This is what’s new in the Mac Store license—it’s the same document as the iTunes Store license, but with separate sections for music and for apps. Some terms that seem reasonable for music (e.g., noncommercial use) wouldn’t be reasonable for apps, and aren’t there. What is there for apps?

Well, first, restrictions on use that Apple can make up as it goes along:

You agree that the Services and certain Products include security technology that limits your use of Products and that, whether or not Products are limited by security technology, you shall use Products in compliance with the applicable usage rules established by Apple and its principals (“Usage Rules”), and that any other use of the Products may constitute a copyright infringement. Any security technology is an inseparable part of the Products. Apple reserves the right to modify the Usage Rules at any time. You agree not to violate, circumvent, reverse-engineer, decompile, disassemble, or otherwise tamper with any of the security technology related to such Usage Rules for any reason—or to attempt or assist another person to do so. Usage Rules may be controlled and monitored by Apple for compliance purposes, and Apple reserves the right to enforce the Usage Rules without notice to you. You agree not to access the Services by any means other than through software that is provided by Apple for accessing the Services. You shall not access or attempt to access an Account that you are not authorized to access. You agree not to modify the software in any manner or form, or to use modified versions of the software, for any purposes including obtaining unauthorized access to the Services. Violations of system or network security may result in civil or criminal liability.

But there is something that seems to let some Free software through:

Your license to each App Store Product is subject to the Licensed Application End User License Agreement set forth below. You agree that the terms of the Licensed Application End User License Agreement will apply to each Apple Product and to each Third-Party Product that you license through the App Store Service, unless the App Store Product is covered by a valid end user license agreement entered into between you and the licensor of the App Store Product (the “Licensor”), in which case the Licensor’s end user license agreement will apply to that App Store Product. The Licensor reserves all rights in and to the App Store Product not expressly granted to you.

Except that redistribution in binary form may be tricky:

(i) You may download and sync a Product for personal, noncommercial use on any device You own or control.

(ii) If You are a commercial enterprise or educational institution, You may download and sync a Product for use by either (a) a single individual on one or more devices You own or control or (b) multiple individuals, on a single shared device You own or control. For example, a single employee may use the Product on both the employee’s iPhone and iPad, or multiple students may serially use the Product on a single iPad located at a resource center or library.

Lots of people use one computer with several e-mail accounts. But most of them are using a mail user-agent that speaks SMTP directly: it connects to smtp.gmail.com or some corporate mail.example.com to send mail. Those client programs have to manage a mail queue themselves, and few of them are good at it. I’d much rather have a single-purpose queue manager (say, the Postfix mail transport-agent (MTA)) handle queuing and resubmission, while my user-agent only has to worry about helping me read and write messages.

But most MTAs don’t handle multiple accounts well—they assume that they have the e-mail, and it’s their job to get it as close to its final destination as possible. I want work e-mail to be sent directly to work servers, while personal e-mail is sent to Google for automatic inclusion in my “Sent Mail” folder (and their pervasive search system, of course). There are a few MTAs that are specifically designed to do this. The most popular seems to be msmtp. It’s fine for some circumstances, but doesn’t queue mail. It only works if the machine on which it’s running has constant access to every upstream MTA. That’s not useful for a laptop!

But postfix—a wonderful tool to work with—does now have all the critical features. It has great queuing and retry support. And since late 2009, it has sender_dependent_default_transport_maps.

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My employer uses Cisco’s VPN client for most remote network access. It’s a fine tool for many purposes, but I’ve found it increasingly frustrating over the last year. It has to be manually started, it kills TCP sessions and complains to the GUI when I put a machine to sleep even for a moment, and worst of all its kernel extension causes more crashes on my machine than anything else. Time to replace it. Fortunately, we also have an SSH tunnel system. It’s not good for anything but SSH port forwarding, but port forwarding is all we need.

We want an SSH tunnel that will run whenever there’s a network, turning on as soon as I log in and restoring itself when the machine wakes up from sleep. Apple’s launchd is designed for exactly these needs.

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I’m debating the wisdom of posting this in my office.

Nukees - Monday, June 1, 2009.

Remember when pizza places used to have little plastic “tables”?
My dolls had a ton of adorable little end tables which had previously served time keeping the lid from collapsing onto a pepperoni, mushroom and sausage. Removing those was a sad day for toys, but a triumph for ecology.
The Green Box is a triumph for ecology that creates toys, instead of removing them!

The “Green” Pizza Box | So Good.

It’s a box! It’s four plates! Now it’s a smaller box! The really exciting part about this, for me, is that my refrigerator is too small for regular-sized pizza boxes. I always end up having to wrap my pizza on a plate or in tinfoil.
I really hope my local pizza places start using the Green Pizza Box!

Gallery - Where’s the remotest place on Earth? - Image 1 - New Scientist.

This is fantastically cool. You can get to almost anywhere 24 hours.

It, unsurprisingly, bears some resemblance to the picture of the Earth at night: Thanks, Astronomy Picture of the Day!

So, this is a really cool idea, that somehow is lacking in execution. Why aren’t all the sans-serifs on one side and the serifs on the other? What does Swift have to do with Memphis? I do like that there’s a bunch of scripts in place of the Lanthanides, but the rest isn’t making sense to me…

Compare:

Thanks to typophile for the typeface link, and google for the periodic table.

[caption id=”” align=”alignnone” width=”1520” caption=”Dixon's Aerial pencil, with text in a font described by H&FJ as "open Lombardic capitals with terminal lightning bolts"”][/caption]

Wordsplosion! had a link to Hoefler & Frere-Jones’ blog entry about grawlix, which was right next to an entry about the cool typefaces used on pencils. Here’s another one from http://www.brandnamepencils.com/ : [caption id=”” align=”alignnone” width=”1522” caption=”Pencil with reverse leading quotes!”][/caption]

Somehow, my current writing implements just aren’t as beautiful to look at. I wish I worked in a fashion that made pencil a reasonable alternative. I even do my crosswords in pen.

On the other hand, though, I do have a lovely new pen—a Pilot Extra Fine RazorPoint in purple to match my new iPod.

AT&T operates a casino. You bet on how many minutes you’ll use. If you use less, they keep the extra money. They win. If you use more, those cost 50 cents per minute. The house always wins. It’s a great business model if you can keep it up.

Last month, I went way over on minutes. AT&T’s staff switched last month to a different billing plan. The house gave up its edge. Yes, this is also evidence that they win enough either way.

WordPress has their iPhone client out. Seems nice enough so far. Most interestingly, they’ve released their source under the GNU GPL. That means that they wrote it from scratch, without any libraries buy their own and Apple’s.