Ah, autumn... that magical time of the year when the leaves turn majestic shades of yellow, red, and orange. When a bracing nip in the air puts a zing in one's step. When a new fall television season rescues us from a seemingly interminable sentence of summer reruns. And, perhaps most importantly and magically of all, when we get back that hour that was so cruelly wrested away from us way back in spring. April is the cruellest month, indeed; it's a bittersweet bargain to trade an hour of sleep for an extra hour of daylight during the summer months. Sure, it may seem worth it in the long run, but losing that initial hour is a real trial for those of us who are already terminally sleep-deprived. So that's just one more reason that autumn is our favorite season-- those sixty precious minutes are returned to us, none the worse for wear.

What a shock it was, then, to trudge into the office after a gloriously long bye-bye-Daylight-Savings-Time sleep to find AtAT's PowerTower PRo furiously updating its Sherlock find-by-content index, approximately one third of the way through the task-- and reporting twenty-six more hours to go. After emitting an admittedly Scooby-like noise of surprise and confusion, we canceled the operation and started digging around online to see what was up. It wasn't long before we came across an old Apple TechNote describing what had happened. It seems that Mac OS Extended format (commmonly known as HFS+) has a known "issue" with any changes to the Mac's PRAM-stored offset to Greenwich Mean Time. If you're making your own Scooby-like noises right now, here's the skinny: HFS+ stores the creation and modification time of each file in Greenwich Mean Time. The Mac OS then stores an offset to that in Parameter RAM, or PRAM, based on your time zone setting. Well, the upshot of this is, any changes to the PRAM-stored offset (such as changing your time zone or-- you guessed it-- taking your Mac off of Daylight Savings Time) will effectively alter the modification times of every single file on an HFS+ disk. The result? Funkiness like Sherlock thinking it has to update the index for the entire hard disk, since every file has apparently changed since the last index update. And when we run Retrospect Express later to back up our system, it, too, will think it needs to back up every file, instead of the hundred or so that really changed since the last backup. So much for getting that hour back...

This isn't new to Mac OS 8.5-- we remember the issue arising when 8.1 came out and the first few brave souls upgraded to HFS+. (In fact, the TechNote mentioned above was created when Mac OS 8.1 first hit the scene.) At that time, we didn't notice any problems. Incidentally, Apple also claims that this "issue" can result in broken aliases, for some reason which, we admit, eludes us completely. We haven't had any trouble with our multitude of aliases, though-- perhaps it's an 8.1 issue only. Guess we'll wait and see.

Over the last several days, many of you wrote in to ask if we had seen the Foxtrot comic strip from a couple of days ago, in which Jason Fox contemplates dressing up as an iMac for Halloween. We most certainly had seen it-- in fact, it had us rolling on the floor-- but at the time, it had not yet been posted to the official Foxtrot web site, so we though we'd hold off on mentioning it until we could actually link to it. NoBeige, however, found another site who had already posted it, so now it's yours to enjoy in electronic format. We think it's funny enough that we're considering buying a $40 framed reproductions for the office when it becomes available.

Now, humor notwithstanding, the iMac could indeed be this year's hot costume-- if it didn't present such a tough challenge to reproduce. In fact, there was a posting to the EvangeList recently from a subscriber who wanted to dress his 11-year-old as an iMac, with his 7-year-old being the mouse-- but since the initial request for sewing pattern suggestions hit the airwaves a couple of weeks ago, we haven't seen any followups. And no wonder, since it'd be tough to reproduce the iMac's swooping curves and translucent mix of textures with enough accuracy for the result to be recognizable. We at AtAt are hoping, however, that someone tackles the challenge, and sends us photos of the results.

Of course, if you're going for really scary, it's pretty easy to beat a home computer with no floppy drive; how about an operating system where you click the "Start" button to shut down the computer? Aiiiieeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!