Self-Management

It seems I only have time for these brief posts. Tons in the pipe; time for none. Life must be... I dunno... Good or somethin'...

Anyway, I just updated my iPhone to the latest 1.1.3 firmware. You know, the one with all the goodies. It's pretty damn hot, I must say. The most useful thing will be the ability to send text to multiple folks. But the faux GPS is pretty damn cool too.

The other thing I updated was my iTunes, wherein I discovered this little nugget:

iTunes 7.6: Manually manage music and videos
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Looks like you can finally drag and drop music right into your iPhone and create iPhone-specific playlists — ones that live right on the phone and nowhere else. At this point I'm so used to the old way of doing things that I'm not sure what to do with this feature. But something tells me this new found freedom will be a boon at some point in the very near future.

Just as soon as I have some time to use it.

MacBook Air

The MacBook Air came out today. It's tiny. It's light. It's as beautiful as anything Apple has ever made. But it's just too damn expensive. Knock off about $600 clams and I think they'd have a hit. But at $1800 bucks, I think I'll take something with a firewire port, thanks. Or I'll just use my iPhone.

MacBook Air: Too Expensive
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I am, however, getting one of these. This week if possible.

Mac Pro: Awesome
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Goody!

Web Programming and MacFUSE

I'm not a web programmer by any means. But a component of the department I work in deals with the web from an artistic standpoint, and a subset of that group does, in fact, do programming. We have web programming classes.

Recently, one of the teachers of one of those classes made the charge that our approach to web programming is old and outmoded. Whether this is true or not is not really the issue. I've been looking for new ways to think about the systems end of that workflow because, well, that's my job, and because it's an inherently interesting challenge to me. How can we make our web development environment more user-friendly?

One general suggestion has been to make the experience more "OS-like." And one step in this direction is to have the web server mount on the Desktop, allowing the developer to work on her site as if it were local. That is, rather than firing up one of the popular SFTP clients and transferring files back and forth from the local machine to the server, the developer could mount her site — or actually, the share her site lives on — directly on the local filesystem. I have two options here: MacFUSE and NFS. I'm testing both currently. So far I've had a couple minor hiccups with MacFUSE's sshfs.app, but it looks to be a fairly smart and user-friendly implementation that web developers here might benefit from. And the NFS approach would work well also, though only from inside the network.

I'm curious what other Lab Admins are doing with regards to web development in their environments. How have you facilitated ease-of-use for a process that's inherently complicated? Or have you? Also, I'm curious if anyone is using MacFUSE — specifically the sshfs component — and what experiences you might have had with it, either positive or negative.

If any of you fine readers have any thoughts on this I would really love to hear them. I've been querying students, staff and faculty for ideas, but haven't come up with much. Maybe things here are perfect, but somehow I doubt it. And, as always, I really just want to make things better.

Please sound off in the comments if you're so inclined.

Safari Remembers

The new Safari 3 is out for both Leopard and Tiger (it's included in Mac OS X v.10.4.11). It's pretty nice, I have to say. It now works with Blogger's HTML editor dealio, which is excellent (though slightly buggy at present). The find function now kicks some serious — and, more importantly, some Firefox — ass. Safari now handles tabs intelligently, letting you not only rearrange them in a window, but also letting you tear them off or drop them into existing windows. All extremely slick. Oh, and it's really pretty and fast as Hell. Seriously, it's smokin'.

But perhaps my favorite improvement to Safari 3 is that window placement is now remembered properly. You see, Safari of yore (of Tiger, actually) would remember the placement of the last window opened, rather than the placement of what I'd call the "base" window, or the first window opened. So, after using Safari, if you'd opened any windows other than your first window — even if you then closed them — the next time you opened Safari you'd get a blank window where the last open one had been. Or sometimes in seemingly random spots. I complained about this a long time ago, and it never got fixed to my liking. It was part of the reason I ended up switching to Firefox — I'm rather anal about my window placement and I like my browser pinned to the upper right hand corner, but in Safari it was always moving. Argh!

Well, Safari 3 fixes this. Sort of. Actually, I'm running Safari 3 in both Tiger and Leopard. The behavior remains unchanged in Tiger, but in Leopard, all is as I like it. So perhaps this is a fix in Leopard and not so much a Safari fix.

Either way, it's just one more reason I like Leopard and can't wait to be done with Tiger.

Can't. Frickin'. Wait.

That said, will I switch back to Safari once I've successfully transitioned to Leopard? Only time will tell. But somehow, I doubt it.

Remote Management Commands in Leopard

A while ago I wrote about the networksetup command, which provides a command-line interface to network preferences, as well as the systemsetup command, which provides command-line control over additional system-level preferences. In the past those commands were stored in the labyrinthian:

/System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/Support

Yes, inside the ARDAgent. Perfect.

Finally Apple has put those commands in a location the shell recognizes as a command path. In Leopard they reside in the far more sensible:

/usr/sbin

Now all you have to do to call them is... Well... Call them.

Really now. Was that so hard?