the WSJ has an incredible piece (Titled Just Say No to Detroit) on the amount of money GM and Ford have lost in the past 25 years. Nearly half a trillion dollars has evaporated.

Over the past decade, the capital destruction by GM has been breathtaking, on a greater scale than documented by Mr. Jensen for the 1980s. GM has invested $310 billion in its business between 1998 and 2007. The total depreciation of GM’s physical plant during this period was $128 billion, meaning that a net $182 billion of society’s capital has been pumped into GM over the past decade — a waste of about $1.5 billion per month of national savings. The story at Ford has not been as adverse but is still disheartening, as Ford has invested $155 billion and consumed $8 billion net of depreciation since 1998.

As a society, we have very little to show for this $465 billion. At the end of 1998, GM’s market capitalization was $46 billion and Ford’s was $71 billion. Today both firms have negligible value, with share prices in the low single digits. Both are facing imminent bankruptcy and delisting from the major stock exchanges. Along with management, the companies’ unions and even their regulators in Washington may have their own culpability, a topic that merits its own separate discussion. Yet one can only imagine how the $465 billion could have been used better — for instance, GM and Ford could have closed their own facilities and acquired all of the shares of Honda, Toyota, Nissan and Volkswagen.

for seamless integration with the Finder—and ease of use—it’s tough to beat. It’s what the Finder’s built-in FTP/SFTP support should have been from the start.

A nice milestone for any Mac developer - to finally earn your mice.

The Onion [hilariously] hosts a panel to discuss if the Government should stop dumping money into the National Money Hole.

“No reasonable person is advocating we stop destroying money - but the American people earned that money, they have the right to decide how it should be destroyed… let the free market decide the most efficient way of destroying money”

I’m going to explain how to setup Gmail to work the right way with Mail.app and the iPhone. “Right”, of course, means “the way I want it to work.” In particular, this means that I want “deleting” something in my client to make it “archived” in Gmail for eternity. I almost never want an email to be deleted forever. I also want Sent Messages and Drafts to work in a reasonable way, but delete -> archive is the big one for me.

NB: This guide is a work in progress, a living document. Check back for updates. Feedback is actively solicited.

Setting up Mail.app

1. Follow the directions at the Gmail Help Center. Make sure you enable IMAP in the Gmail web interface before you play with Mail.app. Also, when Mail.app notices you’re setting up a Gmail account and offers to do it for you automatically, don’t fall for it. It will setup and POP3 account, which is worthless, and you’ll have to start over. Finally, note that every time you’re ever asked for a “User Name:” you’re going to have to enter your whole Gmail address username@gmail.com.

2. As always, the devil is in the details. In this case, the details are the “Mailbox Behaviors” panel for the account in Mail.app preferences. Google has Recommended IMAP client settings, an obscure Gmail Help Center page, and the Mail.app settings are unlinkably hidden by Javascript. I believe Google’s recommended settings are wrong. Well, I think their “Sent” recommendation is wrong, I agree with the other ones. Here is my recommendation.

If you match these settings then your Drafts, Sent, and Junk folders will automatically sync with the corresponding Gmail folders. Your local Trash folder will remain empty, and your deleted messages will get archived in Gmail’s “All Mail” folder.

If “Sent” is not checked, then Gmail store a copy in its Sent Mail folder, and Mail.app will store a copy in its Sent folder. These two copies will be different, and deleting one will not delete the other. The ”Delete sent messages when:” setting will only apply to the Mail.app copy. If that’s what you’re into, then go for it.

A few caveats

Gmail Folders in Mail.app

After following the above directions, Mail.app may or may not have figured out how to merge the the Gmail tags with the corresponding Mail.app folder. For example, the Gmail “Spam” tag and the Mail.app “Trash” folder. In the worst case, if Mail.app figures out nothing, then your Gmail setup in Mail.app’s main window will look like the image to the left. If this is the case, then click on a folder that Mail.app did not figure out for you. Let’s start with “Drafts”. Click on the “Mailbox” menu, pull down to “Use This Mailbox For”, and select “Drafts”. Repeat as necessary for “Sent Mail”, and “Spam”. Do not do this for “Trash”. If you do, then Mail.app will silently turn on “Move deleted messages to the Trash mailbox”__ and your archived mail will start getting silently deleted. Oofta. Also, for some reason my copy of Mail usually won’t merge “Spam” with it’s “Junk” folder. I’ve given up on trying to make it work, because it doesn’t really matter anyway.

You may have noticed that with the above settings you lose the Trash folder in Mail.app. That is, you will have no record of your recently deleted messages except for Gmail’s “All Mail” folder (Mail.app’s Trash will be forever empty). I’m fine with that, since deleted messages are the overwhelming majority of my “All Mail” folder. Another option is to make a costume tag in Gmail like “[Deleted Messages]”, and then set this to be the Trash folder in Mail.app. Then, when you delete the message Mail.app will remove all existing tags, and add a [Deleted Messages] tag. If you delete it againOther option. Make a [Deleted Messages] folder yourself.

Setting the “IMAP Prefix”

In the Mail.app sidebar your Gmail tags will appear as folders. The built in Gmail tags (All Mail, Spam, Starred, Trash) appear nested in a folder named [Gmail]. The rest of your tags appear as folders at the same level as the [Gmail] folder. Some people recommend that you set your IMAP path prefix (in Preferences -> Accounts -> Advanced -> IMAP path prefix:) to Gmail. I don not recommend this. It will make your built in Gmail tags appear at the top level, but it will make your personal tags disappear entirely. Also, if you fiddle with it Mail.app will re-download your entire mailbox. Fair warning.

Setting up iPhone Mail

First, and important FYI: there are two different and barely distinguishable types of Gmail accounts on the iPhone. If you go to “Mail, Contacts, Calendar” settings, then “Add account…”, and select “Gmail” then you will get an account type that I will call “POP3”, even though I’n not certain it is POP3. This potentially out of date video calls it POP3, though the obscure page calls it IMAP. Regardless of what it is, you can’t make it work the way we want.

Amazingly, if you let iTunes sync your Mail.app Gmail IMAP account to the iPhone, the iPhone will turn it into a maybe-POP3 account. Furthermore, if you have a mail account on the iPhone that looks like an account in Mail.app, but isn’t quite the same, then iTunes will be unhappy about syncing. So the first order of business is to stop iTunes from trying to sync your Mail.app Gmail account to your iPhone. Plug in your iPhone, find it in iTunes, click on the Info tab, scroll down to Mail Accounts, and uncheck your gmail account. Then, since you can’t plug in an iPod without it syncing, go delete the account from your iPhone.

Gmail non-IMAP “Auto-G” Type Account

The only way to get a Gmail IMAP account on the iPhone is to instead select “Other” at the account creation screen, and fill out the settings by hand. Instructions are on this page, or you can follow the above previously linked video. Note once again that you need to type out the full username@gmail.com each time.

After you’ve added your account information, quit the Settings app, then fire up Mail and let it download at least your folder structure. If you don’t do this, then the iPhone will let you fiddle with settings using only a fake INBOX folder that it assumes your account will have. Then, after it downloads your real folders, it will throw out the settings you put on the fake INBOX folder. I kid you not.

iPhone Gmail “IMAP” account

Once again, Google recommends that you keep a separate copy your sent messages on the iPhone on its Recommended IMAP client settings page, and I disagree. My settings are in the image below.

My recommended Gmail settings

Other notes

This is a lightly tested theory: if you enter username instead of username@gmail.com then you will download new messages ok, but your deletes and folder moves will not propagate to the server correctly. Oofta.

Heinous iPhone Bug: If you make a new account with the same settings as an existing account, then the client will merge the two accounts with the new one’s blank settings, and erase the data in the old one. If you delete one, then it will delete both.

Advanced IMAP Settings

Google Labs recently released Advanced IMAP Controls for Gmail. If you activate advanced IMAP controls then you can choose to make some folders “invisible” to the IMAP interface. Some people are really excited about this, because they don’t want to download their huge “All Mail” folder. Mail.app will only download it once anyway (and then you have an offline copy), and the iPhone only downloadss 50 at a time, so I don’t see what the big deal is.

The advanced controls also expose a completely incomprehensible feature to let you “turn off auto-expunge”. When this came out about 100 people reblogged it, and it’s pretty clear that no one knows what it does or how it’s supposed to work. According to the official Google post:

The IMAP protocol allows messages to be marked for deletion, a sort of limbo state where a message is still present in the folder but slated to be deleted the next time the folder is expunged. In our standard IMAP implementation, when you mark a message as deleted, Gmail doesn’t let it linger in that state — it deletes (or auto-expunges) it from the folder right away. If you want the two-stage delete process, after you’ve enabled this Lab, just select ‘Do not automatically expunge messages’ under the ‘Forwarding and POP/IMAP’ tab in Settings.

Um, ok. First off, what is “expunge” supposed to mean, and what does it mean to Google? Second, if deleted messages aren’t immediately expunged, then when are they expunged? Once a month? When you click the “expunge” button? (There is no expunge button). Third, that option to “Do not automatically expunge messages” followed by “When a message is expunged from the last visible IMAP folder: Archive the message” is pretty tempting. It’s a trap! As far as I can tell, with every other permutation of settings this will make deleted messages go to the Trash and then disappear forever.

I held out a long time before making the move to Gmail. I got an invite soon enough to get my second favorite username, but then I sat on it for years without using it. At first it was because I was too hardcore to let the gRobot read my email. Later, when I’d become less of an idealist and more of a pragmatist, it was because Gmail didn’t support IMAP. When IMAP support was added last year, I didn’t move because I was to lazy to migrate. Eventually my other mail server went down at an inopportune time, and I decided to make the leap.

Pages with potentially useful information

Deleting IMAP Messages

Apple iPhone and Gmail deleted messages

IMAP Actions

Gmail Archiving and deleting on iPhones

Advanced IMAP Controls

Advice that doesn’t quite work

$ gem install passenger
$ passenger-install-apache2-module

Install the gem, load the Apache module - everything “just works”. It’s ridiculously easy.

I want to fall in love with mod_rails. I’m ecstatic somebody is helping novices configure Apache and trying to make everyone else’s life slightly easier. Too many man months have been spent reading up on deploying a mongrel cluster with proxy_balancer. Passenger tries to make everyone’s life much much easier, but it goes too far. If you’re doing anything with your Apache instance that isn’t purely confined to your Rails sandbox, save yourself some time and heartache and don’t even bother with Passenger. It’ll let you down.

Rails succeeds in achieving a nice balance between Magic and Pragmatic. Rails allows an enterprising developer to peek behind the curtains and make something “custom” happen. Passenger doesn’t. For instance: the inability to get well defined behavior with mod_rewrite or mod_alias is infuriating. Equally annoying is the inability to turn off mod_rails for a given virtual host. Want to run a piece of PHP on your site or have a sub-uri host your PHP based forum? Good luck. Have a low traffic app on your domain that you’d like to use Passenger for while serving your main site with mongrel. Good luck.

Rails developers might not be the most hardcore bunch out there, but they are characteristically willing to look outside their sandbox in order to get something Better done more Quickly. Denying them the ability to adequately configure their application using ‘legacy’ methods isn’t going to get you very far. I’ve tried to deploy Passenger twice now in the past 3 months, and have officially thrown in the towel.

In the Terminator series (movies and TV show), there are some odd time loops.

   John Connor sends Kyle Reese back in time. Kyle and Sarah have a son, John Connor. But John sent Kyle back in time only because of Skynet. Without Skynet, John wouldn’t exist. The timeline protection hypothesis suggests John can’t kill Skynet.

   Skynet sends a Terminator back in time. The Terminator’s arm and CPU are left behind. The technology in that CPU is what Dyson uses to build the beginnings of Skynet. But Skynet sent the Terminator back in time only because of John Connor. Without John, Skynet wouldn’t exist. The timeline protection hypothesis suggests that Skynet cannot destroy John.

Food for thought.

$ pkg set-authority -O http://pkg.sunfreeware.com:9000 sunfreeware
$ pkg refresh

This sets the default pkg authority to the SunFreeware site - full of pre-compiled binaries that are to actually INSTALL and WORK on OpenSolaris/Solaris 10. How novel?

Test it out by installing sudo

$ pkg install -v IPSFWsudo

I’m tagging this post with as many keywords as possible in hopes that people come across this post via Google. I want to love OpenSolaris, but it is such a nightmare to use with open source software. You’d think that out of Sun’s 34,909 employees they could construct a team of 20-30 people whose sole job was to make OpenSolaris usable and competitive with Linux for those trying to host websites.

If you’re using an RSS reader you can subscribe directly to our release feed or our our beta release feed

They said we couldn’t do it. They said we shouldn’t do it. I said we shouldn’t do it. But we did it. Why did we do it? To prove how tough we are? To make a pile of money? Just because it was there? I can’t say for sure, but it’s done now. In version 1.3 ExpanDrive supports connections to plain ftp (and ftp/ssl) servers.

We’re calling it “beta” for now because we expect that there are still some bugs to shake out, but so far it looks pretty good. No, it looks very good. Good like streaming two movies over a local wireless connection at the same time good. That said, the ftp “standard” isn’t quite as standard as one might like if one were writing a filesystem for it, and there are a lot of different ftp servers out there. If you have an ftp server that ExpanDrive can’t connect to and you can give us a temporary login to that server, then we’ll send you a generous ExpanDrive coupon for your trouble. (And we’ll use the temporary login to try and make ExpanDrive work with your server.)

New trials for everyone:

We want everyone to love ExpanDrive as much as we do. That’s why we have a free 30 day trial period. For version 1.3 we’ve reset everyone’s trial, and we’ll continue to automatically reset the trial after every major version release. If you tried version 1.1 and it didn’t grab your fancy, then give it a try again. (We’ve also decrease the intrusiveness and frequency with which we nag you to register.)

Reconnect:

It’s not all about the new features. There also always needs to be “bug fixes and performance improvements”, and we’ve got those too. We’re mildly embarrassed at how far we let our SFTP reconnect feature slip. You know what I’m talking about: your server turned into a folder that didn’t do anything. We didn’t talk about it because we knew we were going to fix it any day now, and no one wants to draw attention to a feature that used to work. Well, I’m happy to say that not only did we fix it, we made it much better.

ExpanDrive used to guess when you’d lost a connection when it took a long time to hear back from a server. (“Hello? Server? Are you still there? Can you hear me, server? Hello…”) We now use OS X system notifications for network availability. ExpanDrive knows when the internet disappears and reappears, when your IP address changes, and when your computer is going to sleep or waking up. This means that server reconnect is faster and more reliable than it used to be, and also that you shouldn’t ever experience a “-36 error” just because you have a laggy connection.

Localizations:

ExpanDrive is currently available in German, French, Danish, and Romanian. Spanish and Japanese will be in our next release. (Many thanks to Jannis Leidel, Nicolas Doualot, CasperT, and Sebastian Pascu, ). We’d love some help with other languages!

Beta Updates:

Finally, we’ve got a lot of things cooking right now that are going to get released in the near future. If you’re like me, then you want to use the new stuff as soon as you can get your hands on it, even before the stodgy, uptight Magnetk QA department doesn’t want to give it up yet. If that’s the case then you can now choose to automatically update to the latest beta release. Our beta updates will contain no known bugs when they’re released, and they’ll be reasonably tested, but they’ll definitely be beta.

Download:

Get the latest version over at the ExpanDrive page or right here

I got the dreaded “authentication failed” error after upgrading one client machine to version 3.2.2, and so I patched together a solution that allows you to solve the problem remotely, using our good friend SSH. It’s all Terminal window commands, but it’s straightforward enough that most users should be comfortable doing it.

Step 1: SSH to the uncooperative client. You can do this via local IP address:

$ ssh [admin username]@[client machine IP address]

Or over Bonjour if a) you don’t know the IP, or b) your router assigns IPs dynamically.

$ ssh [admin username]@[client machine name].local

If you’ve never connected with SSH before, you’ll have to type “yes” before you enter your admin user password when the “Password” prompt comes up.

My machines are all named after deadly sins, so when I do this, it looks like the screenshot below. “Lust” is the computer I’m using, “Wrath” is the remote machine that’s giving me the “authentication failed” error when I try to connect to it using Remote Desktop.

Notice how the computer name listed before “cosmo” has now changed from “Lust” to “Wrath”. Be sure that when you enter any Terminal commands described on this page other than ssh, you’re entering them on the remote machine, not the machine you’re running ARD from. If you don’t pay attention, you could end up deleting a bunch of files that are working just fine.

Step 2: Kill ARD on the remote machine. Once you’re connected to the client, type the command top. This opens activity monitor, listing all the processes currently running on the remote machine. Note the process ID numbers of “ARDAgent” and “AppleVNCServer”, along with ‘ARDHelper” if it shows up.

Once you’ve identified those numbers, open a new Terminal window, SSH to the remote machine again, and then force quit these process by typing kill followed by their process ID number (”PID”).

$ kill 234
$ kill 233

Terminal might whine about quitting ARDHelper because it’s being run by root, but use the sudo command or the bang-bang trick to force the process into submission.

$ sudo kill 228

Step 3: Delete the offending files. As far as I can tell, the whole reason the “authentication failed” error comes up is bad data or bad file paths in the Remote Desktop plist files. It might be possible to fix them with a text editor, but I prefer a less fussy solution: delete them.

Double-check to make sure you’re SSHed into your remote machine, and enter the following Terminal commands, one at a time:

$ rm -rf /var/db/RemoteManagement<br>
$ rm /Library/Preferences/com.apple.RemoteDesktop.plist<br>
$ rm ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.RemoteDesktop.plist<br>
$ rm -r /Library/Application\ Support/Apple/Remote\ Desktop/<br>
$ rm -r ~/Library/Application\ Support/Remote\ Desktop/

Step 4: Fire ARDAgent back up. Now that you’ve quit the processes and deleted the old stuff, change directories to the ARDAgent folder, then turn everything back on and recreate the plist files. You can do this by entering the following two commands:

$ cd /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/Resources/
$ sudo ./kickstart -activate -configure -access -on -users username -privs -all -restart -agent -menu

Step 5: Reconnect to the client machine using Remote Desktop. Re-open Remote Desktop on your computer and go to the Scanner. It won’t remember the name of the old machine, but it will still detect it and list its IP address. Double-click that machine, enter your admin name and password, and your dominion over it should now be restored, all without getting out of your chair.