://privateserver.company.com:1443
ProxyPassReverse / https://privateserver.company.com:1443

Will mean going to https://publicserver.company.com/ actually shows content from the web server on the same server running on port 1443. Very handy!

iTunes Store sectioned in Yosemite

The iTunes Store in the version of iTunes (12) that comes with Yosemite is now sectioned into the Music/Movies etc and you can’t seem to get to the normal landing page that incorporates all types of media the store sells.

This can be a pain if you do like me and check in periodically for all the free content – you would have to go to each individual section.

The workaround is – scroll to the bottom of a section page in the Store and you’ll see the breadcrumbs navigation – and you can click on the top-level iTunes Store there. As soon as you switch a section in iTunes the relevant section will load again though.