ItGlo.ws

Those who know me well know that I am obsessive-compulsive when it comes to organisation. Unless that organisation involves my finances. I’ll admit, I’m an impulse shopper, and a hopeless organiser of my own money.

That could be all set to change, thanks to a handy-dandy piece of open source software (and I’m a sucker for OSS). Please welcome my (possible) saviour,Buddi!

Buddi is a very simple personal finance manager. It may share the name of a purple gorilla infamous for spyware, but this little app seems much safer.

After setting a password to encrypt your personal file, you enter your accounts on one screen, and update the transactions as they occur. It’s a little time-consuming, but it gives you some nice graphs on your net worth. Hooray!

The other part of Buddi is the budget. It’s quite simple. You enter your incomings, your outgoings, put them into categories for a pretty display, and you end up with a hopefully positive figure for the end of the month, which is what is left over. This should be how much you can save.

Anyway, it’s written in Java, and runs flawlessly on my MacBook Pro, and is supposed to be just as easy on Windows and Linux. So if you’re completely hopeless like me, you might be able to stretch those dollars a little further each month. For screenshots, check out this page.

Ever wondered what those .DS_Store files on your network drives are? They are simply metadata about folders such as window and icon positioning, etc.

They will usually appear on network drives that are accessed by mac users with write access (even if they don’t add or modify anything to the file tree), and on removable media used by macs.

For those that aren’t as familiar with the inner workings of the mac filesystem, I’ll give a brief rundown. Back in the day, Apple decided that they should separate the data and resources inside files into two separate forks. For example, your application file might contain the binary exacutables in the data fork, and other files such as icons, GUI widgets, and libraries in the resource fork. It’s a good idea in practice, and in times past, was very relevant to the way macs work. Since OS X, this has not been as relevant, and makes inter-operability with other filesystems difficult.

The .DS_Store is merely a representation of the resource fork of a folder (or directory, for unix purists), and contains the details of how a folder should appear in the spatial model of OS X’s finder, and serves the same purpose as the desktop.ini in Windows Explorer. Unfortunately OS X has, in every version so far (to 10.4), automatically created this file on any non-native filesystem that it has write access to, even if no changes are made to anything else on the disk.

The big question is How can I stop Finder creating .DS_Store files?

Fortunately, you don’t have to know all of the above to stop it. You can safely delete these files if you encounter them, but to stop them being created in the first place, run this line in the Terminal app on your mac:

defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true

Simple!

Wow, what a turnaround from yesterday! After this announcement from Kevin Rose, founder of Digg, it appears that everything is back to normal, and that the admins will stand behind the community in their defiance of the DMCA takedown notices.

I guess I jumped the gun in assuming that Digg would take this lying down. Three cheers for the fight against DRM, MPAA, RIAA and the DMCA!