Sandboxing Sandvox

Mike Abdullah:

At first glance, Sandvox seems a pretty good fit for the sandbox. It’s document-based and doesn’t have too deep a hook into the OS’s configuration. But as ever in programming, we did run into a few of those pesky edge cases.

A lot of the work involved sandboxing the iMedia framework, a cool open-source attempt to provide the iLife SDK that Apple never did. However, once Karelia developers found the media files they ran into problems storing references to them:

There is a nasty bug with security-scoped bookmarks though. Generating one requires write access to the target file (rdar://problem/11929296). For files from the media browser, for example, Sandvox only has read access, and so creating the bookmark fails.

This bug has been known for a really long time. It’s a shame that Apple hasn’t fixed it yet.

Mac Mac App Mac App Store Programming Sandboxing Sandvox

The First Twenty-Five Years (of Perl)

Mark Keating:

So what does the future hold for Perl? Well I don’t have a crystal ball but I cannot see the language fading from usage in the next quarter century, the truth of the matter is that even though there are languages that can do some of the things that Perl does, some of them do some things better, others do things Perl wasn’t designed for, there is no language that has been designed to do the things that Perl is very good at doing. No language in the current scripting languages seems to have the flexibility, maturity and extensibility of Perl. The main power of Perl has always been its ability to quickly adapt, and be adapted, to suit purposes.

Perl Programming