Technical information

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rearranging logs and removing out of date crud. These tasks
ran automatically by the cron application daily, weekly and
monthly. You may remember there were a number of third
party applications which would run these tasks for you when
you chose rather than relying on Apple’s internal timing. One
of the best known of those applications was Macjanitor.
Fast forward now to OS X 10.7 Lion. Searching in the same
System Log files [Console>SYSTEM LOG QUERIES>/var/log] I
find that these tasks are still being run automatically but much
more efficiently. This process is most probably one that you
have forgotten about and not missed. The fact that Macjani-
tor has not been updated for some time, since OS X 10.2,
indicates how much Apple has improved this process. The cron
jobs will now certainly run if your Mac is asleep.
This is an example of the ‘under the hood’ type improve-
ments which Apple talks about at every system update but
which most of never see. Just shows how far OS X has come
in its development: remember having to download a script
to run permissions check, remember running ‘fsck’ separately
when that is now done for you every time you cold boot, re-
member when you had to boot from a separate disk to run
repair permission, remember when defrag your hard drive was
considered necessary, you now can have automatic backup
by Time Machine and great improvements have been made to
applications such as Safari, Mail, Preview and TextEdit is now
a word processor for most of us. Of course these are all just
forward steps along the way. When was the last time you had
a system crash?
Flush
I have written previously about how Flash conceals cook-
ies and other stuff from web sites which Safari visits. And I
showed how to clear them out of your system. That can be
a bit laborious unless someone has written an Applescript or
Automator action to do it but I have never found one. Well
there is a third party application named Flush which will remove
all those Flash cookies for you. Why do it? Well by and large
I suppose cookies don’t do much harm and can assist you by
rapid retrieval of web sites. But I just don’t like the idea of stuff
being downloaded and retained on my computer which I do not
know about. That is also why I use Ghostery which I wrote an
article about a few months ago. I am fully aware of Google’s
retention of all my search data and a lot more besides. But
I just try to make it as hard for them as I can! I have Flush
installed and it works for systems as far back as OS X 10.3.
See here and it’s free:
<http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/32994/flush>
That’s all for now.
Feel free to offer suggestions or corrections.
Peter Sealy
[e-mail]