Remember those old Apple "switch" ads?

Check out this switch to Linux video.

I finally posted my photos of the city from on Mount Washington last week.  There are some pretty good ones of the city skyline and of Point State Park.

In unrelated news, I had to upgrade to a new version of Quicktime the other day to view a video clip, and I discovered that you can’t get Quicktime without iTunes anymore.  Product tying, anyone?  Microsoft gets buried in lawsuits for including -- horror of horrors -- a web browser with their operating system, yet Apple can force me to run iTunes all day long, when I don’t even own an MP3 player?

Signs of the apocalypse:

Pope dies.

German Pope elected.

Apple moves to Intel.

Microsoft moves to PowerPC.

Debian stable released.

Apple releases multi-button mouse.

(From a couple of Slashdot & ARS posts.)

Apple is transitioning from PowerPC processors made by IBM and Motorola/Freescale, to x86 processors made by Intel.  For once, the rumors turned out to be true.  Of course, this particular rumor has been around for years and has popped up every few months, and it would hardly be realistic to say that it’s been true all along.  In fact, Steve Jobs said in the announcement today that Apple has been maintaining an x86 build of Mac OSX for some time, and that it was "just in case," not part of a long-standing plan to shift to x86.  It turned out to be a good backup plan, given IBM’s continual inability/unwillingness to produce the CPUs that Apple wants.

The new Armor For Sleep album is really good.  Check out this track from it.

Over the past few days I’ve taken a lot of photos:

Ducks and Fog on K-Milk Pond Clouds and Skies and Shiloh Treeline at Dusk

Finally, check out this awesome error I got from one of the ancient Mac OS9 systems at work:

"An unexpected error occurred, because an error of type -110 occurred."

Applications
-> Utilities
-> Disk Utility
-> Images Menu
-> Open...

I want to open the file /tmp/FC3-i386-disc2.iso.  But the dialog provides no way to view the /tmp/ directory.  It appears that’s impossible.  If it IS possible, a half-hour of searching has yet to lead me to the solution.  Anyone?  Please??

The thing that most frustrates me about Windows is its lack of command-line remote administration.  You can hack it in via OpenSSH for Windows but it’s far from perfect -- you can’t use any interactive commands because of problems with STDIN/STDOUT mapping, which cuts out a pretty large swath of the programs you’d like to run.  And it lacks tab-completion as well as command history; pressing the Up key actually makes the cursor move up on the screen.

Even if it worked perfectly, Microsoft makes some things impossible via command line.  For example, I recently discovered that you can use Scheduled Tasks (in the Control Panel) to run a program at boot without having it attached to a window.  That’s awesome for background programs that you’d like to keep running all the time but that you don’t really want cluttering up your taskbar because they take no user input (like Eponym).  But there’s no equivalent command-line way to access the Scheduled Tasks functionality.  There’s "at" but it can’t schedule an event at boot nor multiple times per day.  There’s "schtasks" which actually IS equivalent to Scheduled Tasks in the Control Panel, but it’s not included in XP Home.

The unxutils package improves the situation drastically, giving you lots of the most handy Unix tools like grep and wget.  And of course you can use VNC to do remote administration via the full Windows GUI.  But that’s inconvenient because most internet links are slow, and because you often can’t or don’t want to take over a system that someone else might be using just to do a task that should only require the command-line anyway.

I say that MS should take after Apple: admit that the only thing going for their OS is its nice looks and ease-of-GUI-use, and then get to work building that on top of a REAL OS with nice internals (i.e. Linux or BSD).

And also, Superunknown is still a really good album.

Every day I hate Apple a little more.  (I know... and you thought I already hated them as much as possible.)

Why do I have to pay $300 for an adapter to use an Apple LCD on a VGA video card?  Why does the nohup command fail to log output if I run it in the background?  Why does the entire system lock up if I use any part of the GUI while fscking a partition?

epifagus:/Users/fgpbackup/backups root# ps -lax|grep rsync
su: ps: command not found
su: /usr/bin/grep: Too many open files in system

Thanks, Mac OS X.