3 posts tagged “mac os x”

Today's stupid software idea comes courtesy of the most recent episode of Battlestar Galactica, which featured (as some previous stories have) the Hybrid, the organic controller of a Cylon base star (aka the big pointy bad guy space ships). This week, though, saw probably more Hybrid than any other.

Hybrids, you see, continually babble, a stream of consciousness mixing what sounds like system diagnostics, physics and poetry. After the episode ended, I thought "wait, system diagnostics? Well, if I open up Console, I have those. What if there was an additional process - call it hybridd - which emitted poetry to go along with the more prosaic debugging and whatnot that my computer spits out?"

I have an idea how to do it, too. Algorithm::MarkovChain is a venerable Perl module that puts out almost, but not quite, meaningful sentences, based on an input corpus. Tie that in to the syslog function, a bit of Launch Services, and there you are. (I'm sure you could do a bogstandard Unix version too.)

A further step would be to replace the Console UI with one that boils down the actual computer stuff and tries to fit it in with the hybrid's poetry, but that idea's a lot harder to do well, I'm sure.

Anyway. hybridd - an idea whose time has come. And now, thanks to Tom Insam, here's a Perl version. Requires the aforementioned module, along with File::Tail and Unix::Syslog, both available at your nearest CPAN mirror.

Mac OS X 10.5 is out today, and as usual I'm waiting for a while to see how it shakes out before installing it. In fact, I think I'm looking forward to the usual review by John Siracusa on Ars Technica more than I'm looking forward to the OS itself.

Nonetheless, with the release providing fodder for commentators and reviewers everywhere, I have picked up on a few of the new features of Leopard that I'm looking forward to. The thing is, I have a long memory, so some of them are actually old. In fact, they date back to System 7 or Mac OS 8.

• Grid Spacing - an old Finder feature, which Pogue accepts is a rerun
  
• File Sharing - as with the old Mac OS, you can now share folders other than just ~/Public
• Sharp Corners - again, Mac OS 9 didn't draw rounded corners on an LCD. Bafflingly, people have got so used to something that was originally a workaround for CRTs that a hack is apparently on its way to restore them
• Apple Data Detectors - a strange little feature that I've covered before on the 2lmc spool
  

All in all, it sometimes seems that bits of Apple have a reverse gear. Mind you, given how much of the baby got junked with the bathwater of the old Mac OS, it's not exactly unwelcome. Roll on a decent spatial Finder in 10.6! (Well, you've got to have a dream, haven't you?)

Firefox 2 came out on Tuesday. Even if I hadn't been silly busy at work, I wouldn't have installed it.

People who know me will be aware I still run Mac OS X 10.3.9, because 10.4 doesn't look worth it as an upgrade. (Well, it does now, but that's because (Mac?) developers are a bunch of magpies who love the new shinies; who'd consider coding for something two years old now, when it means you can't use Core Data? Get with the program!) At work, I run Windows XP with the Windows 95 theme, because it doesn't make me feel like a toddler (and it conserves screen space too).

Therefore, finding out that I spurn an "upgrade" to the browser I use all the time at work because it's fucked up session management, tab handling, and the fact it's had a reskin that also comes from the Fisher Price school of interface design should come as no suprise to anyone.

Oh, IE7? Well, even it it was supported by the IT staff (which it isn't), that ribbon looks even more eye-pluckingly awful than the Firefox 2 default. I bet you can tell how big a bargepole I'm not touching that with.

Why, yes, I do generally hate software. How did you tell?