It should really be called World Domination 050, because it’s providing remedial education that the student should have had before coming to college, but it’s a start:

Linux on the desktop has been a year or two away for over a decade now, and there are reasons it's not there yet. To attract nontechnical end-users, a Linux desktop must work out of the box, ideally preinstalled by the hardware vendor.

...

When somebody with a degree in finance or architecture or can grab a Linux laptop and watch episodes of The Daily Show off of Comedy Central's website without a bearded Linux geek walking them through an elaborate hand-configuration process first, maybe we'll have a prayer.

...

You can't win the desktop if you don't even try. Right now, few in the Linux world are seriously trying. And time is running out.

...

Unfortunately "good" isn't the same as "ready to happen". The geeks of the world would like a moonbase too, and it's been 30 years without progress on that front. Inevitability doesn't guarantee that something will happen within our lifetimes. The 64-bit transition is an opportunity to put Linux on the desktop, but right now it's still not ready. If the decision happened today, Linux would remain on the sidelines.

[Update: as usual, those wacky kids on Slashdot just don’t get it.]

This has no value whatsoever, but triple-clicking the title bar of a Finder window minimizes it to the Dock and then immediately boomerangs it back onscreen. The third click is processed after the minimizing animation finishes.

Speaking of useless UI tricks, it was briefly amusing when Apple arranged for the Shift key to toggle animations like this into slow motion, but after a few years it’s just annoying to lose control of an application for five seconds because you had a finger on the keyboard while minimizing a window.

I caefully tested out the funky keyboad on the MacBook befoe buying one, but after seveal months, I’m eady to send mine in fo sevice. It seems thee’s a poblem with the ‘’ key not eliably egisteing keypesses. This is not a ecent poblem, but one that’s been botheing me since the day I unpacked it.

At fist, I thought I was just having touble adjusting to the key action, but it’s just the ‘’ key. All of the othes work fine evey time, but the ‘’ only woks about 60% of the time.

Unless I press really had, and then it’s still only about 90%. The annoying thing is that I eplaced the stock AM and had dive with bette stuff, and now I have to swap the oiginals back in, o AppleCae won’t touch it. Fotunately, that’s easy to do.

I picked up a copy of this a few days ago at the Microsoft company store ($65 for alumni, $99 at Amazon). I’ve enjoyed hating this software in the past, and I think I’ll enjoy hating this version as well.

The difference is that I’m hating it on my Mac with Parallels, and the USB GPS works fine.

What’s to hate? Pretty much their entire workflow. It’s capable of being used for in-car navigation on a laptop, with a full-screen mode and voice synthesis, but the designers have apparently never seen an in-car navigation system or hand-held GPS unit. I’m all in favor of having people park the car before fiddling with the routing system, but not for ten minutes at a time. I’m sure that eventually you can get good at quickly navigating the search and routing dialogs, but the workflow is built around creating a new document for each trip, and sharing “pushpins” between documents requires constant use of either import/export or “save as…”.

On the bright side, it only took me half an hour of googling to find the universal driver and Info.plist modifications required to get the GPS working as a native Mac serial device.

But Brian, isn’t it always?

Oh, you meant the online store. Apparently it’s sending people all over the world today, and not just those who took the 7.0.2 update. I’d guess that their region-guessing heuristic goes by netblocks, and the database got corrupted somehow.

[I was tempted to title this entry 「また会う日まで」, in response to Brian’s Mr. Roboto quote, but it doesn’t really work, even though it’s the refrain in one of the songs pictured]

A company called Intego, whose business model is “scare people into buying our products”, announced today that they’ve created a proof-of-concept Bluetooth exploit that can crack your Mac wide open in seconds, without any user interaction. You’re vulnerable if you have Bluetooth turned on.

…and haven’t installed any of the patches Apple has released since May.

Given an old ClarisWorks 4 Japanese document and a working copy of ClarisWorks 4 Japanese Edition, in theory you can just export it to Word, and the Japanese text will be translated correctly. If you are running on an Intel-based Mac, this won’t work. Actually, unless you can do a clean reinstall of CW4JP under a copy of Classic that has the Japanese language kit installed, it might not work at all.

AppleWorks 6, however, which is still available in stores and runs nicely under Rosetta, will. At least, with a little help.

1. Open the file myoldstuff in AppleWorks. Don't worry if the kanji turns to garbage, and even if it looks okay, don't bother trying to cut-and-paste into other documents. It won't work. You can view and print, and that's about it.
2. Save as RTF in, let's say, Desktop/myoldstuff.rtf.
3. Open the Terminal, and run this command:
   textutil -inputencoding x-mac-japanese
      -encoding UTF-8 -convert rtf Desktop/myoldstuff.rtf
4. Open the file in Word, and save as a Word Document. Optionally, fix the fonts and margins, which are almost certainly wrong now.

If your AppleWorks install is damaged or incomplete, it won’t be able to open CW4JP docs; you’ll have to reinstall. The English version bundled with PowerPC-based Macs for a long time works just fine, so if you’ve got one, you don’t need to buy the retail package. I use the copy that came with my PowerBook, which was automatically transferred to my new MacBook.

Note that DataViz MacLinkPlus, for all its virtues, hasn’t the slightest idea what to do with Japanese editions of the software formats it supports.

My new MacBook is not the ideal machine for running Apple’s Aperture application, but it’s supported, and with 2GB of RAM, usable. At least, it would be if Aperture didn’t crash every five minutes on a brand new install of version 1.5, while just poking around with the supplied sample project.

I hope it will be more stable on my Quad-core G5, which is the ideal machine for this sort of application…

(or was, before the new Mac Pro came out; still, one can’t whine too much about the power of Last Year’s Computer, especially when it’s quite the screamer)