double bacon genius burger

things that annoy me in my daily mac os x usage, in no particular order:

• ican'tsee ical
  the background colors on the month view that highlight the selected day and the current day are way too light. it should jump out at me which day is today by contrasting the other white cells, but even after staring at the thing for a few seconds, i still can't figure it out. i don't know why these colors aren't configurable, even through a hidden-hack-up-some-plist-file method.

  also, it would be convenient to have its icon on the dock always show the current month, not just when it's running. maybe some little helper app that runs in the background to update the icon instead of having to keep the whole app open and minimized?

• nothing in the filevault
  i can't enable filevault on my case sensitive hfs+ partition for some reason.
• itunes has a bad memory
  why doesn't it remember what song it was playing when i last closed it? i usually only close it to log out or reboot, so when i run it again i'd like to continue listening to what i was before.
• fonts can't get any smaller
  i can't change font sizes for system things like title bars, the main bar at the top of the screen, etc. i'm not blind, i don't need this giant 14 point font or whatever it is.
• dock is static
  i have limited screen space and i'm not going to be one of those people that puts 2305823047923 applications on his dock, but i hate having to go to the dock, click on finder, then applications, then scroll to find some program i rarely use, run it, then close the finder window.

  why can't it operate like a menu, expanding to show folders that automatically hide once you launch an application? i want an applications icon on the dock that will just expand out another (in my case, vertical) dock right next to the first dock that contains those icons. when i click on one, that second dock goes away and the regular dock auto-hides as it normally does. i think i actually saw a program somewhere that did this, but of course i can't find it again.

• .pkg's stay under the tree forever
  applications that install with .pkg files that use the apple installer (like palmone's hotsync crap) provide no way of uninstallation. i had to do some digging around to find /Library/Receipts/, and the lsbom(8) utility to be able to read the packing lists for these packages, then manually delete all of the files.
• library of congress
  why is there /Library, /"System Library", and ~/Library, that all have different things in them? shouldn't /Library be a system directory if it's not in ~/?
• hide from the spotlight
  there is no simple off switch for spotlight and it must be disabled manually. but even then the icon remains on the menu bar, taking up space, so to remove that, more manual work must be done.
• finding bugs in finder
  if a folder is being viewed in icon mode (as some randomly are), click-shift-click to select a range of things does not work at all. yet in list mode, it works as expected.
• .DS_Store
  enough said
• spinning tcsh
  i don't know if it's directly related to x11, but occasionally the powerbook's fan will start whirring and a check of the process list shows a process, usually tcsh, eating as much cpu as it can. i can reproduce it with rdesktop by closing it through the title bar's close button instead of the application quitting itself.

  there, i just reproduced it by closing rdesktop:

  USER       PID %CPU %MEM      VSZ    RSS  TT  STAT STARTED      TIME COMMAND
  jcs      10749  72.6  0.1    31976    808  ??  R     8:44PM   0:03.59 -bin/tcsh
  

  gdb says:

  Attaching to program: `/usr/local/bin/tcsh', process 10749.
  Reading symbols for shared libraries . done
  0x900138b0 in close ()
  

  yes, that's /usr/local/bin/tcsh. i replaced the stock tcsh with the pkgsrc version thinking it might fix the spinning problem that the original showed, but apparently not.