January 2009 Archives

Unlike the 10.5.5 updater, the 10.5.6 update doesn’t appear to touch your custom StdExclusions.plist file if you updated it according to my previous post on this subject. But it also doesn’t fix the inherent problem.

The file I refer to is

/System/Library/CoreServices/backupd.bundle/Contents/Resources/StdExclusions.plist

and under “ContentsExcluded” is

/private/var/spool

the default location for the mail store. You’ll want to make sure that’s still commented out.

A friend of mine (Hi, Ania!) pointed out to me that I have an awful lot of technical stuff on my website. I assume that she was talking about this blog, and I answered her thusly:

I’m gonna’ guess that you stumbled upon “Bill’s Words?” Yeah, I do throw a lot of technical stuff up there, but it’s usually for me more than anybody else. If I wrote a note somewhere, I might never find it again. If I kept a file somewhere, I might never remember that I wrote the info down in the first place. (I have, on more than one occasion, re-solved a problem, much to my disgust.)

But if I blog about it then Google picks it up, and my first step in troubleshooting any technical problem is to Google the problem. And when I do so, would you believe I always find my blog entry? It’s happened, and it’s cool when it does. (Hey! I did solve that problem before!)

I don’t care if you read my blog. Ever. If you do, and you get something from it, then great! What a bonus!

Blogging is dead? Not for me, thanks.

From Gizmodo.

Wow.

The sad part is that DaringFireball.net has showed some UIs which look this bad, yet the drivers of those UIs aren’t, in fact, rocket scientists, and the programs that have them aren’t, in fact, the most complex machine on the face of the planet.

And off the face of the planet, for that matter.

Cokie Roberts and Steve Inskeep review how Obama is really not going to be able to do all that much all that quickly.

Online audio here.

Article here.

I agree with John. This is great stuff.

Well worth the watch. The force source is from here.

Star Wars: Retold (by someone who hasn’t seen it) from Joe Nicolosi on Vimeo.

Joe Nocera thinks he knows something about privacy, and I think he’s full of crap.

In his blog entry today, he says:

There are certain people who simply don’t have the same privacy rights as others, whether they like it or not. Presidents. Celebrities. Sports figures.

No. That’s wrong. Completely and totally wrong. Everybody has a right to privacy, and unless you are undertaking an activity that requires you to breach your privacy in order to complete that activity, your privacy is your privacy.

Presidents, maybe. But celebrities? Sports figures?

Puh-leaze. Just because a bunch of ravenous fans elevate me to superstar status (maybe even against my will) doesn’t mean I have to let anybody perform a colonoscopy to see if I’m healthy enough to justify betting your life’s savings on my next game.

And the same goes for CEOs, too, no matter how cool they may be.

(Hat tip to Daring Fireball).

Article here.

How come this is being reported in England and not in the United States of America? Oh, wait, that’s right: the liberal mainstream media have their collective head so deeply embedded up President-Elect Barack Hussein Obama’s digestive tract that they can’t quite see the light of day. Want some evidence? Go ahead, Google it. I’ll wait here.

Yes, the article appears in the Daily Mail and The Guardian. And Fox mentions it. (Surprise.) But every other media outlet is doing their best to emphasize that most, if not all, of the cost is being picked up by private donations.

That’s great! $100 million of the $160 million (that’s $160,000,000) price tag will be covered by private donations (up to only $35 million as of this writing), but that leaves a huge chunk that every man, woman, boy and girl in the United States is expected to pay for, because the District of Columbia and surrounding states are submitting that bill to the Congress.

And that $50,000,000 is more than George Bush’s entire inauguration “effort,” as the Obama event is being called (sounds more palatable than “party,” doesn’t it?), cost four years ago. That event was called lavish, extravagant, and over-the-top in a then-good economy by news outlets of all kinds.

I weep and pray for this country which embraces double standards on so many levels and calls them acceptable.

Oh, and for those of you who are attending, be sure to drive across the country in your SUVs, spending as much as you can on the way. The rest of us need that economic stimulus to pay for your ticket.

(Hat tip to blonde sagacity.)

Article here.

Um, yes.

[A note: I feel really, really sophomoric when I write this kind of entry, about Christianity or faith or something. I’m new enough in my faith (three years of “really knowing”) that I realize that I have a lot to learn, and the more I find out, the more I realize I don’t know. I guess that’s the “wise” part of “wise foolishness.” At any rate, I’m going to continue to put these kinds of entry out there, and if you find some flaw in my logic, reasoning, or faith, please point it out to me. As I already said, I have a lot to learn, and need all the help I can get. /Bill]

This morning, our pastor gave a great sermon (it will appear here in a while, for a while). His point bears repeating, but I’m going to expand on it in a “You know when” way because it helps me see the light, so to speak.

You know when you walk into a room at night, with the lights on, and you can’t see the light on the ceiling from the streetlight outside? Or you know when you walk outdoors at night and there’s a full moon so you can’t really see the stars around it? Oh, sure, you might be able to see some of the light or some of the stars, but…

But if you take the primary source of the light away, either by turning off the lights or repeating the activity with a new moon, you can see those lights on the ceiling or the stars in the sky. And suddenly, what was once a dim light on the ceiling or a faint dot in the sky becomes a brilliant light, enough to keep you awake at night or enough to see constellations you didn’t even know existed. That dim light, though certainly still there, was overpowered by the light from another source.

In this vein, Pastor Hakason’s message boils down to a fairly simple point: We are currently in a dark time, but in the darkness, our light shines all that much the brighter.

One more time just to make sure you got it: In the darkness, we shine all that much brighter.

He quoted a fair amount from Isaiah because, as he put it, the prophets weren’t really all that into telling a whole lot about the future that was all goodness and light. Indeed, Isaiah does a great job of being pretty gloomy. There are certainly exceptions, Isaiah 40:31, for example, and Pastor Hakason pointed out others, but essentially, he said, “Look, Isaiah was talking to us in this gloomy, dark time. But he also says that there is a light at the end of the tunnel.” Yeah, that is a very, very loose paraphrase of what he said, but it’s true to his point.

We are called to be the light of the world. And now, in the gloom and doom, we’re being given an opportunity to shine brighter without doing a darned thing! That’s right, when all is “goodness and light” in the world, when the world “outshines” us, most of us are just like the stars around the moon: dim, hard to see, faint. But now that the “goodness and light” of the world (careful how much goodness you ascribe to the world’s light!) is, in many, many people’s opinion, fading fast, we are being given the opportunity to provide a path through the darkness, to show what the light of Christ can do.

If there were ever a time to let your light so shine before all the world that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father, who is in Heaven, this would be it.

Article here.

Still yet more reason for me to think that the Great Apple TV Experiment of 2009 is beginning to work out well.

More on that experiment later…