Aaron Adams’s Blowhard Blog

The website for BFilter states the following as a feature:

Forwarding to another proxy (HTTP and SOCKS proxies).

However, nowhere on the site, in the FAQ or in the documentation, are you told how to do this. Really annoying. If you’re going to list features and provide documentation, document how to use the features!

I figured out how to use this feature by accident in Mac OS X. When you install BFilter, it creates new network profiles that specifically enable filtering. For instance, if you have a network profile named “Home”, BFilter creates a profile named “(BF) Home”. Selecting that profile proxies your HTTP traffic through the BFilter software.

To enable another proxy, such as a caching proxy, you need to edit the original”home” (or whatever) profile and set the proxy for that profile to the caching server. For example:

Profile: (BF) Home
Proxy: 127.0.0.1:8080

Profile: Home
Proxy: 192.168.1.254:8000

That will route HTTP traffic through both the caching proxy and the ad filtering proxy. Good stuff.

Today Apple released a logically-named update to Mac OS X, which bears the version number 10.4.10. Wow! Who would have thought? What minimally intelligent person said sometime in the past that, contrary to the stupid assertions of Think Secret and the apparently brainless people who inhabit forums and comment threads on the 1n+@rw3b!!11!! d00dz, version numbering schemes don’t stop at .9, nor do they roll over like a gas pump? Oh, that’s right, I did.

To all those who thought otherwise, you’re frigtards and I curse you for arguing about this insipid point that’s obvious to any reasonable person. Write your capitulation immediately in the comments section for this post.

A few weeks back, this page revealed that you can use a sqlite command from the Terminal to clear some of the database cruft from your Apple Mail envelope index. Most people reported a speed gain while running Mail as a result of this operation, and almost everyone reported a reduction in size of their envelope index database as well.

Safari uses a sqlite database for its RSS feeds. Since I use Safari as my RSS reader, I decided to try the sqlite command from Mail against my Safari database. The command did shrink the database, and it feels faster loading feeds and sorting them, but I have no objective evidence to point to any quantitative speed improvement. It did not damage my RSS feed database or Safari itself.

I’m posting this command hoping that others will try it and let me know their results.

Steps for cleaning up your Safari RSS database:

1. Quit Safari
2. Open Terminal, and enter the following:
   sqlite3 Library/Syndication/DatabaseX vacuum
   where X may be a number

That’s all there is to it. If you find this useful or have something to say, don’t hesitate to comment.

What a coincidence.

Computer Tech Accidentally Erases Info on Alaska’s $38 Billion Oil Fund

A computer technician at the Alaska Department of Revenue deleted applicant information for an oil-funded sales account — one of state residents’ biggest perks.

While reformatting the disk drive during a routine maintenance check, the technician mistakenly reformatted the backup drive as well and, suddenly, all the data disappeared.

A third line of defense — backup tapes that are updated nightly — were unreadable.

What was it I said in the last post?

If you don’t have at least two restorable copies of it, you don’t have it!

They had at least two copies, that’s good. Someone erased two of their three copies. The third copy was not restorable. Apparently they never bothered to test the tape backups to see that they actually worked. That’s just dumb, and maybe negligent.

Wow, I’m so fucking sick of this. Every ass munch who thinks he’s some kind of hot Mac jockey has some bullshit voodoo ritual he performs before, during, and after system updates, and the especially obsessive-compulsive ones run through a daily regimen of repairing permissions, deleting caches, updating prebindings, and ten other pointless things that make no difference from a day-to-day usage standpoint. If I were a developer, I’d write a daemon that continuously updated permissions, updated prebindings, and deleted caches every 5 minutes, sell it for $10, and retire next week. If paranoid idiots need to compulsively do these things, I might as well be rich because of it.

Read and remember this: There is no magic formula or ritual you need to follow to install updates. The steps for a clean, successful upgrade are very simple.

1. Get over your irrational system tweaking obsession. Just STOP! It’s not necessary. You don’t need to fix permissions constantly, only when you know for a fact that there is a permissions problem. You don’t need to update prebindings at every login. They’re updated when the OS needs to update them without your help. Stop deleting caches unless you know you have a specific problem with cached information.

Why do I have to point this out? It should be obvious to any thinking human being. The placebo effect of doing these stupid things is obviously very powerful, but 99.99999% of the time they accomplish nothing!

2. Don’t use “haxies” or other dumb software. They’re such a problem that Apple discards crash reports with “haxie” contents without even looking at them. Ding ding! That’s the fucking clue bell, people!

3. Install anacron. Anacron runs system maintenance scripts included with the OS and written and approved by Apple in the background at the appropriate time. Install anacron once and forget it. It’s all the system maintenance you need until a specific problem occurs.

4. Backup your irreproducible data every day. Wow! That’s damn important, and most people don’t do it. I think I’ll repeat it 3 more times.
Backup your irreproducible data every day.
Backup your irreproducible data every day.
Backup your irreproducible data every day.

If you don’t have at least two restorable copies of it, you don’t have it!
If you don’t have at least two restorable copies of it, you don’t have it!
If you don’t have at least two restorable copies of it, you don’t have it!

Backing up your data is the best way to protect yourself against any updating problems.
Backing up your data is the best way to protect yourself against any updating problems.
Backing up your data is the best way to protect yourself against any updating problems.

Screw all your tinkering with permissions and other pointless crap. Backup your damn data if you’re really serious about recovering from any problem, not just an update problem.

5. Run Software Update as normal and stop being paranoid. When the update comes up in SU, install it. Don’t wait a week. Don’t wait until you hear problem reports form others that are completely irreproducible on other machines. You have your data backed up, and you can recover from any problem, so you can confidently install any updates right away without worry. No amount of fiddling with prebinding will recover data, but a good backup will.

Really, installing updates isn’t bad, nor is it the traumatic ordeal so many people make it out to be. I’ve been installing updates for five years without a single problem because I keep my data backed up and stupid software off my machine. Get over your victim mentality. Instead of blaming bugs and engaging in superstition, take ownership of your damn data and responsibility for the health of your machine and proceed with confidence.