@jimluther@techhub.social avatar

jimluther

@jimluther@techhub.social

Retired Apple software engineer. I used to polish, refine and fix things, and sometimes I created completely new things.

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davemark, to apple
@davemark@mastodon.social avatar

Steve Jobs, 23 years ago, showing off the first Apple Store, just before it opened...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ce02galgfRo

jimluther,
@jimluther@techhub.social avatar

@davemark Now I know how old a t-shirt I have is. When they opened that store, they gave out t-shirts at an Apple beer bust at Infiniye Loop. The shirts were in plastic tubes. Mine is still in that tube.

GeekAndDad, to random
@GeekAndDad@mastodon.social avatar

Didn’t read but I sure hope SpaceX / Starlink company is paying for this and not us taxpayers… https://mastodon.online/@mastodonmigration/112457475753592138

jimluther,
@jimluther@techhub.social avatar

@GeekAndDad @mastodonmigration Rich guy thinks he’s smarter than NASA because he could pay to go to space. https://www.npr.org/2024/05/16/1251750041/nasa-studyies-offer-of-a-private-mission-to-save-hubble-space-telescope

jimluther, to random
@jimluther@techhub.social avatar

Does anyone still have the binders (with contents) describing System 7 which were given to developers at the Apple 1989 WWDC?

I was at the conference handing them out to developers but I worked in Apple II Developer Technical Support, so I don't remember if I got a set, or if I did, if I kept them.

They really should be scanned and archived somewhere.

In particular, I'd be interested in what was said about the File Manager, the File System Manager (which I wrote documentation for and helped ship to developers in 1994), and Virtual Memory since I ended up maintaining and improving that code from 1995 through the end of Mac OS 9.

jimluther, to random
@jimluther@techhub.social avatar

Happy 35th birthday Worldwide Developers’ Conference (WWDC)!

Apple had developer conferences before 1989 but 1989 is when David Szetela, manager of Apple’s Developer Services group, named it Worldwide Developers’ Conference. The conference ran the week of May 8th through 12th that year.

davemark, to Eurovision
@davemark@mastodon.social avatar

🍿🎤
Eurovision starts today.

For US folks, you can watch live on Peacock, if you subscribe.

EU / UK folks, this still a big deal? Worth watching?

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/voting-schedules-favotires-everything-need-know-eurovision-rcna150616

jimluther,
@jimluther@techhub.social avatar

@davemark this podcast episode was interesting https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/episodes/mysteries-euroverse

dgoldsmith, to random
@dgoldsmith@mastodon.social avatar

I am shocked, shocked to discover that US health insurance companies operate this way.
https://newsie.social/@ProPublica/112354288163593907

jimluther,
@jimluther@techhub.social avatar

@dgoldsmith @ProPublica throw a little more sarcasm into that, Debbie 🤣

w7voa, to random
@w7voa@journa.host avatar

Singaporean diplomat suspended from duty for filming a boy in a Tokyo bathhouse. https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/mfa-officer-suspended-from-duty-after-secretly-filming-boy-in-tokyo-bathhouse

jimluther,
@jimluther@techhub.social avatar

@w7voa I hate it when acronyms are used. MFA is? When I was young, it was Missouri Farmers Association.

drahardja, to random
@drahardja@sfba.social avatar

lol why are teenagers so gross? They leave behind so many grimy fingerprints, stains, and clumps of dirt everywhere they go. I thought kids learned to keep their hands clean when they turn seven, but I guess I’m mistaken.

jimluther,
@jimluther@techhub.social avatar

@drahardja it’s not just teenagers. Did you ever get a hand me down computer at work that you had to sanitize before you could use it? 🤮

paul, to random
@paul@tapbots.social avatar

Printing out a paper backup copy of my Taxes. This is fine?

jimluther,
@jimluther@techhub.social avatar

@paul if I was really worried about it, I’d just print to PDF and make sure it was backed up on a couple of CDs (I’m still burning through that pile of blanks I purchased).

Cdespinosa, to random
@Cdespinosa@mastodon.social avatar

Don’t go around the barriers, people. (Monterey Rd. in San Martin, CA; the driver suffered “moderate injuries”)

jimluther,
@jimluther@techhub.social avatar

@Cdespinosa car vs train - train always wins.

w7voa, to random
@w7voa@journa.host avatar

"I would like to demand our border be closed," says Donald Trump with House Speaker Mike Johnson standing at his side. Biden "should close the border immediately."

jimluther,
@jimluther@techhub.social avatar

@w7voa NPR got the headline correct “Republicans aim to stop noncitizen voting in federal elections. It's already illegal” and then correctly call it out as election misinformation.

https://www.npr.org/2024/04/12/1244302080/trump-johnson-noncitizen-voting-bill

davew, to random
@davew@mastodon.social avatar

Back in the day, many of the early writing tools were called Word-something. WordStar, Microsoft Word, WordPerfect.

jimluther,
@jimluther@techhub.social avatar

@davew don’t forget the “write” and “writer” tools. I started out with AppleWriter on the Apple II.

steveriggins, to random
@steveriggins@mastodon.social avatar

Wait, I cannot change the URL for an iCloud Keychain password entry? This seems like a massive flaw nobody talks about. I have to create a new entry and guessed at the website because the app is a lame web app with a fake input form, and now I have something that I cannot autofill on their sign in screen

jimluther,
@jimluther@techhub.social avatar

@steveriggins It looks like you can change the URL with the old Keychain Access utility (in the Utilities folder). You should write a bug against the System Preferences->Passwords panel so that functionality can be fixed in the new UI before the Keychain Access utility app goes away.

Weird history: I wrote the first implementation for SecItem API for macOS. It was a shim on top of the old Keychain API. Why? Because I implemented the Keychain API on Windows for the Safari for Windows project, and right after Apple shipped Safari for Windows, the iPhone was released and the iPhone team had implemented SecItem for the phone and were not going to use the old Keychain API, so... I wrote the shim code so the SecItem API could be used everywhere. A release or so later, the security team grabbed my shim code and used it to get SecItem up on macOS.

alexr, to random
@alexr@mastodon.online avatar

Somehow I doubt that any of those folks setting up AppleTalk routers are going to hit all those bugs in the rev E Ethernet card that we suffered through back in the day. (ProTip: DDP checksums are important.)

jimluther,
@jimluther@techhub.social avatar

@alexr If you are using AppleShare (AFP), you should use the AppleShare client that shipped with Mac OS 9.2.2. It was the last thing I worked on for Mac OS 9 and I fixed lots of performance issues. That AppleShare client should work back to Mac OS 7.6 (disclaimer, it wasn’t tested that far back but the changes I made were not OS version specific).

danielpunkass, to random
@danielpunkass@mastodon.social avatar

I just learned that my primary school, Branciforte Elementary, in Santa Cruz, CA, has been closed/transformed for over 20 years. The place in my memories doesn't exist. I realize I sort of counted on most of these iconic places lasting. C'est la vie.

jimluther,
@jimluther@techhub.social avatar

@danielpunkass The class after mine was the last to graduate from my high school. They tore down the building after that. It was right across the street from my parent’s house so it was always weird visiting them and looking out the window at a vacant lot.

boredzo, to random
@boredzo@mastodon.social avatar

Some of you may remember I wrote a utility called impluse. It's a CLI tool for modern macOS to work with HFS volumes, including extracting items and converting to HFS+.

I've been working on it and an adjacent project lately, partly motivated by .

Recent fixes:

jimluther,
@jimluther@techhub.social avatar

@boredzo @tempelorg I'm confused by which file IDs you are referring to with “Converting volumes whose file IDs are not unique”. Are you talking about file numbers (the file ID stored in the filFlNum field of the cdrFilRec) or file ID reference numbers?

On HFS volumes, there are file numbers and file ID reference numbers. File ID reference numbers were introduced in Macintosh System 7. When a file was created on an HFS volume, it did not have a file ID reference number -- file ID reference numbers were created for a file by PBCreateFileIDRef (and if I remember correctly, starting with Mac OS 8.1, the File Manager was changed to always create a file ID reference for a file when it was created).

By the way, we talk Alsoft into reviving their PlusMaker product only instead of converting the HFS volume in place, create a new HFS Plus disk image and convert the HFS disk/image to it. I have lots of HFS CDs, a few floppies, and lots of disk images I'd convert.

jimluther,
@jimluther@techhub.social avatar

@boredzo @tempelorg On HFS, it was MacRoman.

jimluther,
@jimluther@techhub.social avatar

@dgoldsmith @boredzo @tempelorg Debbie, thanks for waking up more dormant brain cells that I didn't know I had.

MoreFilesX (which some guy with my name wrote) has a function named HFSNameGetUnicodeName() that converts a Pascal Str31 string to an Unicode HFSUniStr255 string using the same API as the File Manager.

Is that API still available? I don't know -- I haven't attempted to build MoreFilesX lately. Debbie might know.

I’m very surprised I can still find this in the archives https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/samplecode/MoreFilesX/Introduction/Intro.html

jimluther,
@jimluther@techhub.social avatar

@dgoldsmith @boredzo @tempelorg deprecated… just like the File Manager (I deprecated it in Lion) and HFS. Someday, Keith will retire and there will be nobody left working in that group who knows how the CarbonCore API works.

siracusa, to random
@siracusa@mastodon.social avatar

Today's treat from Finder/Icon Services: folder or mounted volume? Why not both?

The title bar of a Finder window showing the command-click menu that lists the path to the item, but now the item has a folder icon. (This is correct. The item is, in fact, a folder and not a mounted volume.)

jimluther,
@jimluther@techhub.social avatar

@siracusa It's probably a race condition.

All mounted volumes start out as directory and then a file system is mounted on that directory. At that point, it is both a directory AND a volume. If code sees the directory in that small window after the directory is created but before the directory also becomes a volume, that’s the race.

FSEvents are supposed to make sure code notices the change from a directory to a directory that's also a volume. Code watching FSEvents would see a directory created event and then see a volume mounted event.

I know that in macOS 12, the kFSEventStreamEventFlagMount and kFSEventStreamEventFlagUnmount FSEvents were not generated. I wrote FB9925463 and I believe that bug was fixed in macOS 13. I had to work around that problem in code I wrote for BBEdit.

That said, it could a new problem or race condition in other code. If you can reproduce the problem in macOS 13 or later, I suggest you write another FB report.

drahardja, to random
@drahardja@sfba.social avatar

Not only does it not save any batteries or resources, it’s actually worse to kill apps instead of letting the system suspend them, because you have to cold-launch the app again the next time you use it, wastefully running initialization code and reloading resources instead of resuming where you left off.

Killing your apps is literally worse for your battery life than just leaving them alone. https://allthingstech.social/@beardedtechguy/111960674538537088

jimluther,
@jimluther@techhub.social avatar

@drahardja I kill apps that require location info to work properly after I’m done using those apps. I don’t care if they have to be cold launched again.

TPOHolmes, to random
@TPOHolmes@mastodon.social avatar

@jimluther @thestrangelet Are you kidding? At one point (maybe still), I had a box full of the thermal travel cups with the red Copland “8” on them. Used them for years.

We had a leak in our 2nd floor deck once and used an 8' vinyl “Copland” banner to cover it until we could patch it. We wondered if any pilots taking off from Oakland Airport were Mac users and would recognize it.

And then there’s the Mac OS 8 semi truck, that my kids played with growing up…

jimluther,
@jimluther@techhub.social avatar

@alexr @jongary @integerpoet @TPOHolmes @thestrangelet None in virtual memory. I fixed them all. 😉

jimluther,
@jimluther@techhub.social avatar

@jongary PsychoFarmer was project that was killed - I think after 7.5. It was then used as a place to dump bugs that nobody was going to work on because Copland was the focus. When I moved from DTS to 7.5.x stability/performance engineering, I was handed VM to improve, but couldn’t find many bug reports until I found them all in PsychoFarmer. @alexr might know what PsychoFarmer was supposed to be.

jimluther,
@jimluther@techhub.social avatar

@jongary @alexr never mind. @Cdespinosa keeps more stuff (and history) than I ever did.

jimluther,
@jimluther@techhub.social avatar

@Cdespinosa @alexr @jongary There were so many projects going in so many directions back then.

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