FileXaminer 2.54

Nothing shall be impossible.
 - Jesus quote from FileXaminer website

Nothing shall be impossible. So says Jesus. That's good to know. After all, christian KKK fanboys are the most fun. And nothing beats invoking JESUS to pull all the dirty tricks in the industry and even come up with new ones - after all, nothing shall be impossible, right? 'Christian fanboy software - it's the best!'

Gideon Softworks
Rating: (four burnt toasts)

David J Clark
12 Newport Dr
Hainesport, NJ 08036
US

Collateral damage:
Can't get Jesus off your computer
Can't get other trojans off it either
Purchase of tinfoil hat to combat reality distortion field prohibitive
Massive loss of disk free space, possibly corrupt system
Your sanity and the sanity of all your loved ones
$10 + $40 K pcm for room at Happy Acres

FileXaminer is an award winning 'Get Info' application. FileXaminer allows you to modify file and folder attributes that the Finder cannot, such as type/creator info, UNIX permissions, and much more. FileXaminer is powerful and easy to use - making it the best 'Get Info' application for Mac OS X.

Try FileXaminer, and let us know what you think.

Sure enough, Jesus. Here comes.

Yeah, it's a great tool all right. A slick 2.9 MB download for a plugin. Piece of cake. While we're waiting for the arrival of this piece of Jesus genius, let's remind ourselves it was Jesus Gideon who also gave us the great xBack - the utility that for a small price replaced a single command line and then added a few totally useless doodads to make the price seem more worth it.

While the rest of the world hold their collective breath and wait to see if any professional business software emerges on this kiddie platform, we have a never ending stream of applications like xBack to keep us serenely occupied.

And Bob 'Dr Mac' LeVitus thinks xBack is cool, so it must be, for Dr Mac knows all there is to know. As far as he or Jesus knows, that is.

The price for this command line makeover is as for FileXaminer - US$10. How many litres of Carling Black Label can you buy for that? At least you can download it and run it for free and pop out to the corner and bring back some CBL whoop-ass and watch your screen saver for a while. And there are always doodads you can click on. When you can't really do anything it's always comforting to have doodads to click on.

Yo.

The reason this review was undertaken was twofold. First: watching all the wankers buy and use add-ons when no one's worried about the task to FTFF is amazing. It's pathological even.

Second: there seems to be something missing in the FileXaminer screenshots. Otherwise this would be an immediate dismissal, a perfunctory brush-away, yet another doodad only the likes of Freaks and Dr Macintosh would find appealing, something the professional finds an insult.

OK, here we are, it's all downloaded on the hard drive now, taking 3,080,066 bytes. For a frikkin' plugin. Must be some kind of kiddie pool record. OK, let's open it and see what we get. As DU runs we suddenly feel sympathy for poor old Pandora.

1740 Copyright (C) Rixstep. All rights reserved.
._fex254.dmg:
              magic: 00051607
            version: 00020000
   home file system:
  number of entries: 2
  entry 0:
      entry ID: 9 (Finder info)
        offset: 00000032 (50)
        length: 32 bytes
                64 65 76 69 64 64 73 6B 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |deviddsk........|
                00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |................|
                      fdType: 64657669
                   fdCreator: 6464736B
                     fdFlags: 0000
                fdLocation.v: 0000
                fdLocation.h: 0000
                      fdFldr: 0000
                    fdIconID: 0000
                  fdReserved: 0000 0000 0000
                    fdScript: 00
                    fdXFlags: 00
                   fdComment: 00
                   fdPutAway: 00000000

Unzipping 'fex254.dmg.zip' gives us AppleDouble horseshit - a totally empty 'this page intentionally left blank' which is about as compatible with Unix as the rest of the Apple disaster today. But inside the sane part is something called 'fex254.dmg' and it's a healthy 3,107,505 bytes.

We just saved the user 27,439 bytes on the download. Oh whoopee. Praise Jesus. And simultaneously torture the user with AppleDoubles. Good thinking!

Time to mount this loser.

350 items. Read that again. 350 items for a frikkin' plugin. Xfind says 5,197,611 bytes on disk in 11712 blocks - and look here! There are resource forks too! Whoopee! Praise Jesus! Truly nothing is impossible!

FileXaminer.app/Contents/MacOS/FileXaminer is a universal. Wonderful. But it's only 631180 bytes so the big damage isn't here.

FileXaminer: Mach-O fat file with 2 architectures
FileXaminer (for architecture ppc):     Mach-O executable ppc
FileXaminer (for architecture i386):    Mach-O executable i386

It comes with three built in frameworks. Things we need.

drwxr-xr-x  7 rixstep  unknown  238 Apr  5 00:50 GIF.framework
drwxr-xr-x  7 rixstep  unknown  238 Apr  5 00:50 GSCore.framework
drwxr-xr-x  6 rixstep  unknown  204 Apr  5 00:50 Spooky.framework

And great news for the fanboy: all the development header files are included too! (No, that's right, you have absolutely no use for them - not even in your dreams. But you did just download them. Be careful: Jesus doesn't like puke on the carpet.)

OK, so we're going to have to bite the bullet and move this sucker to a writable volume just to see how bad things really are. Let's start the trusty lipo machine. First we clean the drive to make sure it's all set for Tracker.

[Fifteen minutes later.]

So anyway we get this sucker down to 223 items with fifteen minutes' work the great Gideon should have done. This sucker now takes 3,546,897 bytes in 7720 blocks - and voila no longer has resource forks. But it still takes 3.5 MB on disk. For a plugin. Just for a plugin.

Time to run Tracker.

And we're up. Sort of.

Menu bar - that's it. Poke around at the menu.

Groups: now here's a good one. 'The Group Members listing is not a complete listing of users in the selected group.' So right - but it's also an incorrect listing. No matter what group you choose, Gideon always tells you root is a member. Clever. [Jesus would do a better job, for sure he would.]

We can also make new groups. [Where did this fifth wheel come from? Didn't we all read in school how someone already invented the wheel anyway?]

Image Buddy? IMAGE BUDDY??!?? What do tiny 4yo fanboys do in the dark at nighttime? Besides sing country and western with Jesus? Take off all their clothes and play with their IMAGE BUDDY? Someone get the flight bag quick. Try clicking the 'Go' button with no data input - the spinner on the bottom left starts going.

Edit text file as root??!??

Manage Users goes to System Preferences? Oh this is too funny.

Get Info: this is admittedly nice. Sort of. Show In Finder is really asking for it. Copy Path - why? Recalculate Size - in other words Refresh?

But as can be seen from the illustration, good old Gideon don't actually calculate all that good all that often. Perhaps small tidbits like this slipped under the nose of Freaks and Dr Mac. [Of course how they could let a TERABYTE get off that easy is another matter entirely. Jesus would have caught it right away.]

'Advanced': the part suspected to be missing. The one reason of two to go through this pointless exercise and download this piece of trash. It's here. Sort of. You get the fourth (from the right) mode digit - and then you go into a tailspin. Mac OS Flags? There are no such things. OK, the invisible flag is pure 'MacOS'. We can't have 'the rest of them' looking at files that can give them a fright, can we?

And as for the 'locked' attribute - get ready, for that's not 'Mac OS' at all. It's Unix.

You wonder what happens if we mess a bit with these? Go ahead - download and try. Haha. But remember 'locked' is not specified as system immutable or user immutable; remember if it turns out to be system immutable you're going to have to boot into SUM to get rid of the sucker; and remember this app promises to 'force delete' your dinky trash can, so you might want to see if it really can with system immutables on the contents. Go ahead - download and try.

Batch Get Info? Really? Shall we attempt to assign new owners to critical system files? Whatever you do - don't hit Cancel!

[This can get baaaaaaad. Each and every single file in the list has to be prompted and canceled - this can take some time. If only Jesus were here and could stop time. Shit.]

Oh heck - and time is precious, being as it's money - so it's best to just put this sucker out of the collective users' misery and start assessing the damage.

Oh goodness. Anyone want to buy a great Power Mac on eBay? It was working great up until a few minutes ago!

[Please note: this malfeasant application installs the nefarious eSellerate framework on your computer and never tells you. Caveat emptor; BUYER BEWARE.]

[The eSellerate framework takes nearly half a meg of your disk space. It has one purpose - to help you buy FileXaminer. It's no longer easy enough to visit a website and make a purchase - you need an obscene half meg framework on disk instead - something installed without your knowledge or permission.]

And it's when you see what a sloppy job Jesus did with Gideon's help in trying to sneak one past you that your general malaise of nausea turns into pure rage: megabytes of shit left in your /tmp directory.

Just leave it there. Fuck it. Jesus saves. Nothing is impossible.

Time to boot into SUM - if Gideon is so crass as to sneak an eSellerate framework past unsuspecting users, who knows what's happened to the file system. As things turn out, the file system is fortunately not harmed.

Time for the bottom line.

• Finder sucks. The sky is blue. Bears shit in the woods.
• Any additional file info is good but this app totally sucks.
• FileXaminer doesn't give you extended flags. It's a fanboy app.
• 5 MB in toto for essentially a plugin - someone needs a lobotomy.
• Half meg eSellerate framework installed in stealth.

Avoid like the plague. Jesus did.