njr 3.0

...rom 2001, during which I transitioned from tape- to hard drive-based backup; since then my family’s non-laptop Macs have included an iMac and three Mac minis, so I’ve become very familiar with external enclosures and drive docks. The state of the art in these devices is just bad, and has been for years. I’ve had more hardware failures, both of the drives and their enclosures, than with any other electronics product I’ve used in the past decade. In...

6:17 PM | Computing

…pos; bundle ID: com.apple.TextEdit kind: Application TextEdit's creator is actually the same as SimpleText's creator. The code in question is in file.writeTextFile. Here's a fun experiment: [p1:26] ~%touch blah 12:33AM [p1:27] ~%SetFile -t ' ' blah 12:33AM [p1:28] ~%launch -f blah 12:33AM blah: document type: ' ' creator: '' kind: Radio UserLand Document Radio actually registers four spaces as a file ty…

11:35 PM | Radio

…launch 1.0b1 released. Several convenience features are new in this version: launch “slack” URLs (launch -l web.sabi.net), and email addresses without the mailto: (launch -l someone\@somewhere.com). launch can now accept piped input as the bbedit tool does. launch represents standard input by the single dash (-): the equivalent of ls -l | bbedit is ls -l | launch -i com.barebones.bbedit -….

12:45 AM | Radio

…pn Password: kextunload: unload id com.cisco.driver.vpn succeeded (any personalities also unloaded) % sudo kextload /System/Library/Extensions/CiscoVPN.kext kextload: notice: extension /System/Library/Extensions/CiscoVPN.kext has debug properties set kextload: /System/Library/Extensions/CiscoVPN.kext loaded successfully % vpnclient connect DCSnet-wireless fread: Unknown error: 0 Cannot secure command line arguments. % sudo vpnclient connect DCSnet…

11:44 AM | PyCS

…d-line methods for bringing an application to the front. My timings were based on OS X 10.2.4, as of February 2003. I redid the same timings in OS X 10.3.3, adding my launch program, with the following results. Times are in seconds, as measured with time(1): Mac OS X 10.2.4 10.3.3 appswitch -a Emacs 0.355 0.054 appswitch -i com.gnu.Emacs 0.381 0.063 launch -a Emacs n/a 0.085 open -a Emacs 0.842 0.876 osascript -e ‘tell app “Emacs” to activate’ 2.3…

1:38 AM | PyCS