Hackerdude

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Besides the iLife Suite, here are some applications I've found useful lately. Here they are. I will update this in the next few days.

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After my nightmare with Quicken I decided to try many different financial packages. I ended up deciding on iBank 2.3.2. I have been using it for a little while now and here are my impressions.

technorati tags:
finances
osx
mac

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Sometimes there's no reason to keep a giant directory, so you can use hdiutil to compress it and then a folder action to automatically mount it. OSXTips shows you how.

Note that it made my finder take a really long time opening the folder the first time (when it mounts). So your mileage may vary.

technorati tags:
osx
cbbtr

I seemed to always have a problem with the unread bit getting "forgotten" on Mail.app. I thought it was a bug on Apple's product but apparently the bug is actually on the GPGMail bundle. Here is how to fix it.

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Last time I didn't write this down and this time I'm blogging about it so I don't forget it. OSX Hints has a good guide on how to set Terminal.app to work the way God Intended (great command line user that He is).

I am handy around the Terminal.app, but for me the main thing that I kept forgetting (and hurts me a lot since my muscle memory depends on it) is moving forward and backwards full word:

"\e[5C": forward-word
"\e[5D": backward-word


By the way, have I mentioned I no longer have to use PCs? Woot!

Update: Here is another guide you may want to take a look at.

technorati tags:osx, terminal.app, bash

Fun and entertaining early Linux History, from Lars Wirzenius:

At one point, Linus had implemented device files in /dev, and wanted to dial up the university computer and debug his terminal emulation code again. So he starts his terminal emulator program and tells it to use /dev/hda. That should have been /dev/ttyS1. Oops. Now his master boot record started with "ATDT" and the university modem pool phone number. I think he implemented permission checking the following day.

Linux Anecdotes

technorati tags:linux, history

If you've followed this for a while you probably know I love emulation and retrocomputing. I'm a big time history geek. Which is why I found this history of the OSX Screen of death entry I found on OSNews pretty cool. And of course I also love when I can tweak things:

Mac OS X allows a custom panic image to be loaded into the kernel from user space. This can be useful in certain circumstances—for example, if it is desired that the user of a managed system notify the administrator in the case of a panic, a custom image can be used to instruct the user.

A New Screen of Death for Mac OS X

It's almost too bad I have only seen the screen once ever on the Mac OS (knock on wood). How would you test this? Parallels for mac, when are you going to run OS X?

technorati tags:osx

I recently got Parallels Workstation for my Intel iMac. This weekend I went on a cleaning spree of my office and I found some very old CDs with Operating systems, software, etcetera.

I decided to take a trip down memory lane and install some of them..

So now I have OS 2 Warp V3, Windows 3.1/MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows 98, in addition to Windows 2000 and XP which I actually use to test.

Fun fun fun!

Man, I love VMs!

technorati tags:vms, retro, virtual-machines, parallels

I just left this on the Adobe forums:

 
I just bought an e-book from amazon because it said it was Adobe Reader.. I didn't choose Microsoft Reader because I have a Linux machine (the book was also available on Microsoft's eReader format). Now only after spending the money do I realize that your application can open these files on every platform BUT Linux. Well if I can't print it, and I can only read it on the desktop at home (where I have a Mac), it completely defeats the purpose of buying an e-book for me.

If this is the level of support you offer your customers, I will not be buying DRM protected books again. I'm an avid buyer of freely available PDFs - The pragmatic programmers provide an excellent selection of programming books on PDFs, as do many other fine technical book publishers.

Even without agreeing with the methods of DRM, I can understand them. But if you are going to go through the trouble of implementing DRM, you would think your company would WANT people to use it, and hence implement it in the same platforms you implement your product. As it stands right now, it's PDF 1, DRM ETD -10000 (since I can't even begin to download it).

What is bad enough to be laughable is the text on the FAQ mentioning that there is not enough market. Somehow I don't believe this for a very simple reason. If Adobe was really interested in knowing whether there is market or not, they would implement the ETD download as a stub that would notify your servers of the attempt (and provide the user with a message about the feature not being implemented in the Linux version). That would be more straightforward and allow your company to determine the actualy market for the product.

But your failure to implement or even mention the feature in the Linux version of the reader is telling enough for me.
 

technorati tags: adobe, drm, linux, consumer