Linked List: May 17, 2005

Tuesday, 17 May 2005

Disabling Spotlight for a Volume 

Steven Frank on how to disable Spotlight indexing on a specific volume (in his case, a FireWire drive he uses for backups).

Yahoo Screws Napster 

Napster’s entire schtick is that they claim to offer a cheaper deal than Apple. But it’s an apples-to-oranges comparison, because the iTunes Music Stores sells songs that you keep, and Napster sells subscriptions that you have to keep paying for. Yahoo has introduced their own subscription service, and their prices are less than half of Napster’s. Napster’s response to Yahoo: nothing.

Backpack Web Services API 

Sweet. The guys at the O’Reilly Radar weblog are already putting it to use.

Mac OS X 10.4.1 Disables Mail Plug-Ins 

Michael Tsai, developer of SpamSieve:

It’s not every Monday that Apple releases an OS update two hours after the close of business (on the East Coast) that breaks your software.

What happened is that some third-party plug-ins were causing Mail to crash on 10.4.0, so for 10.4.1, Apple disabled all Mail plug-ins — including SpamSieve, which according to Tsai caused no known conflicts. Sort of an “If it’s not our baby, why not throw it out with the bath water?” solution.