the art of writing is discovering what you believe
How Mac and Windows Can Talk to Each Other
I have been a PC user since 1984. Until recently it has been my understanding that Mac files and Windows files are incompatible. Is that still true? If I should buy an iMac, could I still exchange files with people who use Windows 98 or XP?
This hasn’t been true for everyday applications for most of the 18 years this person has been harboring these delusions. No wonder Apple still struggles to get a foothold.
While sitting in my downstairs office, I heard some small animal foot steps crunching the leaves along the path: at first I guessed it was the neighbor’s cat, but the steps were not deliberate enough, too random. I looked at the window to see what I might see, as the steps got closer, and there he was , suddenly poking his snout into the light.
No, that’s not the same guy I saw, but the effect is the same. They are cute little buggers, but I’m not sure I want any hanging around my house.
This image was all that appeared below the banner of the Seattle Times today, measuring about 4 inches tall, center above the fold, with the text underneath. The news started on page A3, with A2 reserved for the names of the victims. Even the barcode was moved to the back page.
Stark, understated, and moving, I think.
quotidian: samba tips for OS X
(I wonder when Apple will switch to xinetd? and if I switched, what would it wreck?)
Haven’t found anything broken yet.
The Common UNIX Printing System ("CUPS") is a cross-platform Open Source printing solution for UNIX environments, and will be used as a portable printing layer for Darwin and Mac OS X. CUPS is based on the Internet Printing Protocol and provides both System V and BSD command-line printing services for PostScript and raster printers.
I’m a big fan of CUPS and I’m glad it made it into Jaguar. But for some reason, I haven’t found anything about how you configure it if you’ve never seen it before.
It has a nice web interface to set up it’s print services, but unless you enable it in the cupsd.conf file, you’ll never see it.
Continue reading “CUPS in Jaguar”
I needed to get all the addresses from an old copy of Outlook Express into Apple’s Mail application. Jaguar ships with an AppleScript that handles it for you . . . if you know where to look for it. It’s linked above.
A year ago tonight, on the eve of the World Trade Center attacks, I found my eyes drawn to the Seattle skyline for no conscious reason. I had no premonitions, I didn’t have any kind of “bad feeling.”I just couldn’t sleep, around midnight, and as I often do, I stare out my windows at the skyline (no, my view is not quite as good as the photo). A year ago, I just couldn’t stop staring.
Mac OS X-Installing Perl 5.8 on Jaguar
OS X users that have installed Fink may experience various symbol errors when executing certain Perl operations. More on this can be found in the macosx@perl.org archives.
What this means is that perl 5.8 breaks fink. Plain and simple. This claims to be the solution, but right now I would just as soon get 5.6 back. It isn’t, but read on for a solution.
How annoying. There’s nothing in the excerpt above that I parse as “fink and perl 5.8 are incompatible: choose one or the other.”
Update:
The two versions of perl — the 5.6 release that ships with OS X 10.x and the 5.8 release that’s supposed to be better — put their libperl files in different places.So I simply copied the perl executable from another machine I hadn’t “upgraded.” I’d feel better if I had the original distribution or was building from source: that’s next, I guess.
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 862676 Jul 27 20:02 /System/Library/Perl/darwin/CORE/libperl.dylib
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root admin 1118836 Sep 10 12:25 /Library/Perl/darwin/CORE/libperl.dylib
/Library is for user-installed stuff and /System/Library is for, well, system stuff, what ships with the OS. Version numbers would be useful, but this filing convention saved me this time.
I get these randomly generated nuggets from the UNIX fortune(1) file, when I login,create an email, etc. I never saw this one before.
What does it take for Americans to do great things; to go to the moon, to
win wars, to dig canals linking oceans, to build railroads across a continent?
In independent thought about this question, Neil Armstrong and I concluded
that it takes a coincidence of four conditions, or in Neil’s view, the
simultaneous peaking of four of the many cycles of American life. First, a
base of technology must exist from which to do the thing to be done. Second,
a period of national uneasiness about America’s place in the scheme of human
activities must exist. Third, some catalytic event must occur that focuses
the national attention upon the direction to proceed. Finally, an articulate
and wise leader must sense these first three conditions and put forth with
words and action the great thing to be accomplished. The motivation of young
Americans to do what needs to be done flows from such a coincidence of
conditions. … The Thomas Jeffersons, The Teddy Roosevelts, The John
Kennedys appear. We must begin to create the tools of leadership which they,
and their young frontiersmen, will require to lead us onward and upward.
— Dr. Harrison H. Schmidt
Much has been written about the cyclical nature of societies: I wonder where our communal biorhythm is right now?
Rolling Requiem: Broadcast and Streaming Information
One of the largest Rolling Requiem performances will occur at Safeco Field, in Seattle, WA, conducted by Maestro Gerard Schwarz, and featuring the Seattle Symphony Chorale, where the plans for the event originated. KING FM will come to you live from Safeco Field beginning at 6 A.M. pacific time on September 11th. The broadcast can be heard on 98.1 FM in the Seattle, WA area and streaming online from: http://www.king.org/reg/king.ram
I expect I’ll be listening to this throughout the day. I would like to go to Safeco Field, but that collides with school starting time, and as magical an event as it will be, it won’t reach a 4 and 5 year old just yet. Also, we’re trying not to make too much of the event or its commemoration just yet: it’s too hard to explain, especially if you have no good answers to the inevitable questions, like “Why?”
Find a broadcast/webcast that fits your schedule and listen in as the world remembers.
Continue reading “roll on”
