Shut Up And Click It

Indispensable Mac Apps

I said back in my post on Caffeine that I’d write a post about my favorite OS X apps. Here are the ones I can’t work without.

First and foremost is Growl. Growl is a notification system for OS X that displays unobtrusive messages from other applications that support it. I have it configured for notifications from most of my background apps: Mail.app, Adium, Textual, NetNewsWire, Twitter, and so on. One of the most useful add-ons I’ve found is HardwareGrowler — have you ever wanted a better way for your system to communicate to you when devices are connected or disks are unmounted? This is it.

Adium is an instant messaging client for grown-ups. It supports just about every chat protocol out there, lets  you apply all sorts of themes to both message windows and contact lists, and offers customization for every facet of the app. It doesn’t support video chat though, so don’t go deleting iChat.

TextMate is my go-to text editor, with highlighting and syntax-checking modes included for most major programming and markup languages, and plenty of community-supported extensions for more esoteric ones. It provides integration with commonly-used build systems and interpreters, including XCode. If you program on a Mac, it’s well worth checking out.

NetNewsWire is a cross-platform (OS X and iOS *grin*) RSS reader. You can hook it up to your Google Reader account to synchronize feed subscriptions and read/unread status for articles between all of your accounts. I’ve replaced my iOS client with Reeder though, so it might be time to replace my OS X one too. Suggestions are welcome.

The aforementioned Caffeine is a great way to keep your Mac from dimming its screen or going to sleep if you’re reading something, watching a movie, or giving a presentation.

Flux adjusts your screen’s color temperature to match that of your indoor lighting after sunset. It gets rid of that “eerie blue glow” from using a computer at night and makes it easier on your eyes. Completely automated; just install it and let it do its thing!

In the same vein, Nocturne lets you invert your screen to make it easier on your eyes at night. It’ll set it to monochrome and apply an optional color filter to it to give you red or green on black.

I Love Stars is a menubar widget that lets you rate the currently playing iTunes song with a single click. You can have it flash or play a sound to remind you to rate a currently-unrated track. It’s great for making yourself rate more of your library.

BashFlash sticks another button on your menubar that watches for running Flash plugins in Safari. If one starts consuming a lot of CPU time, it turns red, and clicking on it gives you a menu with the option to kill Flash. Useful!

MacPorts is great for those moments when you go “Gosh, I really wish I had a copy of ImageMagick (or LAME, or ctags, or figlet, or...) right now!” sudo port install ImageMagick, and it’s there.

These are the things I use every day. I hope you’ll find at least one of them as useful as I do.

Why Net Neutrality Matters

Imagine that when we started Apple we set things up so that we could charge purchasers of our computers by the number of bits they use. The personal computer revolution would have been delayed a decade or more. If I had to pay for each bit I used on my 6502 microprocessor, I would not have been able to build my own computers anyway. What if we paid for our roads per mile that we drove? It would be fair and understandable to charge more for someone who drives more. But one of the most wonderful things in our current life is getting in the car and driving anywhere we feel like at this moment, and with no accounting for cost. You just get in your car and go. This is one of the most popular themes of our life and even our popular music. It's a type of freedom from some concerns that makes us happy and not complain. The roads are already paid for. You rarely hear people complain that roads are "free." The government shines when it comes to having provided us pathways to drive around our country. We don't think of the roadways as being negative like telecommunication carriers. It's a rare breath of fresh air.

via www.theatlantic.com

I knew I liked the guy.

Everyone keeps saying that the recent FCC rulings were a step in the right direction because they put some regulations in place where there previously were none. Here’s what I have to say:

Yes, it’s a small step in the right direction. But, in all likelihood, this is the best we’ll ever get, and it’s not good enough. The Obama administration and the current Congress are the most “progressive” we’ve seen in a decade, and this year’s elections indicate that they’re probably also the most progressive government we’ll see for the next decade. It’s impossible to deny that the Internet is going mobile at a rapid (and ever-increasing) pace. Explicitly excluding the mobile data providers from neutrality regulations is, at best, an incredibly negligent decision.

The incoming Republican Congress has already threatened to legislate a repeal of the new neutrality rules. Comcast is currently assaulting Level 3 in a blatant violation of Internet peering tradition. Mobile operators are trying to extort cash from Apple and Facebook in retaliation for the huge spike in data usage they’ve caused, and they’re already entertaining seminars on tiered pricing and per-application fees from enterprising startups looking to jump into what looks to be the brave new world of unregulated mobile Internet service.

Does anyone really see this trend stopping itself, let alone reversing? We’re speeding down the road to an Internet where you have to pay for each and every different site and application you use. An Internet that looks like cable television, or the telephone network before Bell AT&T got broken up.

Internet access providers can and must be treated and regulated as utilities, or the United States will be in a sorry state of affairs when simple economics force the web industry out into countries where you won’t get charged simply to get your foot in the door of a consumer ISP’s network.

The Woz said it best himself: 

When I'm asked my feeling on Net Neutrality I tell the open truth. When I was first asked to "sign on" with some good people interested in Net Neutrality my initial thought was that the economic system works better with tiered pricing for various customers. On the other hand, I'm a founder of the EFF and I care a lot about individuals and their own importance. Finally, the thought hit me that every time and in every way that the telecommunications careers have had power or control, we the people wind up getting screwed. Every audience that I speak this statement and phrase to bursts into applause.

The Obama administration and the FCC need to act now to stop this, or it will be too late.

Caffeine for OS X

A tiny program that puts an icon in the right side of your menu bar. Click it to prevent your Mac from automatically going to sleep, dimming the screen or starting screen savers. Click it again to go back. Hold down the Command key while clicking to show the menu.

via www.apple.com

Ben pointed me at this one. I can’t count the number of times I’ve wanted to override my defaults for screen timeouts, and now I can! Awesome!

I think I’m due to write up a list of all the cool Mac hacks I use. Maybe this weekend.

Gawker hacked in response to 4chan taunts

So, here we are again with a monster release of ownage and data droppage. Previous attacks against the target were mocked, so we came along and raised the bar a little. Fuck you gawker, hows this for “script kids”? Your empire has been compromised, Your servers, Your database’s, Online accounts and source code have all be ripped to shreds! You wanted attention, well guess what, You’ve got it now!

via www.mediaite.com

Gawker seems to have pissed off the wrong people this time — a group of crackers (not hackers) calling themselves “Gnosis” broke into the Gawker content management system in retaliation for Gawker insulting 4chan.

A torrent of stolen data including source code, content database dumps, and user account data has been posted. The best part? Gawker stored passwords using crypt(), aka DES with a 12-bit salt. This means it’s pretty damn easy to guess at passwords. If you were registered for commenting on any of Gawker’s sites, you should make sure none of your other accounts use that password immediately.

Somehow I find it hard to sympathize with Gawker here.

In an obvious move, mobile phone operators demand cash from Apple, Google, and Facebook

Google Inc., Apple Inc., and Facebook Inc. need to pitch in to help pay for the billions of dollars of network investments needed for their bandwidth-hogging services, European phone operators say.

via www.bloomberg.com

Is anyone surprised by this? I mean, after last week’s Comcast/Level 3 debacle, the floodgates are pretty much open for last-mile operators to attempt extortion against any content provider or equipment manufacturer they see fit.

Again, I somehow doubt these network operators will actually invest the money in infrastructure upgrades or use it to offset a reduction in subscriber fees — it’s going straight to their bottom lines.

What we’re really seeing here is broadband (whether fixed or mobile) providers fighting a shift in the industry that leaves them as utilities.

It used to be that your ISP and your mobile phone provider offered lots of value-added services: chat (MMS), content streams (AOL, mobile-phone weather services), and so on. They got away with charging a lot for these because they were in full control over what kinds of bytes you sent and received and how much they wanted each of those bytes to cost.

These days, though, your computer can do everything in its web browser, and your smartphone can do everything with a dumb IP pipe. Want to communicate with friends on the go? Use Twitter instead of SMS. Share pictures and video? Upload to Facebook. Directions? Google. Your ISP and mobile provider are not happy about this, because they can’t differentiate these bytes from each other, which means they can’t charge you extra for them. This leaves them as nothing more than utilities, just like your electricity and water services.

Pacific Gas & Electric doesn’t get to charge you more for the electricity you use to power your TV. Neither do they get to charge TV manufacturers more for getting you to use more electricity. It’s high time that we stop entertaining these shenanigans and regulate data providers as the utilities that they are. 

Facebook messaging is a snooze

Facebook just announced their new messaging system.

Count me out.

I’m not particularly interested in giving Facebook yet another way to slurp up more of my data into their systems where I can’t easily get it it back.

I’ve always hated Facebook messages. Mostly because I have to access them through Facebook’s site (or app) and they’re really hard to share with anyone who isn’t on Facebook. The original implementation got a bunch of other stuff wrong too, most notably the fact that in an N-way conversation for N > 2, the default action is reply-all. (Why on god's green earth?!)

This doesn’t strike me as a really great way to think about communication. No subject lines? No threading? Okay, they’d better have some kick-ass search, and I doubt that they’re going to. They claim to be “working on” IMAP support. Why isn’t it here now? The answer to that is that Facebook doesn’t want you to use IMAP because then you won’t go through their site to get to your messages.

Sure, I’ll probably get my @facebook.com address just in case someone really can’t figure out any other way to contact me (there’s a reason I list my email address and IM screen names on my Facebook profile), but I’m not about to start using it instead of real email and IM. Maybe if it were anyone other than Facebook.

… hey, maybe that should be my new slogan. “Anywhere but Facebook”. What do you think?

Web Designers vs. Web Developers

via sixrevisions.com

via gercek.typepad.com

Not mentioned here is the "Project Manager" which herd these two cats

via www.badnima.com

I want to add that the disclaimer at the bottom about “both afraid of women” should include the fact that gay programmers and designers also exist. ;)

Vertical split for GNU screen (my new awesome terminal setup)

A co-worker of mine has a rather nifty terminal/screen configuration on his development system where he invokes Visor for Terminal.app and has a three-paned split vim instance running in screen for editing.

I became jealous and decided to go one better.

Applying this patch to GNU screen yields a version of screen that can split both horizontally and vertically, just like vim and emacs. So now, I have a three-way split screen session running on my development system that I can ssh into, and the panes aren’t just editors, they’re full-on shells that can then become editors, or do whatever else I want.

This would be a boring post without a screenshot, so here you go: