@lindsay.at

I've been watching Fake Steve Jobs for a while now, and now I'm realising that, true to his growing reputation as the Suck 2.0, writing in character and adopting a persona really can free one up, not only for iconoclastic pronouncements, but for making real insights. I was bowled over when I saw NBC and News Corp., sitting in a tree:

What we're doing today with things like Apple TV or TiVo is just applying Band-Aids to patch up a frigtarded system (linear TV programming) that made sense in the 1950s when bandwidth was limited. Our Apple TV only sidesteps the problem. It still forces you to download to your computer, then beam through a router to our TV box and then up into your TV. So great. Now you've got more pipes coming into your TV but this new pipe is kind of unreliable (wifi routers) and slow and clumsy.

The real fix is gonna happen when someone figures out the back end, aggregating good content (ie Seinfeld and I Love Lucy rather than Ask a Ninja) and then finds a way to get that straight into your TV without all these clumsy connections and multiple hops. But it's a battle. The linear model, as stupid as it is, still clings to life. Inertia is a powerful thing. But ultimately we'll win. Give us ten years. And yeah, this is why Apple is presenting itself to the Hollywood studios as a friend and ally, not a competitor. It's also why we didn't buy YouTube.

It's not necessarily the future, or the future as imagined by Apple, but it's definitely a (plausible) future...

I googled this, but couldn't get very far: I wanted to be able to convert from a decimal to a four-character OSType because mdls only returns large integer representations of type or creator codes which had traditionally been represented as 4-character ascii strings. The quickest, laziest approach that occurred to me was to shift things around using a perl one-liner.

perl -e 'printf ("%c%c%c%c\n", \
 (@ARGV[0]        )>>24,(@ARGV[0]<< 8)>>24, \
 (@ARGV[0]<<16)>>24,(@ARGV[0]<<24)>>24)' 

This works fine on my PowerBook, but have doubts about running on 64-bit and/or Intel architecture hardware. Still, I thought it would be useful to save this snippet somewhere.

Why do I need to do this? Well, mdls gives a result that is really unhelpful:

So, to continue with the example, you'd use backticks from the command line to process the result value from querying kMDItemFSCreatorCode or kMDItemFSTypeCode:

perl -e 'printf ("%c%c%c%cn",  \
 (@ARGV[0]        )>>24,(@ARGV[0]<< 8)>>24,  \
 (@ARGV[0]<<16)>>24,(@ARGV[0]<<24)>>24)'  \
 `mdls -name kMDItemFSCreatorCode 00index |   \
  awk -F= '{print $2}'`
MSWD