Lock screen via keyboard on Mac OS X

I want to easily lock the screen on Mac OS X, preferably without using the mouse or having to install any other utilities. Assuming the security setting requiring a password to wake from sleep or screensaver is set, here is what I have found:

• Control-Eject key sequence will bring up the Restart, Sleep, Shutdown dialog window. Press s to put the computer to sleep. From comments on The Design of the Mac OS X Shutdown Feature via Keyboard shortcut of the day.


• Add /System/Library/Frameworks/Screensaver.framework/Versions/A/Resources/ScreenSaverEngine.app to the Dock (via Quickly lock your screen). Unfortunately Spotlight doesn't seem to find this app, however the keyboard shortcut to open the Dock is Control-F3 and typing sc selects the ScreenSaverEngine.

Update: Command-Alt-Eject will put the mac to sleep. Thanks to Kristian.

VirtualBox - OS Virtualisation on the Mac

Parallels and VMware Fusion both look like good OS virualisation solutions for the Mac. However, with the the current Aussie dollar, the US$80 licence fee (same price for both of them) is quite expensive, especially if you also need to acquire a license for Windoze as a guest OS.

I stumbled across VirtualBox, which is now owned by Sun. It is touted as:

... the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).

This can be a little misleading, as there is a dual licensing model, with various useful features only available in the closed-source version.

The closed-source version is available under a Personal use and evaluation license. The strange, but good thing, is that it seems ok to use this version if you want to install it on your machine at work. From point 6 in the licensing faq:

Also, if you install it on your work PC at some large company, this is still personal use. However, if you are an administrator and want to deploy it to the 500 desktops in your company, this would no longer qualify as personal use.

So on that basis, I installed it on my iMac at work and it was trivial to get a Ubuntu 8.04 Desktop guest VM up and running. The bundled user manual provided instructions on installing the Guest Additions which improved the interaction between host and guest OS.

Now if I could only find a version of Windows XP licensed in a similar manner. :-)

Jungle Disk R.I.P.

In the past I have tried to manage my files by storing then in Git and keeping a central repository on Amazon S3 via Jungle Disk. I was using this system from two different macs and a linux machine and when it worked, it worked well, but the intermittent corruption/synchronisation issues were a killer.

My fallback plan was to store the central repositories on encFS on a USB memory stick instead of Jungle Disk over S3. I tried with the USB stick formatted as FAT32 and then ext3 but that also had intermittent failures.

Over the last few weeks I have ditched the linux machine and stored the repositories in an encrypted sparse disk image on the USB stick formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled). It has worked very well so far!

Anders Hejlsberg and Guy Steele: Concurrency and Language Design

An insight into the world of some professional language designers:


Anders Hejlsberg and Guy Steele: Concurrency and Language Design


The theme of restricting side-effects and making them explicit so that pure code can be identified was also present in Erik Meijer's keynote at JAOO Brisbane 2008 and various talks given by Simon Peyton Jones.

Programming to the lowest common denominator

I regularly observe programming to the lowest common denominator in software development teams. It is especially prevalent in teams associated with large organisations.

What do I mean by programming to the lowest common denominator?

Taking a hit for the team
There is currently great emphasis on team members being able to easily understand each other's code. I am not going to comment on that idea itself, just a possible consequence of it:

I don't know where you work, but on our team of 15 or so developers there's no room for a person who writes code the others can't read. Some of us are smart enough to do so, but all of us are smart enough to know that we shouldn't.

From a thread on a local user group.

So here we have a case where if you could write some code that is "better", but is not "readable" by other team members, then you can't write it. What happens if there is a significant difference between the least and most competent programmers on the team (and I observe that there often is)?

Business continuity
Another pervasive force is from management. Business is generally concerned with the risk that the original developer(s) of a particular software application won't be available one day and so they wish to be able to find others who can take over in a timely and cost-effective manner. So business standardises on what they perceive as common skills, tools and languages, which by definition of being common enough is a low standard.

Consequences
If the previous two points hold, then we now have a situation where business chooses a low standard and and then team members are expected to to work in a low subset of the low standard. Sounds like fun!

I am going to assume that some of the members of these teams are highly intelligent and care a great deal about well they do their work. Now they know, at least subconsciously, that they have to work within these constraints otherwise they won't have that job. I observe that some of them deal with that situation by focusing their attention on just the possibilities that are actually open to them (and perhaps just a little beyond the boundaries). This is actually a very small world, compared to all the possible programming skills, languages, tools, etc.

The sad part though, is when people have internalised that (relatively) little world and they start to emotionally/irrationally defend it and even evangalise it (like in the post above). I admit to being in this situation in the past - you can debate the intelligent part. :-)