My work iMac just got upgraded to OS X “Lion” (10.7), and I’ve configured everything how I’ve wanted it and pretty much gotten accustomed to all of the new software features and quirks.

One of the new features in Lion is that the OS is designed so that you never have to think about saving, because every new (read: the one’s that implement the feature) Application saves their state intelligently upon exiting/quitting. This feature sounds great, and it is most of the time… but having used computers for years and logically thinking of quitting an app as being able to start it again with a clean slate, made for quite the confusing experience sometimes.

Now, for the average consumer, I can see how this can save someone’s ass, but for some of the applications I was using it was really more annoying than anything else.

Luckily, there’s a quick Terminal command you can run that will disable this window saving behavior in an app:

defaults write com.namespace.appname NSQuitAlwaysKeepsWindows -bool false

Obviously, insert the namespace and app name of the offending app into that command to switch off the window saving behavior.

So, for example to turn off the annoying feature of the new Terminal app that makes it so upon launch the terminal window shows grayed out text from the previous session, you would enter this in your Terminal/CLI:

defaults write com.apple.Terminal NSQuitAlwaysKeepsWindows -bool false

And to stop having the Preview app stack window upon window of itself every time it opens a new window over its previous one (even though its been closed completely), you enter this:

defaults write com.apple.Preview NSQuitAlwaysKeepsWindows -bool false

And there you go. The app should no longer save its state (at least its open windows anyway) and resume it upon launch.

John Calkins said in an interview with PC Magazine that “the pricing for online ownership is too high.” He believes that companies should focus on lowering the cost of movies, since it’s so easy to rent and stream for far less.

Finally! A big exec gets it!

This is why I love the internet.
Found a song that I used to love when I played this weird game on the PS2 when I bought the Network Adapter (it came as a demo). I was 11 years old.
Holy nostalgia.

So, yea, I know its still the summer and I definitely wouldn’t ever want to wish away the rest of it… but seeing a picture like this gets me a little excited for the season. ‘Nuff said.

I kept getting disconnected from my server while I was working and it was really frustrating me when I’d have to reconnect with ssh, “cd” back into the directory I was working in, and then open all of my VIM buffers after cleaning up all of their confused “.swp” files. Yea, a huge pain in the ass.

Anyway, what I ended up doing is deciding that I really need to get used to using GNU Screen. I’ve used it a couple times before at work, but never got used to it. That’s when I remember that a coworker of mine told me that if I haven’t gotten used to using Screen, that I should try out “tmux” instead. I got excited that I’d be on the cutting edge…

Well, I have a shared hosting setup through site5 (I don’t have the money for a VPS), so naturally when I typed in “tmux” into my ssh terminal session, nothing happened. Wonderful, I was going to have to manually install it without root access.

After numerous pains of running into dependency problems, libraries not being found, and crazy amounts of Google searches later…. I have “tmux” running.

Here’s what I did to make it all happen:

cd ~
mkdir local
mkdir temp
mv tmux-1.5.tar.gz temp
mv libevent-2.0.12-stable.tar.gz temp
cd temp
tar xvfz tmux-1.5.tar.gz
tar xvfz libevent-2.0.12-stable.tar.gz
cd libevent-2.0.12-stable
./configure --prefix=$HOME/local
make
make install
cd ../tmux-1.5
DIR="$HOME/local"
./configure CFLAGS="-I$DIR/include" LDFLAGS="-L$DIR/lib"
make
cp tmux ~/local/bin
export PATH=$HOME/local/bin:$PATH
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="$HOME/local/lib"

tmux

Woot! It works! Of course, though, you’ll want to add the “export” commands to your “~/.bashrc” file so that you they’re done on login.

Ok, so my terminal might be 10,000 lines more full… but I’ve cleaned up the crap and given you the working results.

I doubt anyone will run into the exact same problems as I did, as it all depends on the setup of your server and what dependencies you already have. Also, this isn’t the best way of going about installing unix tools normally, but I didn’t have root or su capabilities. Anyway, I’m leaving this here in case anyone does run into a similar problem… or at least for archival purposes (I’m not going to remember how to do this, haha).

Hope this helps!

You asked me to pull without telling me which branch you
want to merge with, and 'branch.master.merge' in
your configuration file does not tell me either.        Please
specify which branch you want to merge on the command line and
try again (e.g. 'git pull <repository> <refspec>').
See git-pull(1) for details.

If you often merge with the same branch, you may want to
configure the following variables in your configuration
file:

    branch.master.remote = <nickname>
    branch.master.merge = <remote-ref>
    remote.<nickname>.url = <url>
    remote.<nickname>.fetch = <refspec>

See git-config(1) for details.

I’m not sure why I was all of a sudden running into this, as I had already done pull’s before…. but whatever. Regardless, here’s the fix:
You can work around it by simply adding some parameters to each pull request:

$ git pull origin master

Or, you can correctly configure git to always pull from the master by:

$ git config branch.master.remote origin
$ git config branch.master.merge refs/heads/master

Fixed.
I hope this helps anyone that runs into this.

Yesterday, Facebook released a mobile app for Android and iOS called Facebook Messenger, creating their second official app to have ever launched on mobile.

Traditionally, Facebook has added new features into their official Facebook app, instead of creating separate apps. Over the span of the Facebook app’s existence it has grown to be a little bloated. Its no secret to anyone that the Facebook app, as much as we all use it, is pretty bad for both the iOS and Android platform. They’re slow, buggy, resource hungry, and don’t measure up to the feature set of the Facebook website.

Almost as if to confess to the mediocre quality of the Facebook app, they have released a new app solely for the purpose of messaging. Strangely, however, they have not removed the messaging/chat functionality from their main app, causing a bit of redundancy.

In early March, Facebook acquired ”Beluga”, a small team of people responsible for the Beluga group messaging app. Since then, we’ve all sat back and wondered what the team has been doing under Facebook’s ownership. Well, here’s what they’ve been working on. Beluga cutely gave some hints towards the app’s origin. If you look at the screenshots on the Android Marketplace page, you’ll see a whale picture posted in the example group messaging screen. Also, I noticed when looking at the URL in the Android Marketplace, that the app id is “com.facebook.orca“. Orca and Beluga = whales… ’nuff said.

The app has, from what I’ve seen, confused a lot of users. Mostly people are wondering why they made another app just for messaging. I think the basic idea is that you get a faster, simpler app just for messaging, which gives an important part of messaging back to the user – the speed. Also, it seems that Facebook wants us to think of Facebook Messenger as the one stop shop for all types of messaging. I think so, considering the app, once installed, is simply called “Messenger”. It goes hand in hand with their new messaging platform that aims at redefining the way we use communication systems (like email, SMS, and IM), but also has perfect timing, considering Apple will be launching their own iMessage service when iOS is released to the consumer public.

Right now the app is much like Facebook’s message area, which is a combined inbox of chats and messages…. which is great, except that you can’t tell who’s actually online or not, making the backwards compatibility use of talking to someone on Facebook, through IM, rather difficult. I believe the idea, however, is for it to work like AIM’s old push to mobile service, where people are never really offline. They are either on Facebook chat, or they’re away on their phone. But for now, before the app gains widespread adoption, its a little frustrating to not know who’s actually available.

This is version 1, however, so we’ll see what happens in the coming updates.

You can find the links to the Facebook product page and the App Store pages below.