If you’re like me, you have similarly named directories—src, bin, images, etc.—strewn all over your filesystem. It’s always irked me that the Mac OS X Finder windows display only the basenames in title bars. You can visually see the containing tree by Command-clicking the basename in the title bar (and, under Leopard, View → Show Path Bar), but I’ve wanted to see it at a glance.

Turns out, it’s easily fixed, with the shell command:

$ defaults write com.apple.finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle -bool YES

Then just restart the Finder (since you’re in a shell anyway, killall -HUP Finder will do nicely, or if you’re more visually-oriented, just option-right-click the Finder icon in the Dock and choose Relaunch.

Found on the irreplaceable macosxhints.com.
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Randy Cohen, who writes the Ethicist column in The New York Times Magazine, answered a question today from an “Internet technician” who discovered pornography belonging to his company’s president while “installing software on [the] company’s computer network”. Some of the images seemed to depict underage teenagers. He asked whether he should call the police, mentioning that he feared for his job.

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This week, Apple released a rather large security update to Mac OS X. Predictably, that’s been followed by a flurry of articles in the press speculating as to what this means about OS X’s security relative to other OS’s. I’m not interested in discussing the security of OS X. (Today, anyway.) What bugs me is a lot of the press coverage. The release of a security patch, whether by Apple, Microsoft, or an open-source team, should not be used as a vehicle for speculation that the patched software is insecure. Continue reading