(Crossposted from my comment on facebookMy first computer was a Mac Plus, and I've been Mac-only ever since. While I was too new to the scene (I was in second grade when we got that Plus) to fully understand why so many people were so excited when Steve returned in ’96, I saw the impact almost immediately--by the time I was out of college, iMacs, ( Read more... )

At least one of these statements is false.

( Read more... )

Here's my candidate for the two things about programming (inspired by a ycombinator comment via apenwarr):

1. Like every other significant field of human endeavor, programming is fundamentally unlike anything that came before it.
2. It became the bottleneck in human progress much faster than any of the others.

Mac Mail (AKA Mail.app) has a distressing tendency to delete the mailbox cache of IMAP accounts when certain network operations are interrupted. Since preferred sorting column and direction are stored in plist files in this cache, that means that all folders reset to be sorted by date, ascending, which drives me nuts. After the latest such event, I ( Read more... )

In no particular order:

When a Mac with only one user account is rebooted, you go straight to the password screen.

When selecting playlists to sync to an iPod in iTunes, option-click on a folder's disclosure triangle collapses all folder trees, not just that subtree. (This is a great example of breaking a rule for a reason ( Read more... )

Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise.
- Bertrand Russell

Normally I wouldn't touch a Russell quote with a ten-foot pole, but this one that showed up on iGoogle's "quotes of the day" widget today seemed a particularly apt description of most of the effort of programming.

Itty-bitty typing space. Unhappiness is fixing server problems over an SSH connection … from a BlackBerry. Which round-trips all the packets from here (Singapore) to Greenwich and back (for security purposes). And to the RIM mothership in Waterloo, too, for all I know. It'd certainly account for the 500ms lag on typing…

Peeve of the Day: GMail's "window/tab to front" JavaScript. I hate having my current window changed arbitrarily by apps, especially since it almost always happens while I'm in the middle of something else.