While reading “The Definitive ANTLR Reference” by Terence Parr I encountered this quote. I’m a bit sceptic about XML beyond its use of data exchange, so the quote has completely won me over for the book.

Don’t be afraid to build a human-readable configuration file (I implore everyone to please stop using XML as a human interface!) or to build domain-specific languages to make yourself more efficient. Designing new languages and building translators for existing languages, when appropriate, is the hallmark of a sophisticated developer. —Terence Parr, The Definitive ANTLR Reference, Page 23.

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Being an expert in XML is like being an expert in comma-separated values. —Terence Parr

Apple’s next generation operating system is nearing its release date. Time to face the truth – is it as awesome as Steve told us?

Since I’m a Mac user (despite my Vista adventures), I can only repeat what the brave people of The Joy of Tech published in September: Please Leopard, don’t suck!

Tiger is already far better than Vista – it does the small things so much better than all Windows versions together. Of course on a competitive market these “features” don’t count. But for me as user these are the features I really really love on Mac OS X.

Here my list of these things make OS X the better operating system:

• OS X always prints in the right order – on Windows I often had to reverse the pages.
• I can print to PDF in almost all situations.
• Pressing Shift+Cmd+4 I can make screenshots of a part of my screen (press the spacebar to make pictures of whole windows).
• For certain tasks I’m simply so much faster on the (sane) command-line than by clicking through myriads of dialogs (but both ways are possible).
• Unix! ‘nuff said.
• Taste – yes, I know, this word was stressed a lot in combination with “Apple”, but it’s simply true – compare Windows to OS X. OS X isn’t just a conglomerate of desktop effects, but a fine-tuned composition of feedback-mechanisms. It’s like candy, but you can’t get sick by eating to much of it.
• Innovation – being so much smaller than MS, Apple has to put in considerable effort into their products, but – and this is what I like about them – they don’t suffer featuritis (indeed they had a big disaster because of featuritis in the nineties, but they learned their lessons well).

Well, the list got a bit esoteric at some point, but many many things “just work”. Of course Apple is all but perfect, their “closed-system” policy is dangerous and very annoying. Doing things they don’t want you to do (for good or bad reason) is very hard (try to keep a Macbook running while the lid is closed, for example).

Anyway, closed systems also have their advantages, and if you don’t like it, you can always switch to some other operating system on your Intel Mac. Windows is easily installed on a Mac, and for Linux there are some guides found on the net (depending on your actual hardware).

At some point I didn’t want to care about operating systems anymore (Linux was great, but very time consuming), I wanted something that “just worked” (which ruled out Windows). OS X came to the rescue – and here I am several years later, more happy with my OS than ever.

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Please Leopard, don’t suck!

Vista constantly accesses my hard drive, here is how to do the exorcism (no, not the format-the-drive exorcism).

One thing I notice whenever I start Windows Vista (I usually rely on Linux) is that it always does something on my harddrive. I didn’t know what it was doing, so I started to investigate.

To keep it short, there are three things to disable to keep your harddisk from working permanently.

First, I disabled the “Indexing Service” which was an obvious candidate for accessing my drive(s). Unfortunately it wasn’t the only process digging on my harddrive.

The second service I disabled was the “System Restore” which was suggested here.

This still didn’t work out, so my quest wasn’t finished yet. The last process I disabled was “Superfetch”. This actually did the trick. I don’t know what it is supposed to do, but the OS didn’t suffer as far as I can tell.

I’ll leave the three processes disabled because I didn’t recognize a negative impact (well, the Index-Service might be important to some people).

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If something’s expensive to develop, and somebody’s not going to get paid, it won’t get developed. So you decide: Do you want software to be written, or not?—Bill Gates

Why, oh why didn’t they choose otherwise?