The rest is silence¶
574 words
Some more links and random points thrown along your way.
- Die Zeit has an interview with George Tabori who is turning 90.
- What's the last sentence Hamlet says? Could you tell (a) by heart (b) by going to your bookshelf (c) using digital resources?
-
Following up on recent security problems with the
help:protocol helper on the Mac, it turns out similar problems exist for Terminal as the protocol helper fortelnet:. There go our files. Read about it on John Gruber's site. - There go our files, thanks to Apple's careless implementation of the helper protocol thingie. I read a book about programming long ago and they made a point about having strict specifications for what your functions do. This was to be interpreted strictly – you were encouraged (or rather obliged) to make sure your functions don't do anything else. Perhaps people at Apple should read similar books.
-
When writing that post about the
help:thing – I had evil thoughts about the same lines. Thanks to the other people taking the time to figure this out – so I didn't have to waste my time tinkering around. When looking at the other protocols there are, be amused by the fact that opening the simple URL applescript:// is somewhat annoying. -
I guess having URLs like ssh://localhost%20top – while not immediately dangerous as they require you to enter a password – could be nasty as well. How many people would enter their password here... even for some
rm -rftreats. - Perhaps MacOS 9 was inherently safer in all these respects as there simply were no command line tools which you could let the user invoke with arbitrary options. This forced people to implement a proper interface to such services all the time. The same might hold for the non-importance of paths in the classic MacOS and the fact that you didn't have a "home" folder.
-
There are fun online shops where you can set up your own T-Shirt designs. Not only using the standard colour printing and sticking onto the fabric techniques but also the more fancy ones. I recreated one of my favourite Mac symbols for this. What do you think?
-
My iPod just displayed a spinning disc with a magnifying glass after I connected it to my computer. That lasted for ages and now there is a little check mark on the disk. The iPod didn't mount automatically afterwards. I had to touch it which would cause a reboot (i.e. Apple logo showing for
10 seconds or soan eternity). And then it mounted just as it should. - More iPod complaints: Why can't I simply remove the iPod while the computer is asleep without the OS complaining afterwards. That really annoys me. And why does iTunes do some iPod un- and remounting after waking up nonetheless? Something that annoys me as well as iTunes will always display the iPod contents.
- I meant to elabore this for weeks – but it's just not going to happen... I had a fun discussion while in Berkeley where a guy pointed out to me that when we are shopping it's more and more like the customers are becoming part of the inventory. Of course the whole tendency is clear and almost obvious in the case of magazines as Dave pointed out but I thought it was a good way to put it. Insert many more words and rants concerning credit and 'club' cards here....
