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Tuesday, January 15, 2002
Department of Applied Distraction 
| | I've  got this little window called CPU Monitor (that's it on the right) running on my G4/500 dual processor desktop box in OS X. And since I have two processors here, it shows both of them at once. Like, right now there's a burst of processor activities on both sides as the browser icon bounces in the Dock. When I click on that I see the cycle-waster is a window telling me I'm about to enter an unsecure site, even though I've clicked off the box that tells the browser I don't want to see the warning again. |
| | Anyway, it's one more cool thing that's impressing me about OS X. |
Almost makes me want to hack audio
Tech support as a gift culture
Related
| | When my mother was here over the holidays, I showed her some stuff on the Web, including Google. |
| | "A googol is an infinitely large number," she said. It's not exactly right, but hey. |
| | Mom is 88 now, almost 89. When she was in high school, her friends called her "the human dictionary." I still sometimes use her as one, but I had no idea she knew that. |
A toast to the death of Broadcasting as Usual
Following the Master
| | Brent suggests editing the desktop blog from Radio on one machine while editing another blog (like, say, this one) from another machine. I just tried it. Voila! When I'm ready I'll even start pointing to the desktop blog. Right now it's still in its larval stage. |
This is cool
| | I'm back using Radio on the desktop G4 while I restart the TiBook after downloading and installing some security stuff Software Update says it needed. Wow. It's done. The thing booted up in seconds. Whoa. (Seeing how fast it wakes up from sleep is almost scary.) |
| | Anyway, this is one thing I wanted to be able to do: use Radio (or other software) to hack the same site or document in a serial fashion on more than one machine. It works. Good. |
| | Meanwhile, some other interesting OS virtues have asserted themselves. One is the whole concept of uptime. When I open a command shell and run the uptime command (which consists entirely of typing "uptime" and return), I get this: |
| | 3:00PM up 15 days, 5:28, 2 users, load averages: 0.18, 0.02, 0.00 |
| | Here's another one: Process Viewer, which lists all the processes currently running on the machine. Earlier today something was clearly going wrong on this machine (the desktop G4) when the menu bar disappeared. I opened Process Viewer, saw that something (I forget what) was hogging about 100% of the CPU, double clicked on the item, and forced it to quit. The menu bar returned, and everything proceeded normally. |
| | I then realized that the idea behind OS X, which derives from Unix, is similar to the idea behind a large boat. It's designed to handle many kinds of failure, though in no case by sinking. With your flimsier operating systems, the concept is a bit more like that of a car. In fact, I think the whole idea of "crashing" derives from a car-like metaphorical concept. With cars, crashing is never good, but sometimes it's the only way out of a fix — like, say, when you run off the road to avoid hitting something. Most car crashes aren't total losses, either. Not the same for boats. Sinking is never an option. If it becomes an option, there's a better word for it: scuttling. |
| | Credit where due: I am told that Windows XP is designed to be equally failproof. Maybe it also has a process viewer of some kind. But it doesn't have a command line interface, does it? Not sure. I kinda doubt it. Even if it does, it lacks all the tools that are standard in the Unix toolbox. |
| | So, in OS X, I can skip the process viewer and go straight to the same result in terminal mode. I just type ps -ax in the terminal, and see all the the same processes, and more. Each process has its own number, so I can run the command kill # and it's done. I have no idea if that's do-able in XP, but I am sure that this kind of thing makes OS X a heckuva lot more appealing to Unix hackers (which I'm not, but I'm learning fast) than any Windows alternative. |
| | An interesting twist: this machine is a dual processor G4/500. Is there a way to see what both are up to, I wonder? Must be. |
Hm.
| | I've installed OS X 10.1. Now I want 10.1.2, which many apps seem to prefer. Software Update doesn't say I need it. So I downloaded it from the Apple site, and now I've got MacOSXUpdateCombo10.1.2.pkg. But when I go to open that, it says "Installer Update isrequired for this update." |
Doesn't Satan have a special universe for Mr. Youhanie?
| | Here's a piece in the San Francisco Chronicle on cell phone text message spam, which is starting to show up right when the cell phone companies are ready to promote text mesaging as a Hip New Thing ã y'know, like they have in Europe. |
| | The profiled spammer is Acacia National Morgage (a finanancial institution hosted by Tripod... there's a confidence-inspiring statement), which sent t-spam to thousands of cell phones, after which the company was sued by Verizon Wireless. The two parties settled out of court and Acacia stopped spamming Verizon customers. But that clue failed to penetrate the head of the company's chief: |
| | Jerry Youhanaie, president of Acacia National Mortgage, says federal anti- spam law does not specifically mention e-mail, and therefore his company will continue to market its loans by wireless. He says his company avoids using wireless carriers that charge their customers for each e-mail. |
| | "Obviously, nobody likes to have bad publicity," Youhanaie said about the controversy surrounding his company, "but at the same time not everyone is reporting this in a negative light. This is the wave of the future, and if you don't like it, you need to move to a different universe. |
| | Not speaking of which, my lost Nokia 6160 was replaced with an older 6162 that belonged to a co-worker who moved out of the country. My cell number started its life on a 6162 several years ago, before I lost that phone (there have been at least 3 others between the two, all of which broke and were replaced). Anyway, I forgot how much I prefer the larger, easier-to-use buttons on the older unit, which features a little flip door over the keys. Either way, the Nokia user interface remains the gold standard on cell phones. My wife learned to memorize numbers right away on her new 8260, which never happened on her old Motorola StarTAC. The batteries last longer, too. |
Awright!
| | I've done it. I've got the TiBook running OS X 10.1, and I'm editing the blog in Radio Userland. Seems to work fine. Now I've got some quick tech support questions for ya'll. |
| | First, is there any way to get rid of the anti-aliasing (or font smoothing, or word blurring whatever it is) in either the browser or on the desktop? It looks like everything is typed with a bad ribbon. The text here in RU is clear and sharp, but what shows up in the browser is ugggly. I see it looks fine in the OS 9 versions of the same browsers. |
| | Second, can I get my OS X browsers to pick up on all the bookmarks, histories, etc. that they had in their OS 9 versions? How? |
| | [Later...] One of you pointed out that I can turn off font smoothing in the General control panel. Which is true, but only for fonts 12pt and smaller. I just went to see what happened in IE 5, and it looks ugly as ever, even when I reduce the default font size to 12. |
| | I guess that's because the changes only apply to the desktop UI. There, it turns out, it doesn't help much. Unsmoothed fonts look odd too, but in a different way. |
| | The classic browsers seem to work fine, so I think I'll stick with them for now 'cuz they look better. |
| | Heh: IE just crashed without any collateral casualties. I love that. |
Nice
| | One of the things I've loved about recent MacOS versions is the ability to drag graphics from browsers directly into OS directories or even into documents, and have them copy over, complete with image icons in direcory views. I also appreciate the ability to take an image from a collection of thumbnails in a program like iView Multimedia, and drag/drop it into an HTML editor such as GoLive. |
| | I was worried that I couldn't do that in OS X. I just checked. It works fine, even though iView and iPhoto (two easy image oranizers/editors) are OS X native and my copy of GoLive only works in Classic mode. Turns out it's not a problem. Puts one more fear to rest. |
There are responses to this message:Re: Tuesday, January 15, 2002, Daniel Berlinger, 1/15/02; 7:44:47 PM Re: Tuesday, January 15, 2002, Pat Ritchie, 1/15/02; 6:36:19 PM Re: Tuesday, January 15, 2002, Dave Ely, 1/15/02; 6:02:10 PM Re: Tuesday, January 15, 2002, Brent Simmons, 1/15/02; 4:28:47 PM
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