Today I wrote a Ruby version of my quicky function for calling Applescript from Perl: def osascript(script) system ‘osascript’, *script.split(/\n/).map { |line| [‘-e’, line] }.flatten end The usage looks like this (almost identical to the Perl version): osascript <<-END tell application “Finder” display dialog “Hello” end tell END
Back in March of 2012 I was watching Duplicity and I noticed something odd about 28 minutes in: In the top right corner there’s an 11×17 paper with an image on it that’s really hard to make out. I recognized it instantly. I first saw the image in question over 30 years ago when my … Continue reading “An Ancient Piece of Computer Lore in a Place You’d Never Expect” or “Dungeon (Zork) Map in Duplicity”
I just debugged this for hours. I have a bunch of QEMU VMs and different sets of them would start pausing themselves. If I resumed them they would immediately pause themselves again. Checking logs showed nothing. I found a disk with a bunch of S.M.A.R.T. errors but it turned out to be a red herring … Continue reading libvirt based QEMU VM pausing by itself
Here is one: This is basically the 1974 version of a DIMM. It measures 16″ by 11.5″ and holds 16 kilobytes. It’s technically 18 bits wide but only 16 were used in the PDP-11. The raised part in the middle is where the cores are actually stored. Each bit is a little ring with 3 … Continue reading The Core Memory Module from my dad’s homebuilt PDP-11/05
I recently used Funded By Me to help raise some money for a new build server for Emacs for Mac OS X . com. I set it up and then decided to start publicizing it on a Friday and by the end of the following Monday all the money had been raised! I was blown … Continue reading Emacs For OS X . com gets a new Mac Mini
I just spent way too long trying to figure out why VLC wasn’t opening DVDs. I was getting this error in the log window: no access module matched “dvdnav” Turns out the problem is that VLC 1.1.11 only has 32-bit versions of its DVD plugins (or perhaps its 64-bit versions are broken–the end result is … Continue reading VLC 64 Bit Problems
It seems I’ve been writing little daemons a lot lately–small things that don’t want to run as root but still need to be launched in the background as services. I’ve been noticing because it’s such a pain to integrate them into the system once they are written (or installed). I have to mess around as … Continue reading Daemon-Manager: Manage your non-privileged daemons
So I was playing Crysis 2 and hit a random button on my xbox controller and my weapon went into semiautomatic mode. I could not for the life of me figure out what I had done or get it to switch back. Apparently I’m just dumb but it was so frustrating I tried to search … Continue reading Crysis 2–weapon stuck in semiautomatic mode.
Sparse bundles created by Time Machine in the latest versions of Snow Leopard are created slightly differently than they used to be. It used to be that Time Machine would create a sparse bundle with a name like “machine-name_001122334455.sparsebundle” where the “001122334455” part was your main ethernet port’s MAC address. Now it creates just “machine-name.sparsebundle”. … Continue reading Snow Leopard Time Machine Tweaks
The idea for Daemon Manager came about when I was converting a web site from Apache to Nginx. Nginx doesn’t launch FastCGI programs itself—it only connects to FastCGI sockets and so it requires that you manage the FastCGI server yourself. For a simple web site it might be OK to manually create an /etc/init.d script, … Continue reading Introducing Daemon Manager
I couldn’t find these schematics online anywhere. They came from the behind the front panel of my Kenmore Coldspot refrigerator, model number 106.9555923.
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.
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?
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
I admit, I am easily amused.
I was getting this message:”Mac OS X cannot be installed on “silver”, because this disk cannot be used to start up your computer.”
…
The problem turns out to be that the Mac OS really wants 128MB of unused space after your main Mac OS partition.
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.
…
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.
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.
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.
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.
