Apple Support Document 300225: Photo Sync creates iPod photo Cache:

When using iTunes to sync photos to iPod photo, iTunes creates a folder called iPod photo Cache in the top level of the folder you selected for your photos. Picking another folder to sync does not erase the previous iPod photo Cache.

Depending on how many photos are being synced, the hard drive could fill up.

Drag the folder named iPod photo Cache to the Trash or Recycle Bin.

Sure enough, poking around in there I found cache files from 2005. so I moved some of that clutter over from my old PowerBook to the new MacBook Pro.

Juggling free space is always an issue for me, deleting this folder recovered almost 3 GB.

I noticed this folder while showing Disk Inventory X to a friend.

Ben notes:

>Merrill Lynch issued a note to investors calling for ESPN to “throw in the towel” on its branded mobile phone service. Analysts Jessica Reif Cohen … now estimate that ESPN Mobile will lure a mere 30,000 subscribers over the course of this financial year, well below their original estimate of 240,000. Along with the losses generated by a second Disney-branded phone service, ML expects that the Mouse will lose $135 million on its experiment in FY06

You know, I could have saved ESPN $130 million dollars if they just asked me first. For the small consulting fee of $5 million, I could have written at length about how branded single-channel digital devices were a stupid, archaic model that was doomed to fail. Anyone with a proper internet-enabled phone could have all of ESPN’s features and a thousand times more.

However I don’t think ESPN is completely at fault here. They were likely sold a bill of goods by whichever wireless companies they partnered with. American wireless carriers have no idea what they’re doing. The phones and services are often crippled or charged per use, data access is difficult and expensive. Charging to get photos out of a phone is madness. In Japan you can use your phone like a credit card, here people think I’m some kind of tech-god for getting a weather report via SMS.

$5 million, negotiable. Call anytime.

Halfway through the discussion of dimension 5 I got that wonderful brain-ache where the mind’s expansion seems to have a physical corollary. Click auto-play and enjoy: Imagining the Tenth Dimension.

I didn’t think the Del.icio.us link pulling script was even still working… Guess it is.

• A list of links to programming resources
  tags: programming +

So I was having this weird problem where the results of Find command were coming back with a double slash in the file path.

After thinking I’d solved it and starting to write out the solution, I realized the issue was because my search target was a symbolic link. I then found Find’s switch for dealing with this problem. Doubtlessly someone else is or will come across this same issue, so I’ll explain what was happening anyway.

This all came up because I needed to grab a set of files that resided in my /tmp directory. On Mac OS X, tmp is actually a symbolic link (a unixy kind of alias) which points to /private/tmp.

Here are a few iterations of this command and a description of their results:

find /tmp -name 'Web*' -print

Returns nothing because find is searching /tmp as a file instead of following the link to the target directory.

find /tmp/ -name 'Web*' -print

This returns the files I was looking for, but their paths contained double slashes (ie. /tmp//Webkit...). The double-slashes were strange, and I suspected (wrongly, keep reading) that they might be causing problems with later commands.

find /tmp/* -name 'Web*' -print

This works, and returned correct file paths, but it probably uses shell expansion which seems silly on top of Find’s own abilities.

Reading the man page again, after the symbolic link realization, I finally saw the -H flag:

The -H option causes the file information and file type (see stat(2)) returned for each symbolic link specified on the command line to be those of the file referenced by the link, not the link itself. If the referenced file does not exist, the file information and type will be for the link itself. File information of all symbolic links not on the command line is that of the link itself.

Well that took a stupid amount of time to discover. Using -H, the command works perfectly with the simple /tmp target:

find -H /tmp -name 'Web*' -print

Same results as the /tmp/* line, but a much cleaner command.

A funny, or sad, footnote of this story is that my original problem had nothing to do with the double-slashed paths. I didn’t realize the files were owned by root and that was causing my command to fail.

Bruce IM’d with a quote I hadn’t seen in years:

>”Hip is transitory. Smart endures. Hip is defined by others. Smart is defined by intelligence. Hip is only for the moment. Smart is timeless. Hip is driven by trends. Smart is driven by performance. Hip is perpetually looking over your shoulder. Smart is making your own decisions. Hip is mango-chestnut gelati. Smart is chocolate ice cream. Hip is often difficult to define. Smart is always logically defensible. Hip is flash. Smart is substance. Hip is something that looks cool. Smart is something that works. Hip talks the talk. Smart walks the walk. Hip gets you a $300 a week cocaine habit. Smart gets you a big raise and the corner office.” 

He remembers it from a xeroxed handout in one of Brad Durham’s classes we both had at Art Center sometime in the very early 90s.

Amazingly, that only appears to be in Google once, on a seemingly abandoned Tripod page. Nothing in the Usenet archives and most non-Google search engines couldn’t even find the one tripod page.

Anyone remember where this is from or who wrote it?

*update:* also posted to Google Answers