Missives

Fridge Schematics/Wiring Diagram

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.

How to get fsaclctl off your Leopard install DVD

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.

How to find out what Mac OS X system is installed on a random disk

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?

CentOS (RHEL) 5.4 kernel source

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

Cool things about Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6) that no one but me will care about

I admit, I am easily amused.

What I had to do to get Snow Leopard to install on my MacBook

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.

All My Stupid Man Pages Are Out Of Date

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 Giving me old out of date documentation when I ask for it.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.

PC – Perl Calculator

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.

Upgrading from Debian 32 bit to 64 bit

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.

The Bloop in Real Time

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.

Cordoba: The Small Chrysler

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

“Kharma”

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

All my menu extras are gone!

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.

Why is there no process viewer in Firefox?

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).

Time Machine and a Linux server

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.

Leopard Permissions Going Crazy

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

Selling out: How a Free Software advocate ended up releasing a shareware program

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.