Is the user space simply yielding to the skinny man from Cupertino?
Posted by moonwatcher at Thursday, August 18, 2011
HP and WebOS (AKA former Palm) just dropped out of the race.
This is getting scary, i mean the only players in the future of commercial operating systems are Apple, Google, Microsoft and kind of RIM with blackberry.
Blackberry has about as much chance of survival as the dinosaurs, or other canadian tech companies from the past for that matter (remember Matrox?). Microsoft is loosing market share on every possible front faster than a 1995 fiat looses oil. Google is playing a very risky game that might or might not secure it's future. And Apple, well Apple just keeps growing with no one even trying to stand in it's way.
It seems to me like the IT user space is simply yielding to the skinny man from Cupertino.
This is not healthy. I never thought I would say it, but if Microsoft won't do something really radical, really fast; and by radical i don't mean painting Windows 7 in a new color adding a superlative and calling it Windows 8, we are approaching a world dominated entirely by two companies...
Two wonderful companies, true. But two.
And power. Infinite power. Well it Corrupts.
Flash ON / Flash OFF on MacBook Air with zsh
Posted by moonwatcher at Monday, January 10, 2011 | 2 comments
Labels: code , flash , mac
Just got my new shiny MacBook Air, which as part of Steve's escalating War On Flash, comes without a Flash plugin preinstalled.
After some googling i was fairly informed of the claims, which I find very easy to believe, that Flash shaves 2 hours of the battery life on typical web browsing, probably due to disregarding the existence of a GPU and being utilized mostly for epileptic seizure inducing advertisements. Being an Ad blocking fanatic, and not having my fine tuned squid proxy when on the go, I decided that living without Flash might not be such a bad idea...
Alas! living entirely without flash means no google analytics and sometimes no other things that i do need occasionally :(
So i whipped up two zsh aliases for flashing ON and flashing OFF.
All you need to do is move the files:
to, say:/Library/Internet Plug-Ins/Flash Player.plugin /Library/Internet Plug-Ins/flashplayer.xpt
add to your ~/.zshrc :~/.flash/Flash Player.plugin ~/.flash/flashplayer.xpt
alias flashon="ln -s ~/.flash/Flash\ Player.plugin ~/Library/Internet\ Plug-Ins/ 2>/dev/null; ln -s ~/.flash/flashplayer.xpt ~/Library/Internet\ Plug-Ins/ 2>/dev/null" alias flashoff="rm ~/Library/Internet\ Plug-Ins/Flash\ Player.plugin 2>/dev/null; rm ~/Library/Internet\ Plug-Ins/flashplayer.xpt 2>/dev/null"
Now typing flashoff or flashon in your shell (and restarting the browser...) will toggle the flash plugin loading. Flash ON Flash OFF... Daniel San.