If you’re using Tiger (10.4.x) and have tried to change your network preferences recently, you may well have found yourself in an infinite loop that looks something like this:

When you press ‘OK’ this modal window pops straight back up again, often needing a Force-Quit to get out of the Preferences.^[1]

There is a way to change this (thanks to Mike Allen). Go to the Security panel, and select the ‘Require password to unlock secure system preference’ checkbox:

Voila.

Problem solved.

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[1] There is a slight workaround to avoid trashing the program, if you’re quick. Move the mouse so it’s over either the ‘Show All’ button, to return to the main menu, or the ‘Configure’ button, to change things slowly and painfully. When you’re set, press the return key and quickly click the mouse button. If you time it right, you send the mouse event before the window pops back up again. Annoying, but possible.↩

Bathgate nails it.

I’m getting more frustrated with Accordance by the day. Not with maps – with the core stuff.

Perhaps some competition will help things along.

There are some (many?) newspaper articles that play out exactly like you thought they were going to. Stereotypes are imported wholesale. Straw men are hastily erected, and attacked mercilessly. Certain phrases capture the thought of the piece so concisely and completely, that reading the remainder of the article is just killing time.

Sort of like watching Titanic.

Two articles from the Herald grabbed my attention for this reason over the weekend. One was a tech article, on the opening of the new Apple store in Sydney. The straw men, in this case, are the ‘mac faithful’:

For the cult who worship the Mac, the company co-founder and chief executive Steve Jobs has become the high priest and the Apple Store his temple. It is a place to go to worship and give thanks for having an alternative to Microsoft, PCs and Windows.

Hmm. That’s right. Mac users are zealots, sort of, you know… different… to normal people.

The other was an astounding juxtaposition of ideas, in a short piece on the Anglican church:

Archbishop Jensen is one of the leaders of 1000 conservative churchmen from 17 Anglican provinces who will gather at the Jerusalem Global Anglican Futures Conference this month. Mainly from Africa, the Middle East and Asia, they are united on one principal issue: hostility to homosexuality.

But Archbishop Jensen argues: “This dispute is not really about homosexuality. It’s really about authority and who runs the church. And fairly clearly, to most of the rest of us, God runs the church through the Bible.”

(h/t David Ould)

Not a great example of listening skills, it seems.

Fascinating.

For mac users, Accordance version 8 is now out. It looks like there’s a couple of bugs still being worked through (the universal binary didn’t have the help file for a while), so if you’re keen on getting it maybe wait a couple of days.

To be frank, I’m not that impressed with the feature list. The big one is that it’s now a universal binary, which means that on newer Intel-based macs (read: any mac that has been available in the last 2 years or so) it should run with fewer system resources. That’s good, but I’ve never really noticed it being particularly power-hungry anyway, so it’s one of those features that I probably won’t notice much.

More advanced search features sound cool, but I’m yet to be convinced of their utility. Horizontal panes of bible texts – meh.

And the final thing they’re trumpeting is Unicode import. This means you can type/paste unicode characters into the search field and it will actually work, as opposed to now where it simply doesn’t recognise the characters. Presumably you can still export to unicode, but there is no mention of upgraded fonts, so my frustrations continue. The beautiful fonts used to render Greek and Hebrew within Accordance remain accessible only to those who own Accordance. In order to share work effectively, you need to use a sub-standard font, which is really annoying.

I’m amazed that unicode is still not used internally. I’ve done some coding on mac, and it’s really not that difficult to support as far as the programming tools go. Font creation and modification is not impossible either. There must be an awful lot of legacy code that they’re unwilling to change, and very few programmers, over at Accordance HQ. At some point they’re going to have to strip it back and rework it properly, and the longer they wait, the bigger the job will be.

My conclusion? I’m nowhere near impressed enough to shell out for an upgrade. Feel free to convince me otherwise.

One of the things that has bugged me for a while about Safari’s built in search box has been the inability to alter the default search engine.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of Google, but often I want to search for things in Australia only. http://www.google.com.au/ is great for this, as it gives the option to search the entire web, or pages in Australian domains only. Excellent.

In order to do this effectively, however, I’ve had to navigate manually to the Australian Google site, then search… a minor inconvenience, granted, but one that takes longer than a simple search in the top right.

A minor inconvenience, that is, until now.

Allow me to introduce AcidSearch: a plugin that modifies the search box. You can set up default search engines, custom search paths (e.g. you can easily search for “Kill Bill” on imdb.com), and switch easily between them. It’s gold, it’s free, I like it better than Inquisitor.

Excellent.