Mac Geekery

…or: how I learned to hate Installer VISE.

In my previous article I described a mehodology for mimicing the functionality of the Windows “Power Users” group. Between implementing this and implementing directory-based accounts I have learned one valuable lesson: people who use Installer VISE (or some other malformed 3rd party installation application) need to be slapped upside the head. There's more »

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Hello, this will be my first blog entry. I don’t plan to post to a blog regularly but occasionally I feel like putting up my opinions somewhere so someone can read them. you will probably find the same entries at slashdot just as ignored if not more so (cause its a bigger site). I will put an effort towards spelling and my grammar is naturally good. (still in school so I’m still compelled to write well)

Today I would like to address something I heard on the Macgeekery Podcast. There's more »

I hate hype. After all the crazy, crazy talk what did we land? A generic update to the mini that gives it the Intel chip, a nice update to Front Row, and an over-priced speaker.

But then look at how it was done. Apple took a small set of people into a private room, presented a very short introduction to the items, and then let them go. Even Apple saw it as a small event.

In the end, it was the rumor-mongers that made this larger-than-life. The pre-event Mac society is no better than 16 yo. girls chasing after their favorite pop star, and that’s kind of embarrassing to be even tangentially-related to.

I really hate iTunes. Part of it is how I need to handle my music and how iTunes isn’t designed for it, and part of it is that the program is just badly tuned for the systems it runs on, but, in the end, I really hate iTunes.

I have 60GB+ of music and a 30GB drive in my computer. This means all of my music resides on a server at home and, when I am home, I mount the share and start iTunes. It’s set to use a folder on that remote share as the library location and that generally works. Except when it doesn’t. If the share is not mounted when iTunes is open then it says all my music doesn’t exist rather than trying to open the share and check, which it curiously does when I try to play any of that music by double-clicking on a song.

Once it knows one track in a folder exists, one would think it would say “all of these others should exist, too” and check for them. No. I have to either manually play each one or quit and re-open the program for it to see that the library is there. Even “next song” doesn’t work. I have to double-click each song for it to realize that it’s now there, even though it could know that the music library now exists.

The combination of the two is bad, but I can work around it. I have an AppleScript with iTunes’ icon pasted onto it that mounts the share and then starts iTunes. It works. What I can’t fix is the podcast handling which is about to make me use Juice instead. There's more »

Hi folks, I'm a software developer in a very small software company that makes a JavaScript interpreter. I write and debug software in C and Java mostly, and also write and debug a lot of JavaScript. Since we build and test our software on a wide variety of platforms (from PalmOS to Windows to Solaris, to AIX, blah, blah, blah), we have a very heterogenous collection of computers at our company. Besides doing software development and support on those systems, I also administer them. I don't claim to be an expert in all or any of those systems, but I have gotten a little programming and administration experience on a lot of platforms. There's more »