On Apr 22, 2004, at 2:04 AM, Henri Yandell wrote:
>
> [Crons are jobs which run nightly in UNIX speak]
>
> On Wed, 21 Apr 2004, Jerry Yeager wrote:
>
>> Unix is an operating system that is meant to be ran all of the time
>> instead of being shutdown a lot. OS-X like most Unixes needs to do
>> housekeeping on a regular basis. it keeps a lot of records of what it
>> does during the day in various log files, and these can get very
>> large,
>> so it takes care of that by compressing them and rotating the old ones
>> out of the way. This takes processor time so it does this late at
>> night
>> when most folks are not using the system. Also It checks the status of
>> running operations and cleans things up when it finds a problem. This
>> is also part of the housekeeping stuff.
>
> Out of interest, what if it can't? I for one get quite annoyed at the
> nightly OS X jobs because either:
>
> a) Laptop is closed at that time and not running
> b) I'm using Laptop and definitely don't want to be bothered
>
> Is there an Apple way to reconfigure this? [ie) not the UNIX way]
Well, you can do this in different ways:
Unix way: Fire up your favorite editor (VI, VIM, EMACS, PICO, etc) and
edit the cron tabs (in SU mode) to change the schedule times to ones
that are more suitable for your workflow and usage.
Semi-Mac ways:
Hit versiontracker.com and do a search using the cron keyword. You will
get back results that include editors that allow you to change the cron
scheduled times.
"Holistically" Mac way:
Search for MacJanitor. This is an app that will let you run the system
maintenance jobs whenever you want at the click of a button. Just
remember to run it now and then. Or (really big toothy grin) write a
cron task to run it for you.
>
> This is mainly theoretical though as the only one that tends to do
> anything is the system update, and I know I can do basic configuring of
> when that does checking.
>
>> Cookies do a lot of things besides store you passwords. Shopping carts
>> come quickly to mind, one way is to store the cart info on a server, a
>> very slow and error prone way of doing things, cookies make this easy
>> and almost trouble free. In addition, they can be used to have
>> security
>
> It'd be interesting to see exactly how this is being done at the more
> popular websites. I just took a peek at an Amazon basket, and it
> appears
> to be a server-side session. This basically puts a number in a cookie
> on
> your machine and relates that number to a bit of memory on the server
> where it temporarily stores your shopping basket.
>
Amazon does this on their server to stay within their patent claim for
the "one-click" approach. If you go that route you have to license the
tech from them. if you have the server space and bandwidth then it is
not too bad, but tracking sessions is a pain for smaller operations. It
is far easier to use client-side cookies for the cart.
> This is the normal way as far as I know, but I tend to get brainwashed
> by
> the 'enterprise' Java world. I know in smaller scale things like PHP,
> cookies are used far more often by the developer and not just the
> person
> who coded the actual server system [ie) the stuff you get with OS X
> Server].
>
> You often see people doing this without cookies when you see
> something-something-id in the url. Builder.com used to do this, but
> seem
> to have changed in the last 6 months or so. They now seem to use
> cookies.
>
> I'm looking at /Users/<user>/Library/Cookies/Cookies.plist by the way.
>
>> in web-sites where it is needed. You do not need to connect to the
>> internet, EVER, to turn over private information to some group of
>> government turncoats to lose it, large chunks of your private medical
>> and financial information is freely swapped now between various
>> corporations.
>
> Yep. Plus if we're getting into the fatalistic realities of information
> gathering, there's ECHELON [NATO project to monitor world
> communications]
> storing this thread in their databases right now. Except I mentioned
> their
> name, so they'll read it. Wave at the cameras :)
>
Don't forget about Carnivore...
Jerry
[stuff below chomped]
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