Mac OS X Finder users moving (as opposed to copying) files from one volume or drive to the other may be in for a rude surprise if the connection is interrupted during a file transfer. Tom Karpik outlines this bug and how to reproduce it on his blog. If you’re moving files or folders from one drive or mounted share to another, and if the connection--USB, network, etc...--is interrupted, the original folders or files will disappear from existence. It isn’t simply a matter of files disappearing from the Finder, you won’t be able to access them from the Terminal, either. They will be, for all intents and purposes, gone. But you back up regularly, right?

The worst part about this? According to those who have commented on Karpik’s article, this bug has been around since Panther (Mac OS X 10.3).

As I mentioned before, this only impacts moving items between volumes. By default, the Finder will copy items to the target disk, leaving the original intact. If you hold down the command key while dragging a file to another disk, the files will be moved outright instead. This is when this bug comes into play. Karpik gives a short primer on what happens behind the scenes when Finder copies and moves files, which is worth reading.

John Gruber noted a workaround: copy the file to the other disk and then deltete the original if the copy job is successful.

I tried using the mv command in Terminal while forcibly interrupting the…
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I’m in a good mood today. I have a job interview later this week, the California Golden Bears football team won over the weekend, and I get to write another section of our Leopard review! This is certainly going to end up being the longest article series we’ve written; we’re currently planning for nine or ten sections, so there’s a lot more to cover.

This part covers a feature brand new to Leopard: Spaces.

Here’s the traditional note regarding the score: the score you see at the bottom of this page is for the features discussed in this section only. When all is said and done, we will give Leopard an all-around score.

Anyway, let’s get this party started!

Through space and time

The idea behind Spaces is not new. Spaces is a direct descendant of virtual desktops, which has been a mainstay of UNIX and Linux GUIs (KDE, etc…) for years. If you’re reading this review, I would assume that you at least have an idea of what virtual desktops are, so I won’t describe the concept behind them.

There have been implementations of virtual desktops for Mac OS X before Spaces; in fact, both Pilky and Jay have written about one in particular called Desktop Manager.

I have toyed with Desktop Manager in the past, but I never really got into the idea of virtual desktops. I never saw any way to integrate them into my workflow.

With Spaces, though, I finally decided to give virtual desktops a try.…
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Ah yes, our Leopard review keeps on marching along! This is the third installment of our Mac OS X Leopard review. For those keeping score at home, here’s what has been covered so far:

• Part 1: The Leopard UI
• Leopard screenshots
• Part 2: Spotlight and the Finder

  This part will cover one new Leopard feature that has been the focus of controversy in some circles: stacks. And as usual, the score at the bottom of this page pertains to this section only. We will give Leopard a cumulative score when the review is complete.

  Before we get to actually discussing stacks, let’s go back in time…

  A brief history lesson

  The Dock itself has its roots in NEXTSTEP, where it served as an application launcher and worked much like the Dock in Mac OS X. The idea behind stacks, at least as far as I know, has its roots in an old Mac OS feature: tabbed folders. The idea behind tabbed folders was simple: open a folder in the Finder and drag its window to the bottom of the screen. The window’s titlebar would then become a tab anchored to the bottom of the screen, thus making the folder’s contents accessible with a click. Tabbed folders were well-designed. If you dragged a file to a tabbed folder, the folder would spring open, allowing you to drop the file into the tabbed folder, or into a folder inside the tabbed folder. It was a pretty cool ideas.

  Then along came Mac OS…
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Welcome to Part 2 of Deep Thought’s review of Mac OS X Leopard, the latest version of Apple’s venerable operating system. In Part 1 we discussed the user interface changes in Leopard; for the most it is an improvement but there are some areas that could be implemented better.

Like the first part, this section has a score at the end of the article. Again, note that this score pertains only to this section and not to the review as a whole. When our review is complete we will assign a cumulative score.

This second part will cover Spotlight and the Finder. I am reviewing both in the same article because Spotlight and Finder are tightly integrated in Leopard. No longer is there a fundamental difference between a Spotlight search and a Finder search; the only things you don’t get in the Finder that you get in the Spotlight search menu are calculations and word definitions. I’ll explain this more in a moment. For now, let’s take a quick look back in time.

A spotlight on Spotlight

Spotlight: the early days

Spotlight was hyped as one of the main features in Tiger, and it was an improvement over pervious search functions on Mac OS X in terms of speed. But unfortunately, Spotlight left a lot to be desired. Users expected an instant search feature; instead Spotlight in Tiger had an annoying tendency to lag before displaying results. And for some inexplicable reason, if you selected the “Show All” command from the…
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If you’re a Mac user, you may want to think twice before visiting that porn site, especially if you’re, uhm, unprotected.

Today Intego released a security alert regarding the discovery of a trojan horse affecting Mac OS X. The trojan horse targets visitors of pornography sites, and poses as a message advising users to upgrade to the newest version of a QuickTime codec.

Unlike some previous trojan horses on OS X this one is not just a proof-of-concept; it is actually malicious. From Intego’s warning:

This Trojan horse, a form of DNSChanger, uses a sophisticated method, via the scutil command, to change the Mac’s DNS server (the server that is used to look up the correspondences between domain names and IP addresses for web sites and other Internet services). When this new, malicious, DNS server is active, it hijacks some web requests, leading users to phishing web sites (for sites such as Ebay, PayPal and some banks), or simply to web pages displaying ads for other pornographic web sites. In the first case, users may think they are on legitimate sites and enter a user name and password, a credit card, or an account number, which will then be hijacked. In the latter case, it seems that this is being done solely to generate ad revenue.

As usual, the best advice is to be paranoid online and never download anything from web sites you are not familiar with. These type of schemes prey on gullible users. Also, you may want to…
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