The King Makers: Apple Takes Down an Indie Dev | rollinsio:

On September 26, Greg submitted what he believed was a valid compromise:  The click would take the user to the main Launcher app, and from there the app would call the appropriate action.

Apple rejected the update and within an hour Launcher was no longer on the App Store.

EBay Will Spin Off PayPal Into a Separate Company | WIRED:

EBay is breaking away from PayPal, turning its payments operation into a separate, publicly traded company.

I have four Backup Plus Desktop drives. Two were bought two years ago and two last year.

All of them had an issue where they would drop off the USB bus sometimes and require a power cycle to return. I looked around and found a firmware update that promised a fix. However, it would only apply to two of them (the newer ones). The older ones (which looked identical, of course) didn’t show up in the tool.

It used to be, back in the days of white-on-black email and newsgroups, that you were able to keep a copy of everything you did on the Internet. Well, mainly it was because you did two or three things and they all required specific client software that had the option of keeping copies of your contributions, but there it was, you could do it. I, for instance, have a majority of my email back to 1996 — that includes mail from Compuserve, AOL, Eudora, Claris Emailer, Outlook Express, and now Apple Mail. My newsgroup client keeps copies of all my sent messages as well, still. That’s another old, large archive.

OpenBSD forks, prunes, fixes OpenSSL | ZDNet:

Theo de Raadt, founder and leader of the OpenBSD and OpenSSH, tells ZDNet that the project has already removed 90,000 lines of C code and 150,000 lines of content. de Raadt: “Some of that is indentation, because we are trying to make the code more comprehensible. 99.99% of the community does not care for VMS support, and 98% do not care for Windows support. They care for POSIX support, so that the Unix and Unix derivatives can run. They don’t care for FIPS. Code must be simple. Even after all those changes, the codebase is still API compatible. Our entire ports tree (8700 applications) continue to compile and work, after all these changes.”

The network nightmare that ate my week | Occasionally Coherent:

I used Ubuntu as an example, but it is hardly the worst offender. We have seen Windows machines with more than 300 IPv6 addresses — which, recall, means that every 150 seconds they will be transmitting 30 multicast packets per second which have to be flooded through the network.

After reading a lot about various evil ISPs and other such fun I decided it would be good to have a self-controlled VPN server out there for when I am using a device of mine on a network I’m not so sure about. I could pay someone else for this, sure, but I already have a server “out there” that’s not being used to its fullest capabilities and I’m pretty handy with the Linux and the vi so … why not?

Why are Mac OS X aliases so large? They’re huge! I’ve seen sizes from 1MB to 5MB for a single alias file. Back in the System 7 days, they were mere bytes in size. Their functionality hasn’t significantly ¹ changed since then.

I poked around an alias file (with the help of xattr, DeRez, and GetFileInfo) and found the answer: they’re storing icons in there now.

Twice. Once in the data fork of the file and then once in the resource fork of the file.

A series of events unfolded recently that led me to reconsider a lot about my digital life. The short story — and there is a long one — is that my home was broken into and my computers were stolen. The thieves also managed to take some accessories and drives but, astonishingly, left my Time Machine drives for the two computers. While it’s bad, it could have been so much worse.

The best description of how Cocoa’s views are designed that I could find from Apple is in the Cocoa Views Guide PDF in the chapter called View Geometry. If you’re trying to get your head around what a CGRect is and why self.view.frame.origin.x++ doesn’t work, that’s required reading. (A hint to the latter: view.frame is return-by-value; CGRect is a struct, self is an object.)

That said, here’s a handy graphic to not only help you get your head around when to use frame and when to use bounds, but also what they mean in the grand scale of things. Also included are some visual guides on when to use some handy CGGeometry.h functions to do some work for you.