The languid pulsing of the insertion-point cursor when editing text is an aspect of Mac OS X that has bothered me for years, but bothered me to such a tiny degree that I never bothered to find out if there was a way to fix it.
But today I finally asked the oracle, and inside of ten seconds had my answer. The NSTextInsertionPointBlinkPeriod default seems to work in most Cocoa apps, Xcode included, and the value seems to be in milliseconds. So a simple:
Mac-Pro:~ mason$ defaults write -g NSTextInsertionPointBlinkPeriod 187
…and voila! No more sllloooooow hypnoooootic bliiiiiiinkiiiiiing…
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Posted 08 April 2008
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I strongly support Barack Obama. I strongly dislike Hillary Clinton. But these positions aren’t connected, contrary to the widespread assumption reiterated most recently today by Bill Press.
Okay, sure, the fucking whore radio host was wrong to call the fucking whore candidate a "fucking whore" on the air. Whatever, dude. But the increasingly common assumption he makes — that the reason that people are anti-Clinton must be because they are pro-Obama — is bogus.
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Posted 04 April 2008
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All right, my new and not-quite-improved 8-core Mac Pro is really getting into the spirit of this Apple Bug Friday thing! That is to say, by hard crashing Mac OS X 10.5 in new and exciting ways, so I don’t have to waste my time hunting for those bugs to file.
I think he’s probably trying to apologize for all the trouble he’s given me since I got him. You know, kind of like those cute disemboweled-and-decapitated-gopher gifts that your cat leaves on your doorstep to prove her love.
So, from my Mac(s) to yours, here’s the second way I have found to hard crash a Mac from a userland application this week. Introducing bug number 5842835. Judging from the kernel panic, the hoodlums from the loathsome “NVIDIA Drivers” gang just might be at it again!
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Posted 04 April 2008
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Lame. I really wanted to love this Mac. After spending a couple months traveling the globe (cool), and therefore suffering in the underpowered hell-world of laptop computing (lame), I was ready to get a workstation with real power to shuffle my daily bits around. So I bought the 2008-model eight-core Mac Pro. I loaded it up with many gigs of ram, a few terabytes of internal RAID, a couple thirty-inchers, and then stood back thinking, “Now here’s a computer suitable for a man of my stature. Yes indeed, I am going to love it.”
But this Mac, I don’t love. Because it crashes. The entire system crashes, in various ways, on a regular basis. And in the year 2008, that is simply not okay.
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Posted 01 April 2008
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WOW, BLACK ICE, FINALLY!
WELL, AT LEAST GREY ICE. OKAY, KINDA SHIT-LOOKING BROWN ICE. BUT STILL…
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Posted 31 March 2008
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Incredibly good book
. The deep, long, and plausible plot propels the finely sculpted characters through their decades-long effort to settle Mars. I haven’t enjoyed a book this much in years; probably since reading Neuromancer as a teenager.
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Posted 21 March 2008
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This time around, the US presidential election and attendant political brouhaha are orders of magnitude more important than usual.
Mired in an unwinnable idiot war, with an ignorant citizenry trading away its constitutional freedoms for security theater, 2008 finds our nation in steep decline, led by the worst president in living memory and a gaggle of other dysfunctional cowards.
Yeah, so what else is new, right? Well, there is one thing: it’s probably only because things have gotten so bad, but this time our political system has improbably managed to produce an intelligent and thoughtful candidate who not only reflects America’s better attributes, and eschews most of the idiotic trappings of our broken two-party system, but who also somehow still has a real shot at winning.
Unfortunately, this has sent the Clinton team into a desperate and disgraceful race-baiting frenzy, and they must be stopped.
I have prepared an exhaustive report how this can be accomplished and what you must do to help. (Like most rigorous scientific analyses, it is presented in comic book form.) Read, and then act:
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Posted 29 January 2008
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A good interview with Bruce Schneier, discussing this and that. He’s one of the few smart people that exist, and this Freakonomics interview is geared toward the layman (ahem, Dad) and worth reading. (To protect against the idiot webmasters of the future and/or the present, I made an archive copy of the article.)
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Posted 05 December 2007
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My grandma got me this new gun. It’s red, which is kind of lame, but in her defense it is kind of hard to find realistic looking guns that still shoot. Especially cowboy guns. My dad told me I am lucky that it’s the seventies.
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Posted 20 November 1979
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