ACP Update

As of 28 January.

Get It Try It

Normally, when we pass these things out, the notes are very brief indeed.

It's been a while since one's felt any enthusiasm for systems development, Apple didn't exactly help much, the pandemic only made it worse, but now Omicron is here, we've understood for over a month that this can be the beginning of the end, despite what CNN says, and so a bit of the old levity can return.

Let's be thankful for those who survive, let's honour those who didn't, and lets hold accountable those idiots and psychopaths who turned something eminently fixable into an obscenely profitable disaster. Their time must come.

2022-01-15 Framework
Documentation update.

Mostly this means just what it says. We built our own documentation system back when Apple's system was shit, and we find no reason to revert, as their system is still basically shit. It's all HTML pages in the final analysis. Something's been updated there, that's all we need to know.

2022-01-16 Changes
With Changes running, if Changes is not 'front' and you click on its dock icon, another window opens. Changes was initially built as document-based. Creating a new project file as singleton app (arduous) should fix this. Stay tuned.

2022-01-17 Changes
One byte. One. In a NIB. That's all. Changes an app from multi-doc to singleton. Anyway: it's fixed, and will be available on next upload.

Yes. We covered it here.



One byte differed. The numerical representation of a NeXT code class. Trying to avoid defaulting to 'kiosk mode', a treat for window-lickers.

2022-01-26 Rixedit
Add same anti-XA code to file open.

The pinheads at Apple like to tag all kinds of stuff they know their clueless fanboys will never see. They did this back in the day with .DS_Store. (Isn't it truly amazing how it took so many years for them to admit the obvious, that it was a bug? And isn't it amazing how they kept promising to fix that bug but, to this day, still haven't fixed it?)

Now it's the extended attributes. Which started as a good thing. Or so it seemed. For they were ridding computers of those obnoxious 'resource forks' and stuff. Then of course someone in the deep recesses of One Absurd instead came up with a brilliant plan for Full Spectrum Dominance. Not exactly in the spirit of Unix, but their fanboys don't understand that kind of stuff anyway, do they?

This 'tagging' is controlled all over the place in an Apple system today. It's in the document controller class. This comes in very handy, for example, when you want to save a download to disk. And it also comes in handy when you just want to save a local file to disk. Watch Apple's Preview make a mess of things, if you're still not convinced.

(Of course you can't see this rubbish with Apple tools. You need something better. Apple sure won't let you have those tools if they can help it. Nice people, those Apple people. So it's sort of complete, in a perverse way, the circle that is. A vicious circle.)

So by merely connecting with the document controller to open or save a file, you'll get all this Gatekeeper gobbledegook on your files. Ugly. Unless you rely on Finder for your file management. Which is about the dumbest thing you can do.

The previous version of Rixedit only safeguarded against this Gatekeeper stuff on saves. Now it does it on mere file opens as well. The modus operandi is quite simple. Very simple calls are run through a selector in a very fast loop. One cannot know when Apple will get around to actually opening or saving a file (in fractions of a second of course) so the code can loop past a number of likely scenarios, all a mere fraction of a second, with the entire operation completed in - again - a mere fraction of a second. This works fine locally. How it will work over networks remains to be seen, but things can be adjusted should difficulties arise.

The changes to Rixedit of late have been considerable, but, once again, doing things the right and polite way, those changes are not visible unless one opts in. (Even the module size remains constant.)

Apple's attack at the same issue (was it Ali Ozer or was it that snot from Gothenburg) is to slap on - you guessed it - extended attributes. Which of course don't transport. XAs are stored in a separate system area and do not follow when files move to a different system.

But file extensions do. File extensions are part of a file name. So of course they follow. So all you have to do is associate file extensions (that you can make up on the fly) with different behavioural characteristics. Such as initial window coordinates. Such as background colour, text colour, font family, font size, and font weight. Such as automatic spell-checking. And so forth. But none of this is seen until you trigger things to make them so.

That's called 'opt-in' and it's the proper way to do things. That method gives the user credit for brains, something Apple will never ever do.

But perhaps more about Rixedit configs in a new article in a while. For it's a clever system we really appreciate.

Development for Apple?

Yes. How bright is the future for Apple? Twist the question a bit. How bright is the future for computing science in general? Avoid the obvious detour into 'how many real programmers still exist' and instead ponder the following screenshots taken from Tucker Carlson this evening. They're part of Apple's new 'emoji' library. What we know, Lex Luthor has not yet returned and made good on his promise, but we're hoping he will.

Finally

Finally, as we sign off, with Laura Ingraham Cracker screeching in the background, we have to wonder whether intelligent life will ever be found on this rock. Anti-maskers (they can be obsessive) are talking about when the mandates will be lifted, even as massive convoys bear down on soy capital Ottawa, and they're saying perhaps in February they'll no longer need masks because by then enough people will be vaccinated.

Oy vey. You never try to vaccinate your way out of a pandemic. Vaccines are not therapeutic. Vaccines in a pandemic only lead to further mutations. The current vaccines are leaky crap, attack only one of twenty-seven virus cell proteins, and generate trillions of spike proteins, and they don't stay in the upper arm, so the disasters are pinning the needle, with over one million events reported, Steve Kirsch guesstimating four hundred thousand who've dropped like flies on the spot...

At the same time that the 'funny uncle' known as Omicron is so vastly different from earlier strains, is on the level of a common cold for all but the frail, is more effective than Gates or the NIH could come up with, and, given that it spreads enough, and the geniuses in control don't try to thwart the spread any more, can actually result in real herd immunity - something the Big Pharma potions will never achieve. Ah those talking heads. The Muppet Show was more fun.

And we still haven't talked about Ivermectin or Ron Johnson's five-hour long expert panel free-for-all discussion that took place a week ago, something everyone should see. It's on Ron's Rumble channel. Go see it, get your Ivermectin, follow the FLCCC guidelines. No one ever needed to suffer from Covid. Stick together. Take IVM and remove the fear the bad guys are using on you.

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