Near the end of the year I have been doing some housekeeping at work during the quiet days of December. I was about to install mongodb on a development server for a new project, when I noticed the server was low on disk space. The culprit, an Oracle database I had installed near the beginning of the year. This made me laugh out loud when I realized that our team had not been using at since May. After the initial amusement had worn off, I suddenly realized something:

I had forgotten to how to uninstall Oracle. The temerity!

This blog post is to capture a support article which helped me fix a problem on my MacBook Pro. Google still brings it up as the first result, but Apple seems to “misplace” the page when I visit it. The page in question was live at the time of this post, but I’m going to capture the relevant information here in case Apple misplaces the page again.

I’ve used several different web browsers over the years:

• Netscape Navigator Gold 3 - The browser my school system had installed.
• Netscape Communicator - Just an upgraded version with more features.
• Mozilla - Netscape Communicator without the “N”.
• Opera - The first browser I found with good tab navigation.
• Mozilla Firefox - I switched when several sites I visited stopped working.
• Safari - When Firefox 4 came out and broke every add-on I used with Macs.

It’s been an interesting ride. The story that came out last week about Chrome overtaking Firefox in browser market share got me thinking about it. I can’t say I’m surprised, it was hard navigating to any of Google sites in the last few years without being inundated with “Try Google Chrome” on each page. I’ve never tried using Chrome as my primary browser. The only places I always install it are on GNU/Linux machines or Windows Servers. Chrome works pretty well on GNU/Linux machines, considering that the computers I usually put GNU/Linux on are older laptops. Windows Servers had IE so locked down by default I couldn’t navigate anywhere, and I didn’t care enough to figure out exactly what policies I needed to change in order to fix that. I’d just copy a Chrome Installer.exe over onto the server and be done with it.

The thing that surprises me about this list is that Safari is the first browser I’ve ever used that’s the default for an operating system.

Facebook is especially notorious for sidestepping privacy concerns. Time and time again they’ve come under pressure for their wishy-washy policies on the privacy of its users. There was a great article on AllThingsD describing typical Zuckerberg reaction, which seems to follow a reliable formula. If I had to describe the “Zuckerberg Approach” to any customer concerns, it goes like this:

1. If you think we’re doing something wrong, we aren’t. You’re wrong.
2. What we’re doing isn’t wrong, you just aren’t ready for the future.
3. We’re sorry that you don’t like what we did, but we know we’re right.
4. Okay, we slipped up, but it’s not as bad as you made it out to be. Sorry if you were offended.

One of the biggest tech stories this week involved the independent discovery of an application embedded in several major smartphones. The application, created by the company Carrier IQ Inc., functions by “counting and measuring operational information in mobile devices - feature phones, smartphones and tablets.” According to Trevor Eckhart, who reported the application’s existence and functionality, Carrier IQ’s software goes so far as to log individual keystrokes made by the user. The broad scope of such capability seems to render concerns associated with tracking location data insignificant by comparison. Eckhart demonstrates several examples of Carrier IQ’s interesting capabilities:

• Recording individual keys pressed by the user
• Recording the contents of SMS messages
• Recording requests made to websites, even when using HTTPS