I have sinned; Please forgive me
Saturday, October 23rd, 2010Please forgive me, I have sinned.
Have you been following the recent Apple announcements? Especially with respect to the Mac Store? It bothers me tremendously and I am seriously considering ditching the Mac and going back to BSD/Linux. Here’s an article that summarizes pretty much what I think:
http://gawker.com/5669083/beware-the-garden-of-steven
The sad realization is that I have become addicted to the convenience offered by mac. One click back-up. My Amazon W3 account appears as a disk on finder, just drag and drop what I want to save in a cloud. Bad habits have accrued. Why, I use the search to launch applications, too lazy to even navigate to the Applications folder. Too lazy to open files when I can get a quick view at the pressing of a key.
But I have lost something in the process. I can no longer remember which files in /etc are fun to tweak. Haven’t built gcc from scratch in over five years. Never built my most favorite of all applications, the emacs, in a decade. I am not sure if I can do it any more.
There was a time when I setup procmail and created my own filters. While searching for something, I ran into a mail setup I had used back in 1999 and asked myself: did I really do that? I recently had to re-read ssh configuration and the difference between SSH1 and SSH2.
One could argue that they are antiquated technology, but they offered freedom. They didn’t let me watch Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert on a web browser; neither did they let me listen to Yesudas streaming in from youtube. But I could run my machine on a single user mode with everything turned off, so that I could precisely time my algorithms. It also let me squeeze every last byte of the meagre 64MB to solve a 30k unknown problem.
Today, I use Xcode to build and debug my home projects. I have forgotten how to create a makefile and try to avoid them — not that makefiles were the best. I use TeXShop to compile/view my documents with BibDesk providing the convenience of organizing pdf files with their citations. I use LaTexIt to create images of mathematical equations that can be embedded in say, a word, document. In the process, I have forgotten how to use ps2gif, the TeX environment variables and even hacking out TeX macros.
It has come to the point that it is almost a badge of honor to say that “I don’t bother with those any more; my mac does it for me.” Except, if the Mac chooses to restrict me from doing it, I can no longer trash the offending pieces and replace them with what I want.
There is the key. If anti-intellectualism has become fashionable in life today, I have contributed to it by choosing options that relived me from thinking. And, that is my sin.