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Comment: Re:Interested to see any changes in OSX (Score 1) 349

by Brett Johnson (#33889272) Attached to: 'Back To the Mac' Media Event On October 20th
For Terminal Preferences, I too noticed that starting with Leopard, they were all messed up. They still seem completely non-intuitive to me. I too had a set of .term files set up. It seems the new version of Terminal uses a new XML format file, .terminal. It seemed to understand the old format, but failed in some way (I forget the details). In any case, I ended up creating a set of .terminal versions of the files, and my problems went away. The .terminal files are completely different than the old .term files, and annoyingly full of Base64 encoded serialized objects.

Comment: So that is what happened to my batteries... (Score 4, Interesting) 103

by Brett Johnson (#33843662) Attached to: FAA Reports Heat In Cargo Holds Can Ignite Laptop Batteries
Several months ago, on a flight from Virginia to California, a zip-lock bag containing spare batteries for my phone and camera and several power&usb cables "disappeared" from my luggage. At first I thought I had left it behind, but that turned out not to be the case. A couple of months later, I had a nearly identical zip-lock bag in my carry-on (sans the camera battery, which I have not yet replaced). I was pulled aside for "extra scrutiny" specifically because of this bag. The TSA agent removed it, re-ran my luggage, and returned it to me. I can only deduce that the TSA "stole" my batteries and cables on the earlier journey, because nothing looks more like a bomb that a Nokia cell phone battery and a USB cable.

Comment: It is not just about skipping ads. (Score 1) 210

by Brett Johnson (#32569036) Attached to: The Safari Reader Arms Race
Most of the comments here are focused on the perceived attack on ad-based revenue, so I won't focus on that. I rank Safari Reader's features as follows:
  1. Improved readability wrt fonts and layout.
  2. Single page view.
  3. Removal of ads, sidebars, navigation bars, etc.

By far, my favorite feature is the dramatically improved readability. Because I am 50 years old, I find it difficult to read small fonts - and find myself zooming in web pages frequently. Safari Reader helps me overcome these following web design difficulties:

  • Hot-shot designers who think using an 8-point, charcoal grey, esoteric font on a paisley background is the epitome of style.
  • CSS fails - typically clipping left or right edges of text if the font size is bumped.
  • Navigation bar fails - typically obscuring the first lines of text if the navigation bar wraps.
  • Gross layout fails - most any MSN site when opened in tabs in Safari.
  • Fixed size text frames the size of a business card, forcing me to scroll down to see the second paragraph of text.
  • Same as the previous, but without the scroll bar, so I never see the second paragraph of text. [Hey, when rendered at 8-points, it all fits in the box!]
  • Pop-over or hover ads that obscure the first 2 paragraphs of text. [I said I wouldn't talk about ads, but this is very different than a banner ad or side-bar ad.]

Comment: I turned down the "opportunity" ... (Score 3, Insightful) 97

by Brett Johnson (#32479568) Attached to: Restraining Order On Commercial Spyware Lifted

Back in 2002 or 2003 I was offered a job with these guys [or possibly a similar firm] to port the software to Mac OS X. Once I was informed that the product I would be working on was to be used to spy on a company's employees, I chose to decline. When I started in my career almost 30 years ago, I vowed to myself that I would pursue it with the utmost integrity. This was way over *my* line.

Media

Low-Level Format For a USB Flash Drive? 252

Posted by timothy
from the back-from-the-living-dead dept.
Luyseyal writes "I unwittingly bought one of these terrible flash cards at Fry's and have managed to nuke two of them, successively. I have a USB flash card reader that will read/write the current one at USB 1.0 speed, but it locks up every Ubuntu and XP machine I've come across in high-speed access mode. I have read that if I low-level format it that it could be fixed, though my current one doesn't support it. My Google-fu must be weak because I cannot seem to find a USB flash reader that specifies that it will do low-level formatting." Can anyone offer advice for resurrecting such drives?

Comment: Did similar back in MS-DOS 2.11 (Score 4, Interesting) 582

by Brett Johnson (#31505056) Attached to: Simpler "Hello World" Demonstrated In C

Back in the early 1980s, I was doing development on MS-DOS 2.11 - the first real working version of MS-DOS that resembled Xenix more than CP/M.

I was using a combination of Lattice C and assembly language to do my day job. But I was upset about the libc bloat that Lattice C would drag into the program. Over the Christmas break, I sat down and wrote a tiny version of libc, with the 60% of the calls I actually used. Most of them were either thin wrappers on top of MS-DOS Int21 calls, assembly language implementations (the string functions), or reduced functionality (printf didn't handle strange alignments, floats or doubles), and custom startup/exit code. I also structured the library so that the linker would only link in functions that were actually used. For simple executables, I saw the on-disk file size drop from 10KB-20KB down to 400-600 bytes. Another thing that reduced on-disk file size was to create .com programs, rather than .exe programs.

I was also writing the handful of unix commands that I couldn't do without (ls, cat, cut, paste, grep, fgrep, etc). Since I was implementing dozens of Unix commands, each statically linked to libc, it was very important to reduce the over-all size of each executable. Most of the smaller trivial commands were less than 1KB in size. I think the largest was 4KB. I also had an emacs clone* that was 36KB when compiled and linked against my tiny lib.

For the longest time, I carried around a bootable MS-DOS 2.11 floppy, with my dozens of Unix commands, an emacs-like editor, Lattice C compiler, tiny libc, and some core MS-DOS programs. It allowed my to have my entire development environment on a floppy that I could stick in anyone's machine and make it usable.

* We had a source license for Mince, orphaned by Mark of the Unicorn, a tiny emacs-clone that ran on CP/M, MS-DOS, and Unix. We had enhanced it significantly.

Comment: Re:-1 Troll and Uninsightful (Score 1) 1197

by Brett Johnson (#31232388) Attached to: Health Insurance When Leaving the Corporate World?

*Some* people? Try *most* people. Cost is a *huge fucking problem* in the US healthcare system.

Actually most people with employer-provided health insurance are insulated from the true cost of the insurance. Since the employer considers the insurance benefits to be part of the employee compensation, the companies actively avoid discussing the level of that compensation.

What if employers simply increased employee salaries by the cost of insurance premiums and forced the employees to write the check for the premium? Once the employees see just how much health insurance premiums cost and they wrestle with the 15%-40% annual increases; then the populace will finally demand reform.

Better late than never. -- Titus Livius (Livy)

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