Category: Geek

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Toast This

If you put a blank CD in your Mac, you can drag files onto it, eject it, let it burn, and get a nice cross-platform ISO9660 CD out the other end. Do the same with a blank DVD and you get a Mac-only HFS+ DVD. There is apparently no way to make a cross-platform data DVD from the Finder. Of course, Apple doesn’t tell you this – doesn’t even mention it in their Knowledge Base. You just waste a bunch of money on $5 blank DVDs, thinking something else must have gone wrong, since you’ve never made a coaster with this technique before.

The solution turns out to be Toast. Hooey.

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Music: The Ethiopians :: Hong Kong Flu

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Dump Core

Trying to figure out why I have less than 2GBs of space left on my hdd at work — was trying to burn a DVD and didn’t have enough swap space for it. Found OmniDiskSweeper and started burrowing through hidden subdirs. Found the culprit : 650 core files of 22MBs each hanging out in /cores, totaling 21.5 GB. Deleted them all to get my drive back, but the question is, which app is dumping core so often and consistently without me even knowing, and why isn’t the system cleaning these up during daily/weekly maintenance?

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Study: Mac OS Least Attack-Prone

Computerworld: Mi2g Ltd. said 1,162 new software vulnerabilities in operating systems, server software and third-party applications have been discovered so far this year. Of that number, fewer than 25 were attributable to the Mac OS.

Gotta say, it feels great to not worry about a thing as one wave of vulnerabilities after another washes over the Windows shores. And even better to know that my wife, father, landlord, clients in the city etc. all fly under the radar as well. Security by stealth + security by design is a lot of security (though not total, of course).

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Music: Billie Holiday :: I Cried For You

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PalmOS 6 To Be Based on BeOS

Just when it seemed like Palm intended only to forever mothball BeOS and all the Be engineering talent they bought, The Register reports that PalmOS 6 will be a genuine multitasking OS containing genuine chunks of BeOS code (rather than simply “inheriting DNA,” as Jean-Louis Gassee once said it would). ” Version 6.0 will be as dramatic a change for the platform as OS X was for Apple, or NT was for Microsoft. ”

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Music: Charles Mingus :: Haitian Fight Song

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Yahoo! Chooses PHP

Am gratified at Yahoo!’s decision to move their systems gradually to PHP. I’m sick of hearing perl die-hards trying to fabricate reasons why Perl is for true hairy chests while PHP is only for slightly hairy chests. For purposes of server-side web scripting and database integration, both are equally capable, but PHP is far easier to learn, write, and maintain. I think the cabal of wizards want to keep their hats pointy by convincing the world that Perl is arcane because it’s more powerful.

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Music: Sun Ra :: Sun Thoughts

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Comparing Apples and Penguins

Moshe Bar at Byte.com has performed a careful and thorough side-by-side benchmarking of OS X as a pure server (not desktop) environment by installing both OS X and the SuSE PowerPC Linux distribution on an XServe. Short story: OS X lost to Linux on every measurable count, but Moshe is still impressed, since OS X is so new while Linux has had a decade to tune its subsystems. To my knowledge, this is the first such test done with this degree of care.

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Music: Fugazi :: Waiting Room

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HTML in Email Rebuttal

Anonymous reader “George” sent me a point-by-point rebuttal to “Why HTML in EMail is a Bad Idea.” While I disagree with most of George’s assertions, his response is nevertheless the most cogent defense of HTML in email that I’ve seen. In the interest of fairness, I have posted George’s notes without editing or commentary from me.

As if to prove I’m not a lone crazy man howling in the woods, Low-End Mac has published The Dying Art of Plain Text Email.

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Music: Bill Laswell :: A Screaming Comes Across The Sky