Permissions: the most messed up part of OS X

This is true for 10.4.11 on a multi-user machine

1. User Tim moves folder to User John's Drop Box.
2. User John moves folder to John's desktop.
3. John cannot edit folder contents.

The owner of the folder contents is still Tim. Other users have read-only access.

OS X doesn't change the ownership, even though the act of moving to John's Public Drop Box is an indisputable transition of ownership.

This behavior has been broken since 10.0.

I'd be pleasantly surprised if it were fixed in 10.5.

This ain't rocket science.

The old Apple would have nailed this one long ago.

[Yes, I know how to change permissions. That's not the point. This is 'not caring' style design.]

Quick Look - more than I'd thought

I won't have 10.5 for a few months yet, but this is good to file away: 10 ways to get the most out of Quick Look.

I've always liked this kind of functionality. I started out first with Norton Utilities DOS NCView, then the DOS based Norton Commander with integrated NCView (F3 key I think). There was something similar to Windows 95 to, but I can't remember the name of it.

Funny how this sort of capability comes and goes. I hope it stays this time.

Windows Live Writer cursed by Google's bugs

You know you're in a new era when Microsoft is the humble good guy doing the noble thing, and Google is the arrogant foe of justice.

Google's hacked-together Blogger-Picasa pseudo-integration breaks when image-containing posts authored using Windows Live Writer are migrated to a personalized domain or to an ftp site.

The honorable WLW team has put together a partial solution, but really this is Google's bug.

I'm a longtime user of both Blogger and Picasa. Google is not wasting any of their billions on funding those products. I'd guess it's some manifestation of old-style revenue-funding business discipline. Personally, I'd prefer Google sell both properties to someone who's willing to fund them. I'm more than willing to pay for value delivered; Google's low-cost B-team funding approach is really annoying.

manchester time: another nice Google feature

Cute.

Type "manchester time" into Google and the top of the page shows a nice clock icon with times in various Manchesters.

Omidirectional antennae aren't

Impossible antenna, only $50!

Excellent. All new to me and fascinating.

Python Quick Reference

Bruce Eckels likes the Python Quick Reference (Ruby Needs One!). It is impressive!

If I end up doing more simple programming, my choices are likely to be AppleScript (ugh) and Python (yay).

AppleScript - summarize email is useful

I have a library of AppleScript books, but I've never done much with it -- in part because I always thought it was one step away from extinction. It's also a really lousy programming language (scoping anyone?).

Well, whatever its past status it's still with us, and Apple has even fixed up their once decrepit AppleScript: AppleScript Examples page. Automator and AppleScript have been revised in 10.5, the documentation finally left the 20th century, and Python hasn't taken over completely ... yet (alas).

Even in 10.4 I'm rediscovering useful things. Take, for example, the little known "Summarize Message" script buried away in the Mail Scripts folder. Here's what it does:

... This script demonstrates how to write a script that can be executed
directly from the Scripts menu in Mail. It acts on the selected messages,
which are passed in to the 'perform mail action with messages' handler.

This script will take the selected message, create a summary using the
summarize command built into the Standard Additions, then speak the
summary using the say command, also built into Standard Additions...

My mother's vision is failing. This is something she could use, though I've already programme done key to active the built-in generic reading engine. Too bad Mail.app doesn't let me attach a script to a nice fat icon, but I might create a rule that would routinely read each message she opens. (Rules are hidden away in mail preferences -- which is not a logical place for that function.)

By the way, my favorite 10.4 voice is "Vicki". I hear 10.5 has even better voices.

Update: After a bit of experimenting I created an Application from Summarize Email. I then gave it a nice icon from the Icon Factory and put it in the Dock. So it's easy to click on whenever my mother is reviewing her email.