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After working on a Mac full time for almost a year, I’ve come to realise that OS X provides you with a lot of nice visual cues which greatly enhance the usability of the system. Here’s a nice example I came across the other day; take a loook at this screen grab of a TextEdit.app window.

Here’s another one, but what’s the difference?

The contents of the second window have changed, although it might not be immediately apparent. If you look at the window close control in the top right hand corner you should see that the second window’s close control has a black dot in the centre; this indicates that if you try to close the window you’ll be prompted to save or discard your changes.

This is a very neat feature which is so unobtrusive that it belies the thought which has obviously gone into the design of TextEdit.app. But it’s not just this app, so far I haven’t found a document centric OS X app that doesn’t offer this feature.

I had some hardware delivery to the office this morning; nothing too spectacular, just some disks and some memory. The delivery was taken and signed for by a colleague who works in our IS department and they’d checked that the consignment contained exactly what we’d ordered and paid for.

In order to do that, they’d had to open the box which, judging by the ripped, torn and otherwise mangled top of the box was quite a challenge.

Let’s just look at the top of the box in a bit more detail …

Ahh; they obviously didn’t see the easy to open tear strip on the top of the box, which wasn’t the top of the box, if you see what I mean. Oh well.

As fast as an anti-spam mechanism appears on the net, the spammers try to find a way to circumvent it; recently I wrote about the attempt of spammers to try and create realistic sounding names in an attempt to bypass spam filters with unintentionally amusing results.

The latest weapon in the spammers arsenal seems to be inserting passages from works of popular fiction into mails in an attempt to defeat natural language heuristic checks, with passages from Tolkein’s The Hobbit seeming to be a firm favourite, judging by the contents of my Junk Mail folder.

beeches came right down to the bank, till their feet were in the stream.
Across this bridge the elves thrust their prisoners, but Bilbo hesitated
in the rear. He did not at all like the look of the cavern-mouth and he
only made up his mind not to desert his friends just in time to scuttle
over at the heels of the fast elves, before the great gates of the king
closed behind them with a clang. Inside the passages were lit with red

and

Far over the misty mountains cold
To dungeons deep and caverns old
We must away, ere break of day,
To find our long-forgotten gold.
Bilbo went to sleep with that in his ears,
and it gave him very uncomfortable dreams.
It was long after the break of day, when he woke up.

How long until they bore of The Hobbit and move onto The Silmarillion or
The Lord Of The Rings one wonders?

On Windows, if you use this command line to start a Terminal Services session

mstsc -v:<server name> -f -console

you’ll end up connected to the console session on the target machine regardless of which Windows version it’s running.

Very useful if you’re wanting to connect to a Windows 2xxx Server which normally always connects you to a known session.

With the obligatory thumbs up to Rich for educating me on this topic.

I used to have a home made anti-stress ball, consisting of a flour filled balloon; it was made for me by one of the French students currently on industrial placement at work. I say used to as one of my colleagues managed to break it, which at least proved it really was a balloon filled with flour. Which is a shame as I was rather fond of it.

But then whilst out on a trip the self same student found this.

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