I’ll be chatting live with my fellow TUAW blogger Mike Rose this Sunday night at 10:00 PM Eastern. The topic will be kids and Macs, and we’ll talk about everything from software and hardware that’s great for little ones to purchasing and setting up an inexpensive, kid-friendly vintage machine.
We’d love for you to call in and join in the conversation. Also, we’ve set up a wiki (free registration required) to help us prep for the show, and we invite you to add your own picks and pans.
It’s going to be a great show. I’m very excited about it and hope you join in the conversation. See you then, Mac Parents!
Last night my fellow TUAW bloggers and I recorded our 32nd talkcast with Craig Hockenberry and Gedeon Maheux of The Iconfactory. We talked about Twitterrific, Twitter and the beginning of The Iconfactory. I think it was our best show yet. You can check it out here via iTunes.
Earlier today, I wrote a simple post at TUAW about Brian Tanaka’s new eBook, “Take Control of Permissions in Leopard,” which began like this:
“Despite John Gruber’s longstanding assertion* that ‘Repair Disk Permissions is voodoo,’ Brian Tanaka has published ‘Take Control of Permissions in Leopard‘ for the Take Control series of eBooks.”
Now, when I wrote that line, I knew full well that the Daring Fireball article I referenced didn’t dismiss Repair Permissions as useless trickery. I read the article in full when it was first published, and understood what John was saying. It came to mind when I was writing up Brian’s eBook because it has a fun title (not many articles about the Mac reference voodoo), it’s pertinent in that it’s about repairing permissions in Mac OS X and it’s a good article that deserves the attention of those who may have missed it the first time around.
Reader Floggy jumped down my virtual throat with his comment:
“It’s mischaracterization by implication. Gruber isn’t saying permission repairing in and of itself is voodoo. What he says is:
‘If you are not experiencing any symptoms that would indicate permission-related problems, there is no reason to run Repair Permissions. Repair Permissions is not a periodic maintenance task or a preventive measure.’
THIS is ‘longstanding assertion’ Gruber is referring to; periodic permission repairing as a panacea, not a fix to specific permission issues.
The cheeky phrasing in the TUAW post makes it sound like Gruber is against repairing permissions PERIOD, which is bollocks.”
Then John himself echoed Floggy’s concerns on Daring Fireball:
“My stance on ‘Repairing Permissions’ is not complicated. If you have a permissions-related problem (or suspect one) it might solve it. It is not something you should worry about if you’re not having any problems. There is no good reason to run it periodically, nor any reason to run it before or after software installations or upgrades. If it were a good idea, Apple would configure Mac OS X to do it for you. It’s like taking antibiotics — a good idea if you have an infection, but a bad idea to take every day ‘just for good measure’. (My thanks to ‘Floggy‘, whoever you are, for making the same point in the comments on TUAW.)”
Jeeze-a-loo. All I did was point out a good article for the reasons stated above by quoting the author directly. Any misinterpretation or misrepresentation of John’s stance on repairing permissions was unintentional.
Seriously, people. It was a single link in a 113-word post about an eBook. Let’s all just relax, M’kay?
*For the record, I originally wrote this line as “assertion.” The “longstanding assertion” was added in editing.
