Lee, I really appreciate you going into the level of detail you did to guide me through the process of tweaking the self-repair routines, but I have to admit that my eyes glazed over more than once. Ye gads ... I am a Mac person, and I have been since the spring of 1984. Granted, there is one OSX specific thing that I want to do, soon, which will no doubt force me to use toothpicks to prop the lids ... make use of the Unix window so I can make use of the GRASS program, but it's going to take me a while longer just to get past the irritation of all of the changes that seem to have been made in OSX just for the sake of change.
I wonder why, in the creation of OSX, Apple did such a poor job of maintaining consistency of interface. There was less of a change between 6 and 7, and between 1 and 2. Was it really of value to me to have to learn twenty new ways of doing things that I'd been happily and easily doing for a lot of years? Going to the Apple menu to select a program from an alias holding folder I put there, cleverly called "Programs", was much easier than the task bar. And no matter where you put it, the task bar is always popping up when its only function is to get in the way. Now that's not to say that I don't, overall, like OSX. I do. I love how solid it is. In about a month of pushing it through what's probably a strange combination of concurrently running programs, I've never seen a system crash. My OS9 system was acceptably stable, but I'd guess I did see a crash a week ... usually inspiring me to turn to Redmond and cuss. Does it look pretty? Sure. El neato buttons that seem alive when they are the default choice. Slick. But it seems to me that a lot of the changes were just enforced cultural changes ... which irritate me almost as much as the ATM machines that now insist the I inform them that I speak English before doing business. Ironically, SoftWindows 95 - which was partly broken since about OS 8 - seems completely functional running in the OS9.2 emulation under OSX. Also, my oldest CAD program, circa '87, does better now than it has in years. Go figure. And I sincerely thank you for this opportunity to exercise the ritual of worthless tirade. I feel a little better now. Remind me at the next meeting, and I'll buy you a root beer. :) Bill > From: Lee Larson <leelarson at mac.com> > Reply-To: macgroup at erdos.math.louisville.edu > Date: Tue, 27 Apr 2004 18:06:59 -0400 > To: macgroup at erdos.math.louisville.edu > Subject: Re: MacGroup: Processor temp and cron job - can't finds > > On Apr 27, 2004, at 2:07 PM, Bill Holt asked: > >> Second "can't find" - there is a way, I know, to have the OSX system >> do it's >> self-repair thing on a schedule of my choosing instead of it's wee >> hours of >> the morning preference. I know I've read about it here ... but can't >> find >> it because that exchange is in my archive. Can't even find it on the >> apple >> site ... probably because I don't have enough of a clue to ask the >> question >> intelligently. > > There's probably a nice GUI program somewhere to let you change the > times, but I've never looked for one. It's actually not very > complicated, if you're willing to use a text editor. > > If you look at the file /etc/crontab, you'll see near the end > > # Run daily/weekly/monthly jobs. > 15 3 * * * root periodic daily > 30 4 * * 6 root periodic weekly > 30 5 1 * * root periodic monthly > > These three lines tell when the periodic maintenance scripts are > executed. The columns stand for > > minute hour monthday month weekday owner command > > From this, we see that the run times are > > daily 3:15 AM > weekly 4:30 AM on Saturday (Monday is 1) > monthly 5:30 AM on the first of the month > > With a text editor, you can change them to run whenever you want. > > To learn more about this than you'll ever need to know, open up a > terminal window and read the documentation by typing > > man 5 crontab > > > > > > > | The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will > | be April 27. The LCS Web page is <http://www.kymac.org>. > | List posting address: <mailto:macgroup at erdos.math.louisville.edu> > | List Web page: <http://erdos.math.louisville.edu/macgroup> > | The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will | be May 25. The LCS Web page is <http://www.kymac.org>. | List posting address: <mailto:macgroup at erdos.math.louisville.edu> | List Web page: <http://erdos.math.louisville.edu/macgroup>
