The Undercover MacBook

For someone in possession of a stolen computer it is no longer enough to look over their shoulder while using it, these days the computer itself can turn informer and lead the police straight to them.

This summer I had my MacBook Air stolen from a hotel room while vacationing in Las Vegas. Along with the machine, roughly 1500 photos taken during the preceding three week road-trip through California and Nevada were gone. Thanks to my heavy reliance on the cloud storage service Dropbox I lost almost no other data, despite having used this as my main machine for the last couple of months. I would have been devastated had I for example lost the source codes to my apps.

I promptly made a report of the theft to the Las Vegas Metro Police Department where they let me know, in no uncertain terms, that I should not expect to see my computer again. They did however assign a detective, one Russel Lee to the case.

A Ray of Hope

Despite the Police's pessimism, I maintained a ray of hope. After buying the laptop I had invested in a piece of software called Undercover to keep my MacBook safe. Described as a “revolutionary theft-recovery software” it would supposedly provide me with all the information needed to recover the computer in case it was ever stolen.

Using my iPad I logged on to the Undercover recovery center website and marked my computer as missing — telling the software to start tracking it.

Things were quiet for several days. I had already made my way back to Sweden and the ray of hope was starting to fade when I finally received an e-mail proclaiming that the computer had been used to access the internet and that Undercover had started tracking it. As promised, I was provided with webcam photos, screenshots, the computer’s IP address, and an approximate location!

I could see that the person using it had logged in to the computer’s guest account and had connected to a Wifi network. While it’s no fun seeing someone using your computer without your consent, I was nevertheless relieved that the tracking software seemed to be working.

Hello there, what are you doing with my laptop?

Oh, you’re hitting up women on Facebook. Carry on then.

The location in Henderson, Nevada, wasn’t exact enough for the police to figure out which house to visit. Frustratingly, I also found out that it takes the police all of 60 days to get the subscriber information for an IP address.

Profiling the User

During the following weeks I was informed whenever the computer was used and I tried to piece together the information I could gather from the screenshots in an effort to point the police in the right direction. I quickly found out the user’s Facebook profile and Skype account, but he used the alias Dee Macc and I couldn’t figure out his real name and address. His Facebook profile did mention that he graduated from LA High class of 2007, so that prompted a search of their online yearbook, alas to no avail.

Eventually a bit of luck, he typed his phone number into a couple of chat windows while trying to pick up women. But according to whitepages.org the number he gave is registered to a 60 year old person in Los Angeles. Not the age you would expect of someone who uses the phrase “im not no baby yeah”. Also, according to his Facebook profile Dee Macc was born on February 5th 1990 making him 21 years old. Thus, the registered owner of the phone number is definitely not our man.

It looked as if my machine was making lots of new friends as other people also started using it now and then, always from the same location in Henderson, NV. Some of their Facebook profiles were under their real names. One of those people, let’s call him B., turned out to be the owner of a Las Vegas boxing gym near Las Vegas Boulevard. Another user was his son D., whom I could tell from his Facebook account is a promising young boxer.

As time passed and more information came in I forwarded everything to the police, but they still didn’t have enough to take action.

The Retrieval

One late evening as I was ready to turn in for the night I was alerted by Undercover that the computer had moved to a new location. At first I thought this was bad news since it meant the IP address subpoena would have to be restarted from scratch, but I couldn't have been more wrong. The location was reported to be close to Las Vegas Boulevard, and the webcam photos showed D. hanging out in a very nice boxing gym. For the first time in weeks I knew exactly where it was!

I sent a quick e-mail to Detective Lee.

New and actionable information.

D. XXXXX is at the time of me writing this using the computer at the XXX XXXXXX Boxing Gym, XXXX Paradise Road, Las Vegas.

I had a reply just minutes later

Perfect! Thanks, I’ll run over there and see.

As webcam photos continued to come in over the next few minutes, I forwarded them to Detective Lee to help him find the right people in the gym. Then all of a sudden the computer went offline. A worrying turn, but I maintained hope as the last screenshot contained an intriguing Facebook update.

“ugghhh i hate police officers…makes me wanna qweef”

Moments later the e-mail I had been hoping for arrived from Detective Lee.

I have your computer! Good Job!!

High fives all around! The Undercover software had delivered on its promise, and combined with the swift action from Detective Lee it had recovered my MacBook Air.

Conclusion

As I’m writing this I have just taken delivery of the computer from the Las Vegas Metro Police Department evidence vault, and I was glad to see my road-trip photos remain safely stored on the disk. Detective Lee had already mentioned that my user account was still on the computer which lead me to believe they would be there, but it’s good to have it confirmed.

After 10 weeks of being separated from my computer I can finally get back to app development and get som delayed updates out the door — once I'm done organizing the road-trip photos of course.

Lessons learned

I was lucky in having been sufficiently prepared before having my computer stolen. Take these lessons to heart, should it happen to you;

• It’s a good idea to take the precaution of having theft-recovery software installed on your computer.
• It is vital to have your computer’s serial number available when filing the police report, without it you may not be able to legally prove it’s yours even if you are able to track it.
• Set up a guest account so the thief can log in and connect to a network, or tracking will not work.
• Lock your user account whenever you step away from the computer so that a thief can’t access your files and won’t have administration privileges to the system.

This ordeal has made me consider taking a couple of additional measures now the computer is back in my possession.

• For insurance reasons always make use of the hotel in-room safety box, no matter how insecure.
• Set a firmware password, a simple measure which will make it impossible for a thief to wipe the system and reinstall the operating system, thus removing the tracking software.
• Install some software to allow me to siphon off data in the background so that I could have copied over my photos while the computer was connected to the internet but not under my control.

Undercover is available from Orbicule. I highly recommend you install it on your Macs.

Excerpts of collected evidence

Below are some of my favorite screenshots and webcam photos selected from the huge amount of data I received from Undercover during this episode.

Installing Flash? Not on my computer you don’t!

Some webcam photos of people hanging out with my MacBook Air.

“yu cute” — Dee Macc using the shotgun approach on Taberah and Gisele.

“im not no baby yeah” — Dee Macc's failed attempt at sounding mature.

Fine prose from Dee Macc and friends.

NSZombies and the Program received signal: “EXC_BAD_ACCESS” exception

[The following article applies to Xcode 3.x]

Even when following the memory management techniques explained by Steve "Scotty" Scott I sometimes run across my most dreaded runtime error;

Program received signal: “EXC_BAD_ACCESS”

This happens when you try to access an object that has already been released. Sadly the error message doesn't give you any information on what object you were trying to access, but luckily you can call up some zombies to help out.

Control-click the Executable you are trying to debug and select Get Info

Use the + button to add a new environment variable called NSZombieEnabled and set its value to YES.

When you run your app with this variable enabled, all deallocated objects are kept in memory and you will get a better error message in the console once one of them receives the unexpected call which crashes your app.

The debugger stack trace can at this point help you figure out exactly where in you code the problem occurred. Hovering the mouse cursor over the offending object will indicate that it is indeed an NSZombie.

Now that you know which object was accessed after being released you should be able to squash the bug in a few minutes by making sure to apply the memory management techniques correctly on it.

Make sure to uncheck the NSZombieEnabled variable before you ship your code, otherwise no memory is ever freed from you app. If you forget to uncheck it all released objects will be kept around in a zombie state, consuming your memory and eventually getting your app force killed by the system.

Since it is important and you need to remember this, say the following phrase out loud;

"I will not ship zombie infested code to my customers."

The iPad case for explorers and adventurers

I'm pretty sure I never saw Indiana Jones use an iPad, but had he owned one he would certainly have kept it in a Vintcase. Just look at the thing, it radiates pure awesomeness.

When folded up, the wrap-around string keeps it snugly closed, ready to go explore the world.

The Vintcase is made in Spain from high quality cowhide leather. This card matching game is made in Sweden from the absolute highest quality digital bits.

There's no need to hold your iPad or prop it up against anything when watching a movie or using it for recreational gaming. The Vintcase can stand independently on any level surface.

The case was delivered lovingly wrapped with a note saying "I hope you like it" – that's how you make a good first impression! The whole thing just oozes class and I certainly do like it.

If you are interested in getting one of your own, take a look at Vintcase.com for more photos and information.

Full disclosure: I am not affiliated with Vintcase in any way except for being a satisfied customer.

"Barkeep, this round is on me"

How you can do good toward your fellow man, and end up with some quality apps for yourself.

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Update March 1st:

I sold 341 apps during February. After subtracting income taxes a donation of $143 was made, providing 20 years worth of clean water for 7 people.

My thanks to all who helped by purchasing apps. The charity runs through March, you can donate directly at http://developersagainstpoverty.org/.

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Living in a town which sees more than 100 rain days per year, I find it hard to imagine what it must be like not to have access to clean and safe drinking water. Sadly there are people on this planet for whom clean water is an unattainable luxury.

Unsafe water and a lack of basic sanitation kill more people every year than every form of violence on the planet, including the wars raging around the globe.

This is a fact I learned after tuning in to this week's episode of the chat show iDeveloper Live, where Scotty (the show host) has launched Developers Against Poverty — a campaign asking software developers to help bring clean water to areas of the world that lack it.

After hearing about this initiative, and then being inspired by Baked Ham Games' pledge to donate a percentage of their app sales, I have decided to support the effort as best I can.

Therefore;

I hereby pledge to donate 100% of my February profits from the app store to the cause championed by Developers Against Poverty.

The donation will be made during the first week of March, as soon as the February sales numbers are in.

So if you are at all interested in football (soccer if you're American) or perhaps want to study some Japanese, I hope you will join me in supporting this noble cause by buying some apps, which coincidentally are all currently on sale.

Even if none of my apps appeal to you, do consider donating directly to the Developers Against Poverty charity campaign.

Installing Leopard on the G4 Cube

The PowerMac G4 Cube, arguably the coolest computer on planet Earth, is not supported by operating systems later than Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, but there are many reasons you may want to run a later system. For me the main incentive to upgrade was that Apple dropped Tiger support with the release of iTunes 10, which means a Cube on 10.4 can not partake in the wonders of Home Sharing.

The minimum system requirements for installing Leopard on a PowerPC based Mac is an 867 MHz processor and 512 MB of RAM. The memory requirement isn't really a problem since the Cube supports up to 1.5 GB, and you wouldn't want to run Leopard on any less than 512 MB anyway. The processor speed requirement, however, is a problem since the fastest (unmodified) Cube runs at 500 MHz. Luckily there is a way to fool the Leopard installer's system requirements check by temporarily modifying the processor speed reported by the firmware.

Back up your Tiger

First off you'll want to create a bootable backup of your internal disk on a firewire drive. Do this using SuperDuper! or a similar tool, and make sure you can really boot from the backup drive.
No really, do not go on until you have succesfully booted from your backup and made sure it works.

Set the startup disk


Put your Leopard installation disk in your DVD slot, or copy it onto a firewire drive if your Cube can't read DVDs. Then set the installation disk as your Startup Disk in the System Preferences so that on next restart your Cube will boot from it and start the installation.

Modify Open Firmware


Restart your Cube, and hold Opt-Cmd-O-F during boot to enter the Open Firmware prompt. You will now temporarily set the reported CPU speed to 867 MHz and then continue booting. To accomplish this you will type some commands on the prompt, Open Firmware will respond with an 'ok' message after each understood command. The reported speed will revert back to the original value after next reboot.

For single CPU systems type the following three commands exactly as shown.

dev /cpus/PowerPC,G4@0
d# 867000000 encode-int " clock-frequency" property
mac-boot

For dual CPU systems use the following five lines.

dev /cpus/PowerPC,G4@0
d# 867000000 encode-int " clock-frequency" property
dev /cpus/PowerPC,G4@1
d# 867000000 encode-int " clock-frequency" property
mac-boot

Continue with the installation normally, and eventually end up with a Leopard Cube.



Thanks to MacRob on CubeOwner.com for turning me onto this solution.

Retro gaming on iPad, for iOS developers

MADTV and Gabriel Knight running in dospad on the iPad

Sometimes it's good to take a break from coding, and what's more relaxing than running some retro games on your iPad?

Getting DOS onto iPad

Some time ago a DOS emulator called iDOS briefly made it into the App Store, but it was already long gone when I heard of it and tried to download it. As luck would have it the source code for the app is available under the name dospad from Google Code, so any registered iOS developer can build it using Xcode and run it on their iPad.

I believe iDOS or dospad is also available for jailbroken iPads, for those who are not registered developers but are OK with jailbreaking their device.

Installing games

With dospad you get a fully functional DOS system for your iPad. There is mouse support and sound support, making it brilliant for some retro gaming. If the games are mouse driven you can even go full screen for a very immersive experience.

Sierra's adventure game Gabriel Knight is one of my all time favorites, and since I no longer have a floppy disk drive on my computer I downloaded it from an abandonware site called The House of Games, where there's a large selection of old DOS games.


With dospad installed on your iPad, you can drag files into it using iTunes. Just go to the iPad's Apps tab and select dospad under the File Sharing header.

Dospad comes with an unzip utility so once you have transferred the zip file with your game you can use the DOS command prompt to create a directory and unzip the file into it.


For Sierra games you then run install.exe to select your sound options. I selected Soundblaster Pro which seems to work well.

Launch the game by running sierra.exe.

Mouse controls

Obviously, this being DOS, you don't use it like a standard touch screen. Instead you control a mouse cursor on screen in the same manner you would using the touchpad on your Macbook. Tapping the screen left clicks at the position the cursor points to.


You can play either in portrait or landscape mode, as well as full screen.


Happy retro gaming, and make sure to save your game often.

Add your own teams to Starting 11

Version 2.0 of Starting 11 was just submitted for App Store review and should be available on the store shortly.


New features

The new version lets you add any number of your own favorite teams and players.
Formations you prepare are stored for future modifications, meaning you don't need to start over from the beginning the next time you want to prepare a starting eleven.






How to get it for free

Version 2.0 will be priced at $2, but it is a free upgrade for users of version 1.0. So if you haven't yet downloaded Starting 11 you can get 2.0 for free by acting now, before it goes online at the store.

App store link