Rick Swift & Apple & Embedded I make things. Sometimes, I’ll talk about it here.

My Gorram Frakking Blog

Especially in America

I came across this article about Fundamentalist Mormons. Well, really, it’s an article about a book written by one such Fundamentalist who murdered his wife and daughter in the name of his religion.

Afer hearing that Elizabeth Smart's kidnapper was an excommunicated Mormon, Dan Lafferty correctly deduced something about the crime that even seasoned lawmen failed to suspect: “I immediately guessed that he was probably a fundamentalist, and that Elizabeth was somehow involved in a polygamy situation.” Lafferty ought to know...

Now, I’m not so naive to think that this sort of extremism never happens in America; on the contrary, I’m very concerned that the religious right (usually the Christian right) has far too much influence in American politics and society. Although extremists can be found anywhere (look at various Islamic countries), there’s something especially sinister about finding non-Islamic zealots in America.
This entry will hopefully be the start of a series of comments reflecting my feelings about religion and social aspects often affected by it.

Panther Rocks

Yes, I'm special. I've got Panther. Not a pre-release, the actual GM. Weeks early, no less.
I must say, it really rocks. So many improvements, so many things I've been waiting.
Although you still can't let go of scrollbars.
More to come...

Blogging Friends

My dear friend Yellie has a blog. Check it out. She's much better at it than I am.

Launch Services Cache Corruption

In the first what is sure to be an ongoing series of entries on how Mac OS X sucks, I’ll describe an issue I came across recently and how I solved it.
Yesterday I restarted my PowerBook (which is running Mac OS X 10.2.6) and found that I could not log in. The login dialog would appear, it would go through the motions, then disappear, then finally reappear.
I suspected that something early in the login process was crashing so hard it was taking down the login process itself. After a couple hours of snooping, and some luck (I was able to ssh in from another machine and watch the system log report the crashes), I discovered that Launch Services’ cache was corrupted, and was causing lsregister to seg fault. Removing that file (/Library/Caches/com.apple.LaunchServices.LocalCache.csstore) allowed login to proceed normally.
Update (2009-03-10): Thanks to this post, I now know that the filenames have changed in more recent OS releases. Launch Services caches information per-user, in files of the form com.apple.LaunchServices-023<uid>.csstore, where <uid> should be replaced with the user ID of the user with which you're having trouble (my default user ID was 501).

New MSN for Mac OS X

Folks, I don’t work for Microsoft. I can’t help you get MSN for the Mac. You should dump any friends you have that insist on using it, anyway.

Tantek mentions a new Tasman rendering engine in his log, with promises of speed and bug fixes.
I ask, “When will we see this update in IE/Mac?“ I simply have no desire to use MSN, but I’d sure like to see fixes to IE. I also wonder if there are stability enhancements.
Maybe MSN is IE. It’s not in Software Update yet, though.