Al Hoang

I’ve been getting acquainted with Panther’s new features. So far I find the UI snappier than Jaguar which is a good thing since I want my UI to wait for me and NOT the other way around.
But here’s some very cool stuff:


man sendmail

SENDMAIL(1)                                             SENDMAIL(1)

NAME
       sendmail - Postfix to Sendmail compatibility interface

VIM(1)                                                         VIM(1)

NAME
       vim - Vi IMproved, a programmers text editor

Apple’s been doing some cleanup under the hood of the UNIX layer underneath. Now that’s service! One other nice thing I’ve noticed is they’ve been going through cleanups of the UI for various programs and making sure that Cmd-, actually means bring up the Preferences. Beforehand programs like Mail.app DID NOT respect this convention and it made it a pain to memorize which particular programs adhered to the new set of keybindings and which ones didn’t but I’m very glad Apple has been going around fixing these warts that have made daily usage a pain.

Chad Dickerson links to Scott Rosenburg’s thoughts on some motherboard issues he was having:

Scott Rosenberg has a darkly entertaining�(though not to him)�post about his recent travails with a motherboard replacement:

Paper clips and solder points?� Are we talking Heathkits here?� These kinds of stories make me seriously doubt the future of autonomic computing, at least for technology�devices that aren’t sitting in a highly-regulated data center environment.

At first I was thinking of nodding my head and thinking “ouch” then I thought about this again knowing what I know about hardware and it’s like… DUH!
If you know anything of how electronics and computers are made at the circuit level most of the commodity stuff isn’t made to be durable or have layers of protection against physical elements like some military grade hardware. So well yeah, one thing will knock down the whole machine. Of course if we’re thinking autonomic computing there are 2 strategies:

1. Make these small components really durable like living organisms so that one bad solder won’t take out the whole system. That will be the start to making the electronics more durable
2. Admit that the electronics stuff would cost too much money and stop thinking in terms of one machine as being the whole organism and just stuff a bunch of PCs and view each of them as one cell (parallel computing anyone?).

So far survey says #2 is winning rather than #1. Anyone that builds #1 charges piles of money for it so enough of these components won’t hit enough of a mass market.

James Robertson’s Blog mentions how he hates flying foreign airlines because they don’t have a power adapter.
Now, I understand the geek fascination with using all your electronic gadgets on the plane… however I tend not to most of the time although I guess if I had a programming project I might get lost in it HOWEVER….
I flew on JAL a little over a month ago (Chicago->Tokyo) and I remember asking the flight attendant if there was a power outlet and she kindly mentioned look under your seat. However, you needed a cigarette adapter to plug into (which I had not bothered to pick up before leaving). Perhaps some planes don’t have this feature but jeeze before you complain about not having power (and frankly not having electricity is a nice wake up call to doing something else besides doing something relies on electricity) look under the seat.

BoingBoing points to GPS Tagged JPEGs. All I can say is… cool!
Although people better start taking more care when taking pictures and posting them if they don’t want to be located.

For some reason, when I upgraded to Panther my Dock shortcut to the X11 Server
busted. After fiddling around I noticed in the Consoloe that it was complaining
about some unrecognized option when launching. I found X11 in the
Applications directory and tried that but the same problem. After scritching my head for a bit I ended up trying to start X from Terminal by just typing X. Lo’ and behold it worked! But I just got an X server without much that was
interesting. So then I tried starting xterm from the Finder (Show in Finder
on the X program brought up /usr/X11R6/bin).
Then the familiar little X11 icon popped up again and this one I ended
up keeping in my Dock and NOW things are working. Not sure what exactly that did to fix it but it ended up fixing it.

Here’s the beginning of the message I got from the Console:

Unrecognized option: –xquartz-be-xinit
use: X [:] [option]
-a # mouse acceleration (pixels)
-ac disable access control restrictions
-audit int set audit trail level
-auth file select authorization file
bc enable bug compatibility
-br create root window with black background
+bs enable any backing store support
-bs disable any backing store support
-c turns off key-click
c # key-click volume (0-100)
-cc int default color visual class
-co file color database file
-core generate core dump on fatal error
-dpi int screen resolution in dots per inch
dpms enables VESA DPMS monitor control
-dpms disables VESA DPMS monitor control
….