I’ve been using Linux for a long time. While it lost the battle for my desktop, it still reigns supreme in my server world. I have this very occasional habit of wanting to check if two files are really, honestly, undoubtedly the same.
I had that need again today.
I’ve always used md5sum on Linux. sudo port search md5sum was a bust. I Googled around. I figured I’d just have to find the package that contains md5sum and sudo port install [package]. No dice. Nothing promising for miles around, or at least through page 5 of the Google results.
Eventually I landed on Wikipedia’s md5sum page. Then a flood of vague memories hit me. Macs have a similar program, but it’s named md5 and its output formatting is slightly different (but the calculated hash is the same). It had been ages since I had discovered this, and I had totally forgotten.
So, instead of sudo port install md5sum, I’ve edited my ~/.bash_aliases file to contain this:
alias md5sum=‘man md5‘
Maybe there really is a fabled md5sum for Mac, but this is good enough for me. This will remind the more frozen part of my brain that I really want to type md5 [filename] instead. And then I won’t go a-Googling for it any more. And perhaps, neither will you.
P.S. the md5 man page on my Mac shows it to be part of openssl, just in case you wondered.
It’s all over the news today. Steve Jobs announced that there won’t be an SDK for the iPhone — just use Safari. Oh, and you Windows developers can use Safari for Windows to test out your iPhone apps. (BTW — I really love the “resizable text areas” in the new Safari 3 beta. It makes working in the web much nicer when you don’t have to be cramped in a tiny box!)
This seems like an interesting confluence of releases to try to gain further inroads in the market: release a killer OS upgrade (all for just $129), release a revolutionary phone, and then make sure developers everywhere can test that their webapps will work with it by pushing your browser to that other OS.
We’ll have to see if these connections play out the way it seems, but I’m very excited about the announcements today from Apple. I, for one, am planning an app with some iPhone integration so I’m interested to see how the development goes.
I’ve been using Firefox for a long time. Last night I decided to give Camino a spin. I’m using a nightly build of what will become the 1.5 stable release later this month. This thing sings. It’s fast, feels lean and light, and it stores my passwords in Apple’s Keychain. Lovely.
There’s no way I can give up Firefox for development — Firebug is just too cool. I may, however, use Camino for normal “work” where I’m not trying to tweak the CSS, layout, or whatever of something I’m actually building. This dichotomy could perhaps become too burdensome; though I think QuickSilver will surely see to most of that concern. I could discover that I insanely miss the occasional GreaseMonkey thing, or I really miss…something. We’ll see. For now, I’m happy to have a zippy browser again.
