Mac OS X’s terminal doesn’t seem to play nice with Linux hosts in its default configuration. The character it sends for “erase” confuses the shell over on the Linux side, and no amount of stty magic has been able to fix it for me.
The simple solution, as it turns out, is to set your terminal type in the preferences for Terminal.app to “rxvt.” Magically, everything works.
Who knew? (Many people, apparently.)
PC World published an article listing 15 reasons to switch to Vista. I imagine that the article is aimed at XP users rather than Mac or Linux users. Still, I wonder how many of their reasons are compelling to the likes of me.
So it’s “transparent animated windows,” “subtle and elegant colors” and “a new Start menu?” I don’t know about “animated,” but I already have “transparent” (although I don’t use it.) Unless they’ve gotten rid of the Start menu (in favor of something more like Quicksilver) it’s still not good enough, and I’m pretty sure that you could duplicate the same “subtle and elegant colors” on any windowing system if you choose to do so.
Apparently the Alt-Tab behavior in Vista does some sort of three-dee flippady-do thing. Which sounds like a gaudy take on Expose. Which I already have.
This actually sounds pretty neat. Hover over a window on the Taskbar and a live (that is: with the actual content from the window) thumbnail pops up. That said: Expose already covers this.
Cute. It loads programs you use often in to ram such that they start quickly. Sort of like the Office Quick Start or whatever it was called from a few years back. Thing is, the applications I use frequently are already in memory. That’s sort of how memory on a computer works. Oh well. At least they’re trying.
This reads like a non-ugly PerfMon replacement. Given that I’m satisfied with the likes of “top” and “iostat,” I’m unlikely to be swayed by this.
Remember, this is better relative to XP. So this isn’t saying much.
Oh, like Spotlight? Already have it.
Oh, like Dashboard? Already have it.
The only problems I ever have with wireless networking are caused by me upgrading the firmware on the AP and telling it to do all sorts of stupid things. (This is a round-about way of saying “I break the AP when I screw with it.”) I guess the wireless networking in XP was lacking somehow?
Hey, finally something that I’d use! I like this feature. Although it sounds more like a userland application than it does a core OS service.
Oh, like iPhoto? Already have it.
Oh, like iMovie? Already have it.
Presumably notebook support was lacking under XP. Works for me.
I’m sure that I’d have more to say about this if I ever did workgroup networking. I don’t, but I remember it always being a little bit harder than it had to be to do correctly. If Vista makes it easier, I’ll count that as a good thing.
I wonder how well this works. Content filtering isn’t a trivial problem — although I’ve seen very good approaches to the problem (of course those solutions were ignored by my former employer, but that’s neither here nor there) — and I wonder if Microsoft solves it particularly well in the OS or not. Either way, it’s not the approach I take to my son using a computer, so I’m not really swayed by this.
Well, that turned out to be a little more smug than I thought it would. Perhaps I need to get a $1,000 hoodie and start making fun of John Hodgman. Still, it’s hard to think that Microsoft isn’t a day late and a dollar short here. An “I already have it” list could be easily put together for Linux and probably XP for that matter. Way to go, Microsoft.
That said, they’re bound to sell millions of copies of it, so perhaps I’ll be buying some of that Microsoft stock.
I’m not a big gadget guy, so I’m not terribly moved by the iPhone or all the buzz it’s causing. Jason Kottke’s iPhone round up contains this bit, however, that is absolutely hilarious:
The price is pretty high. So was the price for the first iPod. And the Macintosh. Apple will approach this in a similar way to the iPod…start with a premium product at the high end and work their way down to shuffle-land. It isn’t difficult to imagine an iPhone nano that just does voice, SMS, music, and a camera. (Or an iPhone shuffle…you press the call button and it randomly calls someone from the ten contacts the shuffle synched from your computer that morning.)
Anyway, good times.
You read the Fake Steve Jobs, right? He’s funny. Read him.
An excerpt from today’s piece on iPhone pricing:
To be sure, it took some time for me to develop the correct overpricing strategy. With the NeXT machine, we figured out what would be a fair price, and then we quadrupled that price, and sure enough, people lined up to buy them. Or some people did anyway. Problem is, we kinda priced ourselves out of being a mass market company. Meanwhile, Microsoft – God, just to write that word makes me feel slightly nauseated – was pushing Windows. Their stuff was like a Special Olympics version of what we’d done at Apple. But it was cheap, and it came bundled onto all the butt-ugly PCs in the world. So frigtards went out and bought their PCs and got stuck with Windows and, tragic as this may seem, many of them actually considered this to be a wonderful thing.
I weep for those people.
I don’t know why nobody notified me of this not entirely recent development. I’ll try not to be too hurt by this. Anyway, there’s a program called Seashore. It’s a Cocoa implementation of The Gimp, which is, as everybody knows, the one true raster image editor. (At least for people too cheap to pony up for Photoshop.)
I’ve been a fan of the Gimp for years, and under Windows or (especially) Linux, it’s a delight to use. However, on OS X it runs much like it does under Linux or Windows, making it seem comparatively super-klunky. It’s a real captain comedown. Nobody should have to use things that smell like Windows when they’re working on a real computer.
Seashore aims to make the Gimp behave like a proper Cocoa application. It’s still pretty beta — sometimes dialogs dissappear and windows refuse to refresh, etc etc — but it’s definitely usable.
I stopped at home yesterday to drop off some packages and found a new battery on my front porch.
I have to say that Apple’s turnaround time on this was pretty impressive. Almost as impressive as if the battery hadn’t gone so quickly bad in the first place ;)
I got an exploding battery! (Serial number ending in “U7SC.”) It didn’t explode, but it bowed the battery case out to the point that the mouse on my laptop thought it was pressed all the time. Two things that this is not: braggable. Both of them, actually, are “braggable.”
The only redeeming thing about the story is that Apple is shipping me a new battery. But it’s only redeeming in a “yeah, I stole your car, but at least I filled it up with premium before the police found it” sort of a way.
Anyway, I feel a certain bond of brotherhood with the other Dell and Viao and Powerbook users who got exploding batteries. It’s a good thing the exchange happened before DHS found out that I’ve carried dangerous explosives like this on to airplanes on multiple occasions.
To use WPA “Pre-Shared Key” authentication with a Linksys WRT54G router and Mac OSX 10.4, choose “TKIP” for the WPA algorithm on the router and “WPA Personal” for the wireless security mode on the client.
And now you know.
Holy crap the new Apple laptops (The Apple Store (U.S.) - MacBook Pro) look cool. I’m usually not one to drool over technology, but I’ve really become attached to my powerbook, my only complaint being that it’s way slow compared to what I could get with a PC. Seems like apple has solved that particular problem.
If somebody wants to buy me one, please feel free.
Can anybody recommend a good Applescript reference? I’ve got some ugly jobs that I want to automate, which seems like a good opportunity to pick up a new tool. Here’s what I want to do:
I’m moving my photos from Picasa — which I love dearly and will miss, but I never use my Windows PC any more, so it seems sort of daft to keep my photos there — to iPhoto. Picasa has a really cool “export” feature that can dump all of your photos out to disk in directories named after the albums you’ve created. I want to import all of these in to iPhoto, preserving the album names from Picasa. Seems pretty straightforward, no?
Anyway, pointers to good web Applescript references or even book recommendations would be appreciated. Alternately, if there’s an easy way to automate this sort of thing in other tools — Python in particular — that’d almost be better. (Although learning a new tool may or may not be the larger objective here.)
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