Log

I guess once the proverbial writing on the wall is large enough, even the zealots find it hard to continue pretending they can't see it.

What am I talking about?  The realization that Apple, like Microsoft, Intel, Dell, and every other behemoth company (tech or otherwise), eventually bends to the crushing demand for year-over-year stock growth.  And when you're so big you create your own weather, the only way to manifest continued growth is to become a psychopathic, malignant entity hell-bent on squeezing the market for that extra shred of revenue even if it means the ruin of civilization.  Morphing from plucky, idealistic, everyman's company, fighting the good fight, to card-carrying agent of evil is not a transition that's instantaneous, but neither is it subtle.  If you're not so busy kneeling at the obelisk, head bobbing back and forth, watering eyes squeezed shut, while you try to suppress the gag reflex, you generally can see your beloved company changing quite apparently.  

With increasing frequency, Apple is demonstating just how far down the slippery slope they've slide, and that they're accelerating rather than arresting their descent.

And I don't blame them, not specifically anyway.  Or, rather, I'm not in the least bit surprised.  They're playing the corporate market-share game, and it's a ruthless, bloody, lawless-behind-closed-doors, game that is unfortunately the only game in town.  Don't hate the playa, as they say.  Well, I hate both the players and the game.  Our economic systems, global and national, reward and encourage evil.  Expecting corporations to not be evil under those circumstances is pure folly.  And expecting the systems to change when they're controlled directly by the entities benefitting from them is equal folly.

For those who haven't been paying attention, here's a decent summary of the stuff Apple's been doing: Jason Calacanis makes the "Case Against Apple in Five Parts".

And of course the Google Voice App rejection fiasco is proving to be very effective at snapping many out of their hypnotic coma of Apple idolatry.  Even so, some want to argue that it was just "out of character" for Apple, whereas I say that it was a textbook bellwether indicator, and there's every reason to expect more of the same.

One bit of irony in this that isn't lost on me is that the other half of the controversy (Google) is itself an entity tetering on the edge of morality.  Which direction it will ultimately sway is not a mystery.

[UPDATE] Still not sure?  Still hoping Apple's culture-shaping brand power hasn't taken root as a festering infection within its proverbial core?   Well, apparently Apple is convinced it owns the concept of an apple, as in the fruit.

While in a previous post I claimed that Finder had the 'good sense' to not show .DS_Store files, the fact of the matter is that in general I don't want it hiding things from me.  If something's on disk, I want to see it.  Apparently I'm in the universal minority here, since all three main platforms (*nix, OSX, and Windows) have as their default behavior the cloaking/supressing of various filesystem content.  On linux, 'ls' requires the '-a' argument if you want to see everything.  Windows forces you to edit folder visibility properties.  And OSX hides all '.*' content unless you apply the following bit of voodoo:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE

A quick restart will reveal all, including things like '.localized' on your desktop.

An OS and/or window manager shouldn't be leaving little turds all over my filesystem.  That's exactly what OSX does.  It poops everywhere it goes.  Little OSX dingleberries named '.DS_Store'.  It's annoying enough that it does it locally, where it at least has the good sense to not show them in the GUI file browser (though they're in full view from the shell).  But the fact that it flings its poo all over any and every network mounted directory is just inexcusable.

Thankfully, its easy enough to get it to behave a bit more civilized 'in public', by disabling the creation of the .DS_Store files on network mounted directories.  The necessary bit of OSX voodoo is the following command:

defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true

I think a reboot is necessary for it to take effect.  And you'll probably want to take a broom to any locations that have been sullied, via something like:

find . -mount -name '.DS_Store' | xargs -L1 -I {} rm -v {}

Bad OSX -- No biscuit!!

I was feeling churlish and finally annoyed enough with the default login background for OSX that I figured I'd google out the recipe for changing it.  Turns out it was trivially simple.  And in addition I swapped in an 'improvement' on the apple logo itself  [snicker snicker].

Here's how you can get OSX (Leorpard) to flush its DNS cache:

sudo dscacheutil -flushcache

If prior to doing so you wanted to see what it actually had cached, use the following:

sudo dscacheutil -cachedump -entries

Not terribly useful, but when you're setting up a LAN and there's some IP:name flux and you need to force OSX to see the new mapping, this is the way to do it.

Want to have the window focus follow your mouse (i.e. without clicking)?  Tough.  You can't.  At least, not for native quartz apps.  You can get the OSX X11 server to do it for X11 apps via the following command:

defaults write org.x.X11 wm_ffm true

But as far as I can tell from googling, it's impossible to get quartz to behave this way.  Which SUCKS!

If you need to do any bulk file transfers from OSX (using SCP or SFTP), Fugu works great.

In what is sure to be a chronic occurrence, I was frustrated by OSX pretending to act like Linux without actually doing the same thing.  Specifically this time I wanted to change the hostname.  The following sort of does it but not really:

• sudo hostname <newhostname>

According to a post at the bottom of this blog, the following are also necessary:

• sudo scutil --set LocalHostName
• sudo scutil --set ComputerName
• sudo scutil --set HostName

In addition, it's necessary to go into [System Preferences] -> [Sharing] and change the 'Computer Name'.

And all of that won't get around the name provided by DHCP, depending on the DHCP server's config.

(note that this applies to Leopard 10.5.2)