Saturday, August 24, 2002

OS X All Around! Wow. I just upgraded my wife's iMac to OS X 10.2 (I'll be out of the doghouse once Brother ships an MFC 10.2 compatible driver -- it shouldn't take long, their Mac support has been awesome so far). After about the 30th time of answering a "Why did this crash?" with "Because you aren't on OS X." (Netscape, Adobe Acrobat, Word, etc...), she finally let me upgrade the machine. First, it is quite responsive on a 400 mhz G3. I'm impressed. But what really impressed me was that the machine automatically recognized the Epson printer hooked up to the machine and, with a single click on "Share Printers", OS X reconfigured the built in firewall and enabled printer sharing on my LAN. It, quite literally, "Just Works". My TiBook immediately became aware of the newly available machine and printer without further intervention. Rendezvous + CUPS certainly rocks. For those looking to share printers with Windows boxes, check out this article. It is clear that Apple has taken the "embrace and extend" philosophy to heart when it comes to standards. 11:54:37 PM

Prebinding Explained The subject of prebinding has been surrounded with a lot of confusion throughout the history of OS X. I contributed by creating one of the first tools to provide a UI for updating prebinding on your system. It was written as a source example for folks that asked about how to run a command line tool with administrator privileges from a GUI app while also parsing and displaying the output. I wrote a long winded article explaining what prebinding is, what it does, how it works, and why you don't actually need to update prebinding on 10.2 (and never really needed to do so on 10.1). I tried to keep the article as high level as possible. Comments, corrections and cash are welcome. 10:59:14 AM

Pacifist Pacifist as a tool for inspecting and extracting bits and pieces from Installer Packages. With it, I'm able to determine exactly what any given package-- including all of the system updates downloaded by Software Update-- has or will change on my system. Awesome tool, very well written. Intuitive to use. Cheap at $20 for anyone that needs to have a deep understanding of how the system is changing over time (every System Administrator should pick up a copy!). 10:43:42 AM