What matters is this: an application, in and of itself, should never install an extension that modifies the system or otherwise diddles the runtime environment of other applications, without the express permission of the user. There are no exceptions to this rule.

Daring Fireball: Smart Crash Reports

This article is long, and it's sort of technical. But read it anyway, it's good to understand. But if you can't follow it at all, I'll cut to the key bit:

That might still be a bit tricky for some users. With a strong dose of caveat emptor, here's my step by step version.

1) Open a terminal window (it's in Application/Utilties if you live in the dark ages. If you run Quicksilver open Quicksilver and type in "Term" or so until you find it. Or put it on your dock and aspire to be a real Unix weenie someday. :-))

2) Enter the following: cd ~/Library

3) Enter the following cd InputManagers

4) If 3) doesn't work you probably need to create the folder. mkdir InputManagers will do it. If 3) worked then skip to 5)

5) Enter the following: ls

6) If 5) returns this text "Smart Crash Reports" you already have it. If you know what you're doing at the command line, then delete the folder.  (Full disclaimer - that's what I did - a rm -rf command. If you don't know what that means, I'm not going to tell you. If you do know than you don't need my help - RTFA beeyotch!) If you don't, let me tell you the safer way to trash it (using the Finder). Open the Finder. Go to your home folder, open the Library folder, and then inside there is the InputManager folder. Drag the folder named Smart Crash Reports to the Trash. This will junk it, but the next time you run whatever really ill behaved app it will reinstall it. Continue on to lock your system down. If 5) did NOT list the folder then continue to 7)

7) Back at the Terminal window enter the following: touch Smart\ Crash\ Reports

8) If you didn't do step 6 open the Finder window and navigate as described. Once you have a Finder window in Library/InputManager then select the file there named "Smart Crash Reports". Hit Apple-I (for Info). Click the "Locked" check box. Close the Info window, the Finder window and the terminal app. Now you are protected from "silent" installation of Smart Crash Reports.

Bonus note: If you have anything else installed in the InputManager folders you've got some other crazy thing running about. Apparently this is the same mechanism that PithHelmet uses. It sounds pretty clunky to me, but I Am Not A Mac Programmer. If you have something else in that folder and you don't recognize what it is . . . well that's bad. Drop me an email and we'll see what we can find :-)

technorati tags: OS_X, software

(And yes, I know they dropped the 'A' a while back. It will always be Advanced to me, baby.)

Amazon dropped me a line pointing out that I might want to order the upcoming 30 Years of Adventure : A Celebration of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D Retrospective) (Paperback) - which is a reasonably good guess, let's be honest. I thought I was familiar with the product - this is just the softcover version of the book that came out last year. Fair enough. However one thing did catch my eye - the softcover was edited by Peter Archer (which makes perfect sense - he's the head of the book department), but check out the author of the hardcover version. That's right Vin Diesel!

I poked around a bit and it's not as quite as outlandish as it sounds, apparently he really did write the foreword. I've been seeing more and more stuff about Amazon screwing up the author credit on books and apparently it's a real pain to get it straightened out, so I assume this is the same sort of thing. Anyway, it made me laugh.

technorati tags: gaming, humor, Amazon

So them there Interweb denizens have gotten atwitter about the existence of Dev2.0 (which is a kid band covering Devo) I popped over and watched a couple of videos - and my final take is just pure perplexity. Who is this for? I mean, the videos manage to convey "Disney manufactured kiddie stuff" perfectly - there's some sort of interesting discussion there about what elements make it so obviously aimed at pre-teens. But then they are just basically doing bad Devo covers. Do pre-teens give a crap about Devo? Did I miss a memo? The next theory is that it's supposed to appeal to me somehow - that it is either ironic and/or retro. I don't buy that for a second. In the first place I have the original Devo songs on my iPod already, and in the second place, there's not an original bone in this melange.

We're left with the weak third case - the "multiple levels" approach. In this mode it's supposed to appeal to the kiddies while have richer levels for parents. See Pixar or Shrek for examples of this. But I'm not buying it there either. See, for that to work it has to first appeal to the kiddies, and I'm not convinced Devo songs do that. After you have that then you can layer on additional content that amuses parents. And I'm not convinced it does that either - the covers sound strictly inferior to me.

So I'm not outraged but I am perplexed. I'd love to see a coherent explanation of what the marketing plan actually is here.

technorati tags: music, Disney

Did I ever mention SF Novelists before? I should have. It's a community of science fiction novelists who are getting together to discuss the writing genre and to jointly promote everyone's work. I'm a member, albeit a quiet one as my book is not yet available. Anyway, it's a cool site, and you folks should check out the aggregated blog. Once I have a professional site set up I'll have stuff posted there as well - I think I'm going to keep this site seperate as a personal deal.

Anyhoo, there's a lot of free fiction that showed up from SFNovelist authors and I'd be remiss if I didn't point it out. Tobias S. Buckell (who organized SF Novelists) has his first book Crystal Rain coming out soon and he's posting the first third of the book here.

Chris Roberson is another SF Novelist member and he wrote Here, There & Everywhere - a book that Weezie recommended to me and I can endorse as an enjoyable romp through parallel worlds. He has Paragaea: A Planetary Romance due out in May, and he's set up a site for the book here - and you can download entire an entire prequel under a Creative Commons license.

I have to admit I haven't read either of these yet, but I'm downloading them and putting them in the queue now. But everyone from SF Novelists rocks the house, so go check 'em out! :-)

technorati tags: writing, Sci-Fi, book

http://m.gmail.com is the new mobile interface to gmail. Can't say too much about it, except in works on my Treo 600 - no muss no fuss. It's not fabulous, I wouldn't want to do much with it. But y'know it's gmail and it's available everywhere now. That's worth something.

I'm sure somebody is saying "but you have email on your Treo already. And I'm fairly certain that I do. First off, I've probably got some cruddy Sprint thingie I've never used. Second off, at one point in time I had it successfully communicating with my hiddenjester email - that might still work. HellifIknow. I can't remember the last time I tested that. Actually, I'm quite certain that send wouldn't work for that - I could probably read my email, but not send it.

Anyway, I know the web browser works, so setting up gmail as my "emergency on the go mail" is a nice thing.

technorati tags: gmail, phones, Treo600