Rails Conf -- Joel Spolsky

I really liked Joel's keynote at Rails Conf 2008. I have always read Joel on Software and thought he was a kool aid drinking Microsoft guy, but he did not come off as such. He was thoughtful and practiced. More later.

Apple "regedit"/ changing Terminal.app default settings

There was not much on google for this. I recently clicked the "Use Settings as Defaults" in the "Window Settings" in Terminal.app for Mac OS X 10.4.11. This screwed me over because I was secure shelled into a remote machine at the time. What this did was save the last execution string in the Mac OS X defaults settings. So then every time I launched terminal, it would ssh into that last server! Bunk.

Well, I did not know about the whole "defaults" command in Mac OS X, I was looking for some config file in my home directory to no avail. Terminal.app is a system binary that squirrels away its settings in the internal os database. To fix this issue, you must access this internal database using the "defaults" process. Here is the exact syntax:

defaults read | less <------in less: hit '/' and type in: ssh -l, once you find the "section" label
defaults write com.Apple.Terminal ExecutionString ""

now we have knocked this problem out. This will also allow you to alter all kinds of things in your os.