cap008

so i keep running into these stupid little things that work fine on every flavor of Unix/Linux and even the free unix shell for windows (Cygwin), but they don't work on Mac. Really effin' annoying.
My favorite example so far is pipe grep.
for example:
ps -ef |grep ntp

Should take the process table info in extended format, find all the lines that contain the string 'ntp' and print only those. However, it behaves as if I hadn't typed the pipe grep part, supremely annoying as pipe grep is so useful and practically ubiquitous on *nix that there is even a comic named after it.
Or how about passing arguments...? Dunno why, but I needed to run a different version of my favorite editor(after googling and reading a bunch) to get it to accept a command line arg. These things should not be difficult, or different.

Also, don't even ask bout Mac's support for Java, if you're curious you could google it. Seems they have a very similar attitude towards Java developers that they have towards Iphone app developers. Looks like Sun has very limited support for Java on Mac and it makes me wonder why.

I was very surprised last week to have a discussion with one of the engineers here, whom I perceive to be very smart, complaining about Apple as the evil empire the way I used to complain about MSFT ten years ago. Granted most of his gripes were about their foray into DRM, and how ITunes refuses to 'store' your purchase history so if you lose your harddrive you must repurchase, however if you attempt to make more than 5 copies ITunes is denied by the mothership, so it looks like they _are_ keeping track. Ya, I'd call that evil.

Of course I could go on about their decision to put no less than four keys on the left pinky/thumb or the fact that they behave differently in different contexts (app, vs web), or the 'one button' trackpad on a $2k+ machine, effin' brilliant. I personally think that context menus (via rightclick) are probably the best contribution MSFT made to the mouse interface. Supremely less useful without a right click, and no I don't want to hear bout their guestures which cannot be accomplished without moving the fingers off the keyboard. Granted context menus were probably on Solaris and Mac, but MSFT went very far in making them standardized and generally dependable.

I wouldn't be surprised if the command key is causing extra cases of carple tunnel. My thumb is not comfortable moving that far sideways to hit a key, there's a reason that every other keyboard puts seldom used keys in that spot.
Going now to google how to switch command with capslock.