I know, three posts in one day is really too many; but this quote really tickles my funny bone while being a solid reminder why we need some humility and introspection powers.
While discussing the requirements or principles that might guide the development of a new mail application for Mac OS X; Brent manages to use “Let yaks prowl the grounds unshaven.” in a document. Excellent.
Follow along here for more.
SCons
make for over 20 years; I’ve decided that something has to be better. Turns out, there is something better.scons together for the last few months.
What a wonderful tool for building. There is a ton of information online, so I won’t add to the mélé with my opinions.
Check it out : scons.org.
Website #FAILs.
Lately I’ve noticed a lot of websites make crazy assumptions about my location. I was thinking it was geolocation gone wrong, but it appears that in general they are doing something completely illogical: they are using my language preference list to guess where I am.
This amounts to assuming that all French speaking people are in France, that all English speaking people are in England and so on.
What does RFC 2616 have to say about this?
14.4 Accept-Language
The Accept-Language request-header field is similar to Accept, but
restricts the set of natural languages that are preferred as a
response to the request. Language tags are defined in section 3.10.
…
Nothing there about location? This is a classic assumption / layer violation in a design.
The worst offenders here are, by in large, financial institutions. When I visit ING Direct, they redirect me immediately to the Canadian login screen. Trouble is — I don’t have a Canadian account. Worse — there is no button to override their error the button to fix the problem is buried and two layers deep. Outsmarted by not too clever web developers.
Ouch. That hurts.
Wonder what would happen if I visited with a language preference set to en_DE or en_FR?
I managed to install vmware tools into my guest OS (CentOS 5.2) using the manual install method, mounting the ISO image and then running the perl installer. So far, so good.
However, the files are all mounted with the host OS uid/gid. There is likely a better solution, but given that the guest is a single user (effectively) environment, I just mapped the host fs to my guest OS uid/gid by editing the /etc/fstab file.
# Beginning of the block added by the VMware software
.host:/ /mnt/hgfs vmhgfs defaults,ttl=5 0 0
# End of the block added by the VMware software
Changes to :
# Beginning of the block added by the VMware software
.host:/ /mnt/hgfs vmhgfs defaults,ttl=5, uid=500,gid=500 0 0
# End of the block added by the VMware software
The 500/500 comes from my id on the linux guest OS, NOT the host OS.
Good luck!
Microsoft has apparently released some advertising for their new Office flagship collection (Office 2010). The movie can be seen on YouTube here.
I find it upsetting that they can spend lavishly promoting nothing — note that there are zero product shots in this ad. It is pure blockbuster hype.
Arial!? Don’t get me started on Arial. Perhaps MSFT could have spent a little money improving the Windows font engines and licensing some non-horrid fonts from a reasonable foundry. I still think Arial is a poorman’s Helvetica and will never be a substitute.
Checkout Helvetica vs. Arial if you haven’t already seen this.
Surprisingly, there are still quite a few pages on this topic indexed at Google.
Sometimes you just have to wonder what the web developers were smoking. A large trading company recently told me the following after I failed to remember my password in three attempts:
Beacuse I might not be using a web browser to do anything else.
So there goes any hope that I’ll get that task done. They are forcing me to ignore them until I can restart my browser. Who really things this is OK? Why to consumers settle for this kind of quality? We should all know better than this.
Just as I had finished complaining about Cisco’s VPN drivers causing crashes, I stumbled across a macosxhints.com hint about vpnc.
Looks like this is well worth the effort to install and try it out. This will let me get that Cisco code out of my kernel and perhaps make the lock-ups go away.
Further instructions are available at the original poster’s site.
I’ll update this post with my experiences.
Something isn’t working properly with my normal theme, so I have installed the Wordpress ugly default until I can debug the combination of Themes and plugins I was using previously.
I’ve been using a Mac since 2003, and I love it. It is far and away my favorite machine of all time, I’ve had several and I will continue to buy and use them. For software development and general messing around, having a BSD-like OS under a pretty hood has been VERY excellent.
One things that really frustrates me though are the large number of software vendors that truly do not ‘get’ the Mac world and insist on shipping installers (instead of just dragging / copying to install) and one level worse : installers that ask for a reboot or shutdown other applications. This just isn’t in keeping with the spirit of things on the Apple platform. Wait, there is a level even worse than all this: Kernel extensions.
My Mac crashes about once a week. It never used to crash, ever. Of all the programs I run, the two right at the very top of the “crash my Mac” list are two that I really cannot do without: Cisco’s VPN Software and VMware Fusion.
Sadly these two applications are very useful, however, they are the worst offenders when it comes to doing things against the grain. The Cisco software creates a proprietary VPN connection (based loosely on IPsec, but not really) and eschews the fact that the Mac has perfectly good IETF-IPsec built right in. Secondly, the driver code is terrible. 9/10ths of my crashes have a stack trace in the kernel that points directly at the Cisco VPN drivers. It isn’t very useful if I have to take my VPN down all the time to avoid crashing my machine.
And VMware fusion, well, they just simply don’t play well with others either. Check out this known issue from their latest release:
Do not install VMware Fusion 2 and CheckPoint SecureClient on the same Mac
When both VMware Fusion 2 and SecureClient VPN applications are installed on one Mac, the Mac OS X stops responding while booting or shutting down.
If you encounter this issue, use the following workaround to boot your Mac in Safe Mode and remove one of the applications:
- Make sure the Mac is powered off.
- Press the power button.
- Press and hold the Shift key immediately after you hear the startup tone (but not before).
- Release the Shift key when you see the gray Apple and a progress indicator.
- Uninstall SecureClient or VMware Fusion.
- Reboot the Mac.
Sorry, you just cannot use us if you use SecureClient. Nice.
Sigh. I think I’ll take my VPN down and reboot prior to launching VMware. Yeah. That’s fun.
As we were driving North on CA-1 on our way back from the elephant seal rookery, KC and I saw an odd vehicle off in the distance. At first it looked like a wide-load with some sort of farm equipment in the front. As the ‘farm equipment’ got closer (it was closing fast) it started to look like a squat vehicle. At first I figured it was a Shell Solar Challenge vehicle, but once we got home we noticed that the news had a story.
It is a fellow Canadian who has made this vechicle (and driving it around North America) quite a project.
More here.
Photo by Jack Snell — I didn’t get a chance to take one as it zoomed by on a twisty section of CA-1.
PS: Damn – it was cool looking and booking along, fast.
