Status-Q

[Original Link] …and another great OS X utility. They’re coming thick and fast at the moment. Still Life is a cool and easy way to create slideshows, including that nice Mac thing of zoooming and fading from frame to frame.

[Original Link] This one is strictly for command-line hackers only…

Mac OS X comes with a variety of standard Unix tools that can be used for creating backups, mirroring directories etc, but most of them know nothing about the historical ‘features’ of the HFS+ filesystem, in particular the ‘resource forks’ traditionally associated with Mac files.

This means that backups created with tar, rsync, cpio etc will not necessarily restore all Mac files to a fully-working version. Some of the other included tools and some of the commercial alternatives also have limitations. The ditto command can handle resource forks but is pretty unsophisticated other than that.

Howard Oakley’s hfspax utility is a version of the standard pax command which knows about HFS and will back up files including their resource forks into standard cpio, tar etc archives, or into another directory. It also allows you to rename or exclude files based on regular expressions. I don’t want to back up onto my iPod anything containing ‘.Trash’ or ‘Cache’ in the filename, for example. It allows you to copy only updated files, only those on the same device, and so on. You can end up with some pretty complex command lines, but it will work, can be run from cron or anacron, and is free.

Howard doesn’t blow his own trumpet; there’s no documentation on the web site. Download the archive and look at the included docs.

[Original Link] The story of a chap in Australia who wanted his hardware and software to work as advertised, and wanted the store to sign an agreement to that effect.

[Original Link] Splendid (and brave) letter in today’s Times from J.F.James.

[Original Link] From Memex 1.1:

Paul Strassman did a lovely,
polemical piece for PBS about the
risks implicit in a software monoculture (i.e. a world where
everybody uses Microsoft software) in which he used analogies like
the Irish potato famine to illustrate the point. Microsoft then

replied with a thoughtful piece. Both arguments are flawed, but
the exchange is instructive and would make excellent material for
class discussion.

There’s a story, which may or may not be true, about a caller to a computer helpline saying,
“I deleted a file from my PC last week and I have just realised that I need it. If I turn my system clock back two weeks will I have my file back again?”.

And why not? That’s rather a good idea for a system design…

An article about the 007 phemonenon, reprinted from the New Yorker in today’s Sunday Telegraph has some nice thoughts.

“…Dr No fails, just as Hugo Draz, Emilio Largo, Ernst Stavro Blofeld and all the other nincompoops fail, largely because of their tendency, when at home in their lairs, to avoid the normal practice known as walking and instead cover extremely short distances by monorail.”

“The most worrying aspect of the Brosnan era is that, while GoldenEye took $350m at the box office, the computer game of the same story made even more. How the implications of that success will feed back into future films, one shudders to imagine.”

These little movies have been doing the rounds recently. Great fun.

things1.mpg (approx 640K)
things2.mpg (approx 320K) (my favourite)
things3.mpg (approx 720K)

Duct tape is like the Force. It has a light side and a dark side, and it binds the universe together.

From an NYT review of David Rockefellers memoirs, quoting his description of arguments with an an arch-rival at Chase:

“If the disagreement was strong enough, we could end up pretty close to the borderline of incivility.”

[Original Link] BBC article on the dramatic steps taken by the Korean government to ensure wholesale broadband deployment.