Porkrind Dot Org Missives

Leopard came with a program called fsaclctl that let you turn on and off ACL control for a filesystem. Here’s how to get it off your Leopard (10.5) install DVD. Continue reading →

Ok, so you have a random disk lying around and you plug it in and it looks like it has Mac OS X installed on it. How do you tell what version it is without booting into it?
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Say you want to build the source tree for a RHEL/CentOS 5.4 kernel (2.6.18-164.11.1.el5 in my case) and you are running a recent Debian or Fedora system. You might get patch failure errors.
… Just add this to fix it:
%define _default_patch_fuzz 2 Continue reading →

I admit, I am easily amused. Continue reading →

I was getting this message:”Mac OS X cannot be installed on “silver”, because this disk cannot be used to start up your computer.”
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The problem turns out to be that the Mac OS really wants 128MB of unused space after your main Mac OS partition.
Continue reading →

So at some point the system installed new, nicely gzipped man pages but somehow failed to remove the old ones. And it turns out the man give the non-gzipped version precedence. Giving me old out of date documentation when I ask for it. Weak.
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I had about 4500 that I was able to delete, and now my ls and chmod man pages have up-to-date info again. Aaaahhhhh. Continue reading →

For years I was GUI calculator fanatic. Desperately searching for that perfect calculator that did all the things I wanted it to do… At some point I decided to write my own. Finally one day it hit me that Perl’s eval() was really what I wanted. And so “pc“, Perl Calc, was born. Continue reading →

I got a new Intel core i7 computer and migrated my Debian server over to it. Here’s how to do it without installing from scratch. Continue reading →

Here’s my slowed down version of the famous “Bloop”. You won’t be able to hear it with tiny little computer speakers. Either find a subwoofer or some nice over the ear headphones and crank the Cthulu Bloop. Continue reading →

I was rearranging my bookcase and happened across a 1976 Readers Digest. I saw this ad and just had to laugh! Continue reading →

Sheila Jones sends us a lost phone and a piece of her mind. Continue reading →

For most of the day today I’ve been missing all the OS X menu extras in the top right of my MacBook screen, including my clock, airport and volume controls. I never knew how much I used that stuff until it suddenly wasn’t there. Continue reading →

What I need is a plug-in that monitors all the javascript and plugins that are running and keeps track of how long each runs. Then I want a unix top-like view of all the pages open and how many resources each is consuming (how much memory, how much cpu time their javascript is taking, etc). Continue reading →

Getting Time Machine to work with my Linux server was annoyingly hard–the default Debian server doesn’t support Leopard out of the box and Time Machine itself doesn’t support non-apple file shares. Continue reading →

So a couple days ago I noticed I had no permission to access one of my directories… Continue reading →

I write computer programs for a living though quite often I end up writing code for myself at home… When I quit my job and started consulting I lost the security that comes from a steady paycheck… So when I needed to write a piece of software to scratch my own itch I started thinking about selling it instead of releasing it as free software. Continue reading →

I read this article on reddit and while I thought the author was correct that RSS is really a bad design, I think he missed the real underlying reason why. That reason is that polling is always wrong. Always. Really!
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Every review I read about the iPhone whines that the price is high. So let’s see how high it really is. Continue reading →

I tried out TiVo Desktop on my Mac and it was kind of cool… I found some articles and discovered the TiVo Desktop is just a http daemon plus some mdns stuff. Sounds easy enough! Continue reading →