Monday, May 02, 2011
What's this red stuff here? … oh, it's catchup.
Yeah, it's been awhile. I just haven't felt like posting since … oh … it's been since early January.
Ahem.
Anyway.
Work at The Corporation has been a series of long periods of intense bordom punctuated by short bursts of sheer terror (in other words—“hurry up and wait!”) as we've been going through a testing phase (more on that later). Meanwhile, my current private “project du jour” is dealing with email. More specifically, working slowly towards indexing a rather large archive of email I've collected over the past fifteen years (and more on that later as well).
Also, Hoade and his lovely wife Ann survived the terrible tornadoe that ripped through Tuscaloosa a few days ago with nary a scratch. Their house, however, did not survive (much like large portions of Tuscaloosa didn't survive). He's also coming down to Lower Sheol to visit; his plans made a few days before he and Ann lost their house. The plans are still on and it'll be nice to see him again without falling into a cactus plant.
“He's one of the old gods! He demands sacrifice!”
Another day, another Mac OS-X automatic update.
I'm growing leary of Mac OS-X updates. I'm also growing leary of Apple in general. I'm not saying I refuse to use their products–heavens no! Chez Boca is slowly turning into Apple territory with one Mac mini, A Mac laptop, an iPad and two iPhones. The computers just work (and give it time Bunny—you'll get use to the interface, trust me).
But I get the feeling that doing anything a bit out of
the ordinary is punished, for Steve Jobs is not a kind and
loving god—he's one of the old gods! He demands sacrifice! His
way, or no way.
The only change I've made to the system is to have syslogd
forward its logs on the Mac to my Linux system (and to do that, I had to
figure out how to edit
/System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.syslogd.plist, which is
a binary file, to add one command line option to
syslogd when it starts) and the last time my Mac auto-updated
(last month) it completely overwrote my changes and I lost an hour trying to
remember how I initially set it up and troubleshoot why it wasn't working
properly.
Thanks, Steve.
More troubling though, are some of the logs I'm seeing from the Mac. Such as:
(pardon the rather unorthodox output from myfc00::3 | /usr/libexec/taskgated | user debug | May 02 15:48:15 | no system signature for unsigned /Applications/Firefox.app[18605]
syslogd)
The only executables that are thus logged are those that I compiled, or
have been downloaded off the Internet (like Firefox for instance). The man
page for taskgated says this:
taskgatedis a system daemon that implements a policy for thetask_for_pidsystem service. When the kernel is asked for the task port of a process, and preliminary access control checks pass, it invokes this daemon (vialaunchd) to make the decision.
which doesn't reassure me all that much. Also, given the control that Apple exerts over the iPhone and iPad software ecosystem, how long until Apple starts tightening its grip over the software echosystem of the Mac?
Okay, I doubt they'll go so far as to remove the ability of third party applications from running on the Mac, but still … if I have to worry about every update reversing changes I've made to the system …
