Now this is strange.

Apple releases this brand new product, which they proudly present as a smartphone, but not just a smartphone, one hell of a smartphone. They pack it with awesome features, put a lot of money and effort into it (apparently two and a half years) and guess what - the shoot themselves in the leg by not letting the iPhone run 3rd party applications.

It could have been a great PDA, but guess what, they ruined it. Come on, Apple, you can do better than that! Third-party applications are what keeps a platform alive. Seriously. Didn’t Steve Jobs thank third party developers for their great job on migrating to universal binaries? Ridiculous.

Is Apple trying to make their own products fail on purpose? I don’t get it!
There’s no way I’m buying an iPhone (or whatever they’re gonna call it after losing the lawsuit) if it can’t run 3rd-party applications.

At home I have a server running Linux and a MacBook.

Every now and then, I want to run an X11 program. VNC takes up my whole screen, and therefor it’s counter productive, but there’s another way.

Mac OS X has an optional X11 server. After installing it, programs could connect to it and coexist in the Aqua environment.

The thing is that while my server doesn’t change IP, my MacBook does, since I often alternate between wi-fi and ethernet, and even then I can’t be bothered to set it every time. So basically, the IP always changes.

For this purpose, I made this useful script. I’ve tested it on zsh, but it should work in Bash as well, I believe. I put the following lines in my .zshrc:

if [ $SSH_CLIENT ]
then
export DISPLAY=`echo $SSH_CLIENT | sed ’s/ [0-9]* [0-9]*$//’`:0
fi

Basically, if the variable $SSH_CLIENT is defined, it takes that variable, nips the last two figures (one being the source port and the other being the destination port), which leaves us only with the IP of the machine we’re SSHing from. Pretty useful. Now all you need to do is put xhost the_ip, where the_ip is the IP of the machine you want to connect to you, in your .xinitrc to automatically allow it to connect to you.

It werks!

Hello.

Around Monday last week I finally received my MacBook. Now, we all heard a lot of complaints from the Apple community in general, CPU whines, fan mooing, overheating, discoloration, display artifacts after sleeping, frequent crashes, random shutdowns, and the list goes on and on.

However I haven’t yet experienced any of those symptoms, I still haven’t had a single problem (apart from one that was already fixed anyway). (continue reading..)