Odds & Ends: QuickTime 6 and Japanese text follow-up;

QuickTime 6 and Japanese text: a follow-up Regarding the appearance of Japanese text in QuickTime 6 (see previous report), a reader states that this is a known issue and is due to the presence of "Kotoeri, the input module for Japanese language. If you have the Japanese Language Kit installed, Kotoeri will pop up at odd intervals when you open certain programs. The fix is to switch it back to whatever you wanted in the keyboard menu available through the International System Preferences settings."

QuickBooks for OS X? Several readers report getting an email from Intuit about a "potential" QuickBooks Pro 5.0 Edition for Mac that would include support for OS X as well as 9.2.2. To determine interest, they requested the recipients to fill out a survey. Note: We wouldn't bother sending your survey answers unless you got the ID code that came with the email. Update: In reply to reader queries: If you got the email, an ID code was tagged on to the end of the URL. The URL link here does not include any such tag. Thus, we are not certain survey answers based on it will "count."

OpenSSH vulnerability OpenSSH 3.3 is out. However, Rajiv Aaron Manglani spotted a message stating: "There is an upcoming OpenSSH vulnerability that we're working on with ISS. Details will be published early next week. 3.3 does not contain a fix for this upcoming bug. However, if users enable priv separation in their ssh daemons (by setting this in their /etc/ssh/sshd_config file: UsePrivilegeSeparation yes), they are immune." The vulnerability would likely only affect Macs with Remote Login enabled. Note: The Apple April 2002 Security Update included OpenSSH 3.1p1.

slp_ipc oddity If you use the Finder's Go To Folder command to navigate to /private/tmp, you will find a item called slp_ipc. We don't know for sure what is does. However, it has an interesting characteristic. If you launch Terminal and go to this directory to check the size of the file (using <ls -l>), it is listed as 0K. However, if you select the file in the Finder, and click to Show Info, an enormous size is indicated. On our system it was 8,389,484,740,264,034,385 bytes. (Thanks, Chris Callac.)

Update: Jonathan Simon provides a partial answer to this matter: "It's a 'named pipe' file. It's not a file in the disk storage sense; it's the output of a program whose output is piped there. The 'ipc' stands for inter-process communication, of which using named pipes is one form. The slp stands for service location protocol." Note: piping is a Unix feature where the output of one program can be automatically used as the input for another program.

Language modules and Acrobat: a follow-up We have previously reported that a languages module listing can cause Acrobat to crash on launch in OS X. At that time, the recommendation was to disable unused languages. Alan Hirshberg offers another variation that worked for him: " Open System Preferences:International and click to Edit. Enable US English; click OK, then drag US English to the top of the list."

Macromedia color pickup glitch David Topper writes: "Using Fireworks MX 6.0.0.273 and FreeHand MX 10.0, if I attempt to use the Tools Window -> Colors -> Fill Color using the eye dropper tool for color pick up, the tool will only pick up colors from the provided swatch selections. It will not pick up properly from any other color source. However, I can type in the color code from another source and it will be correct." Macromedia confirmed this as a bug.