Building a PC: a recent quick review

I have built my last few PCs, and I've been happy with how it worked. I may never build another though; all but one of the household machines are Macs now. Still, it's good to get a quick summary of the current state of the art. I'm surprised to learn that the 10K rpm Raptor boot drive made such a big difference, but I'll buy it. For what I do the onboard video, however, is not really an issue. It would be different if PCs, for example, made use of the video card for RAW image rendering (maybe under Vista?).

PS. I like Coding Horror, but he really doesn't know much about OS X or Macs. Contrary to his recurrent postings, for an expert user OS X is a much better computing experience than XP. I think it's a better experience for the novice user too, but both OS X and Vista are lousy options for novices. For the novice OS X wins primarily because of Apple's hardware and the absence of the antiviral software hassle, not because it's enormously better than XP. No comments on Vista, I've not used it.

Update 7/24/07: CH has a cumulative summary and a set of suggested configurations.

A technical guide on designing a privacy friendly web application

footle: Protecting Your Users’ Data with a Privacy Wall

Odd OS X bug: can't share the shared folder

There's a longstanding and mysteriously ignored flaw in OS X File Sharing.

If I connect to one of my Macs using afp, I can browse all the folders belonging to the user I've connected as. I cannot, however, browse the shared folder -- as any user!

I wonder why this only annoys me ...

Update 4/14/07: I thought I knew a fix for this, but I was fooled. If you create an alias to the Shared directory and put it in your home directory, it looks like a remote client can get to it. Wrong, OS X simply redirects to the local shared directory!

I wonder again why I'm the only person who seems to notice this ....

Update 4/15/07: I've been looking at this from a few angles, and this is a real wart. My guess is that the Shared folder is a kind of kludge that was stuck into the OS as a temporizing measure. There's no standard way in OS X (non-server) to create a network share that everyone can access! The one folder available for local shares is not network accessible! (Insert more exclamation marks.) Grrr.

See also: the Parents folder.

Update 9/3/08: This was fixed in 10.5

End of the line for the 35mm full frame sensor?

Canon's latest pro camera uses an APS sized sensor:

High-end Canon SLR counters Nikon | Tech News on ZDNet

As with the 1D Mark II, the sensor is the APS-H size that shrinks the field of view by a factor of 1.3 compared with traditional 35mm film SLRs. That means a 50mm lens on a Mark III has the field of view of a 65mm lens on a traditional film SLR. (The APS-H size is right between the APS-C sensor, which has a 1.6 crop factor and is used in Canon Rebel XTi and 30D SLRs, and the full-frame sensor, which matches 35mm film and is used in the 5D and 1Ds Mark II...

Curious. Why introduce another sensor dimension?

Multiclick iTunes album column to subsort

macosxhints.com - Sort by album and artist or year in iTunes 7

...click on the Album column to sort by album (as you would expect), then click again to sort by 'Album by Artist' and again for 'Album by Year.' ... play whole albums at a time, but ... keep artists together."

Why doesn't Apple ever document stuff like this?

SpyMe: another remote control app for OS X

SpyMe2 is presumably another VNC based remote control app, though the main page doesn't mention VNC. We're still waiting for something like Windows terminal services (RDP).

I might try it. Inexpensive.

The NYT Permalink Generator

I'll start using this in my blog posts:

TidBITS - Create Permanent Links to the New York Times

... because the New York Times considers itself as the newspaper of record, back in 2003, they worked out a deal with Dave Winer of UserLand Software to provide permanent links in RSS feeds generated through the Radio UserLand RSS aggregator. That said, it would seem that the New York Times is running its own RSS feeds now, so there's no obvious way to find a permanent link to an article you're reading on the New York Times Web site...

...use the New York Times Link Generator, written by Aaron Swartz of the social bookmarking site reddit. Just feed it a link to a New York Times and it returns a version of the link that will remain free for the foreseeable future, though of course the Times could always change their policy. There's also a bookmarklet that you can use to generate a permanent link from the current page when you're on the New York Times Web site.