Red Hat Diaries/0045

MacTrials & MacTribbilations

I wrote to some Swiss character last night about a game Syd likes called SameGame. She drives me nuts she plays this game so much. Wille's site is at

http://homepage.mac.com/wille

And it's a good game. It's written in Real Basic or some such schlop, but it's a good game. Syd has shown me other games for X that really screw up the OS. This one doesn't.

Wille has a friend who made a very watered down version for Windows. I downloaded it, but it was funky. Had a 128 byte header in front of the MZ header. Weirdness. So I wrote Wille's friend about it.

This new guy Dominik writes back and attaches the actual EXE to the message, but I'm sitting on my Titanium so it's ok. The problem is getting the blithering thing off the message.

You can see the attachment at the bottom, and if you control click it, nothing happens - no context menu. If you just click it, up comes Stuffit and unstuffs it so fast you can't see where he put it. It's certainly not in any of your standard locations.

I open a console and go to root as superuser, then run ls -R | grep exe, and in about half a second he's found it. Only thing is, he doesn't show the path. So I just run ls -R | more and wait until it appears.

Which it does all right - the problem is the path is 'way the hell down there.' It's in the preferences in the library, in a weird directory for the mail program, for precisely the mailbox inbox I was looking at, and then a few more subdirectories for good measure.

Thing is, none of these directories are visible in the Mac Finder - none. They're hidden somehow. Oh yes, I find the file - which, after I'd tested the link about ten times, resulted in not one but about TEN files - but that's not the point. The point is I found it, but most people would not.

What happens when you get an e-mail with an attachment that good old Stuffit wants to handle? When it's only 75KB, and when there's no decompression to take care of, what is Stuffit doing anyway? Whatever, it happens so fast you can't see the path even if there is one - which I suspect there is not.

Ordinary people would not find this.

Still, it's an awesome machine...

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