Out of Cheese

"Mac OS X Hints" soon to come from Pogue Press/O'Reilly

Congratulations to Rob Griffiths, founder of macosxhints.com, on his new book! Pogue Press and O'Reilly are publishing Mac OS X Hints next month. If it's anywhere near as good as the web site -- and from Rob's description, it sounds like it's better -- it'll be a great book.

Out for the weekend

I'm heading down to California for the weekend on a quest to find an apartment in a whirlwind two-day tour. Naturally, it appears I'm bringing Seattle's rain with me. Oh, well. I'll just have to imagine how each place looks in nicer weather.

I might be out of email contact all weekend, too, since I'll be staying with my future roommate and I don't know if her family has Internet access at home.

Creativity in taxation

How Appealing points to an amusing story at law.com about taxation and the First Amendment. Apparently Citrix Systems just filed suit against the Florida Department of Revenue, claiming that the company shouldn't have to pay taxes on transmission of information, including software sales. The company believes that the First Amendment's right to free speech renders those taxes unconstitutional.

The claim is so laughable that I'm impressed they found a lawyer to file it. The First Amendment protects speech, true, but courts have consistently held that commercial speech doesn't receive anywhere near the same degree of protection against government regulation as non-commercial speech. Ignoring the fact that software is sold, not spoken, Citrix' business sales are clearly commercial speech and therefore can be regulated. The regulation in this case, a tax, is content-neutral because it applies to all companies, regardless of their field. Citrix would not only propose to overturn the long history of First Amendment law, but it would also cause the regulation to no longer be content-neutral because it wouldn't apply to businesses whose products could be construed as providing speech. So the company's argument isn't only wrong, it contradicts itself by proposing an unconstitutional solution. Very impressive.

DarwinPorts progress

A couple of interesting tidbits from today's traffic on the DarwinPorts mailing list:

• Apple's Ernie Prabhakar posted a preview release of DarwinPorts.app, which provides a UI on top of the standard DarwinPorts command line interface. DarwinPorts.app is one of the projects I'd love to work on once I move to a state where my employer can't restrict what I do with my free time.


• Another message pointed to Shantonu Sen's Darwin Locker. Shantonu's putting in the effort required to provide convenient packages for various important bits of software for pure Darwin. Without work like this, Darwin would be nearly impossible to use in its standalone configuration (as it is always installed on x86).