thwartedefforts

When the hell is Apple going to get their head out of their asses and catch up with the rest of the Internet? Does anyone else use QuickTime to distribute marketing videos on the Internet? Does anyone else use QuickTime to distribute videos over the Internet that they actually expect people to watch? The entire Apple website is centered around marketing, and I, as the consumer, have to go download some additional tool in order to witness the marketing? Apple, you’ve lost the web-browser-embedded video-via-a-plugin war (although technically, since QuickTime is pretty much a one-trick pony compared to Flash, you barely even showed up at the battle). It does not matter how interesting the video is, or what better kind of quality QuickTime has over Flash-based video, the barrier to entry to have to install yet another thing, just for a rarely used feature, is just too great.

Additionally, there is no native Linux version of QuickTime. In comparison, I’m not a big fan of Adobe’s Linux support, releases for Linux usually being late in coming after the Windows and Mac versions, but least they recognize the diversity of the Internet and their (potential) customers. Apple getting more into consumer electronics means they are not marketing to some exclusive thinks-they’re-something-special crowd anymore. Additionally, the message doesn’t need to get out to the washed masses who have already sipped the reality distortion field koolaid and who can access what is effectively proprietary content without jumping through extra hoops, it needs to get out to the unwashed masses.

It’s more secure to use public/private key authentication with ssh and to disable password authentication, but it’s not secure to store the same private key on every machine that you may be sitting down at. I have two machines I use regularly, a desktop and a laptop, and I, well, my accounts, on them should have the same “identity” no matter which one I’m using and how I’m getting to the various accounts on servers I need to maintain and that I develop on.

I didn’t appreciate the power of the openssh agent until recently. For a long while, I wanted to have a single private key on a removable drive that I can carry around with me, but the disadvantage of having to mount and unmount the drive, and figure out its device name, when I just wanted to read for a few seconds it was more trouble than it’s worth. On top of that, some of the systems I have put the home directories in different places (/home/users, for example, ugh!), so it wouldn’t be as straight forward as just issuing the same mount command every time.

This can be done by using autofs though, in a machine independent manner — the only thing that needs to be customized on a per-machine basis is files in your home directory.

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