Jaharmi’s Irreality renewable hyperlinks with 0% transfat since 1999

“Well, you know, I think when you go into a bar and you serve the country, you deserve to have your chicken wing not be alligator-clamped onto a booklight. That’s what separates us from the Russians.”

— Merlin Mann, You Look Nice Today: “Aunt Nancy”, approximately 15:52

Note: In case you wondered, StupidFilter rated that quote as “not likely to be stupid.”

If you can’t remember the specific name of an application, but you often think of it by another name, you can change how it is referred to in your LaunchBar configuration.

I used to do something like this with Microsoft Excel; I’d change its name in the LaunchBar configuration to “XL.” You could also refer “Lineform” as “Illustrator” without changing the application’s name in the Finder.

To make the change, open LaunchBar. If you can remember the application, perform a search for it. When it is selected in the LaunchBar bar, choose Configuration > Reveal in Configuration. Enter a new name for the selected app in the “Name” column in the window that appears.

I’m not aware, however, of a way to have an application to respond to two or more names in LaunchBar. There may be a way; I just don’t know it.

Does anyone else think that Apple has some ulterior motive for promoting Viva la Vida, the track on the new iTunes ad featuring Coldplay? That maybe its lyrics are indicative of something going on at Apple?

“When I ruled the world,” indeed.

No matter. I find it a fantastic visual treat and now the haunting music is stuck in my head. I would not be surprised if it were featured at WWDC 2008 in a few weeks.

I ran a quick test of the Python “title” string method (from Python 2.5.1 in Leopard); it fails the tests on the edge cases mentioned in the Title Case post at Daring Fireball. It really only uppercases the first letter of every word and lowercases everything else.

Not much better than looping through a string with ucfirst() in Perl, except you don’t have to do the looping yourself.

Drat. I was expecting better.

I was reviewing the pre-release CIS guide for securing Leopard today, and was struck by the many ways people refer to the action of logging in to a computer. This is really a situation calling out for consistent usage based on a style sheet.

So, here are my personal observations on the matter:

• Login is the noun of the bunch. The New Oxford American Dictionary (handy to use, since it’s built into the Dictionary application on Mac OS X) agrees with me here, calling it “an act of logging in to a computer system.” They also list “logon” as an alternative, and I agree. “He used his login credentials to access the system,” would be a usage example.
• Log in is the verb form. The NOAD backs me up, listing it and “log on” as “phrasal verbs” whose meanings are, “go through the procedures to begin use of a computer system, which includes establishing the identity of the user.” For an example phrase, “Security procedures require that you log in to the computer.”
• Log into should not be used, as far as I’m concerned. “Log onto” would be its close brethren, also to be avoided. The NOAD has no listing for either. My proposed alternatives would simply be to add a space: “log in to” or “log on to.” Then, you’re using the phrasal verb.

As I was examining the document, I decide to see what Apple does. I was using the dictionary data they bundle with the operating system, and reviewing a document about their software. They are usually hip with consistency and thus a good example, I thought.

In this case, they aren’t entirely consistent. I found one case — in Accounts System Preferences while editing the Guest account — where they use both “log into” and “log in to,” all on the same screen.

Yes, I forgot to renew my domain. Yes, that became a real pain very quickly when I realized what the repercussions were.

For future generations, I suggest not having to deal with this when:

• you want to switch domain registrars
• you want to switch DNS hosting providers
• your goal is to save money
• you have never switched either registrars or DNS hosts for any domain before
• your domain’s WHOIS records are severely out-of-date (mostly because, through a comedy of errors, your host won’t let you update them)
• most of your administrative e-mail goes to a now-defunct mail address whose inbox you cannot access (I’m looking at you, .Mac, with your costs that went from $0 to $99/year in one year, and your vexing lack of forwarding)
• the rest of your administrative e-mail goes to an address in your expired domain (“because that’s the one e-mail address I’ll always have control over! Not like that .Mac account, no!”)
• you forgot that the reason why you didn’t switch domain and DNS providers earlier was because of the WHOIS hassle, and you just blithely plunged ahead with it
• you’ve waited until the day the current domain hosting provider has cut off your service (“hey, why can’t I connect to anything in my domain today? Er … ah … hm … oops. Maybe I should Twitter about this.”)
• you have to converse with the support organizations of at least two companies, and one of them is losing business
• you have better things to do with your life.

Lesson learned.

Anyway, it looks as if the long electronic nightmare of jaharmi.com being offline for Web and e-mail purposes has now ended. I can see this site. I can send and receive e-mail.

Good day.

The refreshed Terminal utility in Mac OS X Leopard doesn’t have an obvious way to revert settings changes you make in the Preferences window. Or, at least, it doesn’t have an obvious way if you’re used to seeing a “Revert to Defaults” button or somesuch.

At first, while I was trying out some new font/color combinations — something I hadn’t touched since Jaguar — I was put off by the lack of a “Revert” or “Cancel” button.

Then, being a long-time Mac user, I realized that I should try thinking the Mac way. Instead pressing a button to get rid of the changes, what would a Mac application do? Undo!

I found that if you make preferences selections that modify your terminals’ appearance or behavior — which are “live” and affect your frontmost Terminal window immediately, so you can preview them — you can simply use Edit > Undo to revert whatever changes you’ve made. Just do it while the Preferences window is still open.

I’ll grant that Undo is not the most obvious option for this action in some sense. It’s not right in your face, staring at you from the Preferences window. Thinking about myself looking for a button to undo these changes reminded me of watching the convoluted steps I sometimes see people take for actions when they’re new to the Mac. Have we all just trained ourselves to expect complexity?

I realized today that Adium 1.1.4 takes up 39 MB, which is about the size of:

• my old Mac LC’s internal hard disk, sold long ago
• half of a Bernoulli removable disk that’s stored in my garage right now.

How times have changed.

Heather B, talking about whether there should be any sort of tribute when Briere or Drury return to HSBC Arena on opposing teams, compares them to other recent Sabres:

“Dominik Hasek was the team for many, many years and while he was a prick at times he was also arguably the best hockey player to ever put on a Sabres uniform. How was he welcomed back to Buffalo? We booed his ass.”

She also disses Bucky Gleason. Bucky sounds fine on the radio when I’ve heard him talking about the Bills, but I simply won’t read his stuff about the Sabres anymore.

Reading the Macalope’s ACME Pundit Saws post — wherein he skewers David Berlind about his ZDnet post, Is Apple getting dragged (kicking, screaming, or suing?) into licensing OS X? — I haven’t written down my own thoughts regarding the sale of Mac OS X to regular PC owners.

I think this is a situation where Apple could get in front of the market. Even though their sales are booming, Apple has taken a few risks that might have eroded their position. There was a quote where the company’s CEO said that if someone were to make their products obsolete, it should be them. I think this is telling — to get on top, you make risky moves like replacing a successful iPod mini with the iPod nano, or the iPod nano with a wildly different model. Living where I do, I can’t help but contrast this to a company like Kodak that practically begged everyone to take its core business away by not reinventing itself and its products. A cash cow product like film photography can go out to pasture more quickly than you think.

I’m not sure Apple has made this kind of move for the Mac, at least not yet. In fact, ever since the Intel transition, they’ve mostly sat on their Mac lineup. The MacBook was brand new, but derivative, and has seen several updates. The MacBook Pro is very close on the outside to the PowerBook G4, and has also seen several updates. The iMac, Mac Pro, and Mac mini have been quite static.

To get back to licensing, one area where Apple could do the unexpected would be to sell Mac OS X for generic PCs. I think to offset the potential for considerable support costs, it could be a separate edition of the operating system that sells for a higher price — maybe on the order of the current Mac OS X Family Pack or Windows Vista Ultimate at retail. This extra cost might also cover some aspects of software piracy, even to the extent of a system to attempt to lock the OS to a specific PC, similar to Windows activation.

The benefit, I think, of having Mac OS X on more generic hardware is that this might create a larger Mac community. I don’t think it would create a majority, by any means, but it would tap users who wouldn’t have run Mac OS X otherwise. And, it would allow those people who kitbash computers together some leeway in building their own systems.

Give customers one more reason to choose your system, because people who choose computers seem to be choosing Macs in increasing numbers. I don’t see Apple winning the managed IT space where computers are selected for the users, but I do see Macs being chosen by more people for their own purchases.

As long as Apple provides some compatibility information on what is known to work, this could effective get Macs into form factors where Apple isn’t. The mid-range headless desktop is one such place that the company fails to address, and yet I know many people who stress over the lack of hardware in the $900-1500 price range. In my observation, there is overlap between the people who don’t use Mac OS X today, UNIX/Linux users, and people who build their own systems.

New hardware options might also spur developers — and the community of users that surround them — to create drivers for the hardware that currently lacks it and improve existing drivers for everyone. This may be especially true for open source drivers.

One way to limit sales while tapping this homebrew market would be to require even a free ADC subscription (and the concomitant NDA) in order to buy through that non-retail channel. You can already buy upgraded ADC accounts there — and discounted developer hardware, if you have that option on your account — so why not sell Mac OS X for regular PCs there? Give it a trial run and see what happens.

I have long hoped that Apple would someday embrace people who build their own systems — I wrote a position paper about this for a marketing class back in the 90’s and my thoughts haven’t changed much on that score since then. I believe that selling Mac OS X to at least a section of the PC market makes sense. Given Mac OS X’s broadening appeal and its apparent reach into the power user and alpha geek markets, it may even cement Mac OS X as the operating system of choice.