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.”
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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.
All My Stupid Man Pages Are Out Of Date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 Giving me old out of date documentation when I ask for it.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.
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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.
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.
Polling is always wrong
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!
The iPhone is not expensive
Every review I read about the iPhone whines that the price is high. So let’s see how high it really is.
Tivo Desktop on Linux
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!
Efficient JavaScript or Inefficient Browser?
I caught “this article”:http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/48/ on “Reddit”:http://reddit.com this weekend and had definite mixed feelings about it. Many of their suggestions were obviously good ideas. But some of what was masquerading as optimization “advice” seemed more like work-arounds for a substandard javascript implementation.
Calling Applescript from Perl
I needed to call some Applescript from perl and was quite proud of my end result.
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In the end, I like that it fits on one line and that it lets the Applescript sit in the program in its native form.
Darwin Ports Pextlib Problem
I deleted all the Tcl-ish things in /usr/local/bin (and didn’t find anything anywhere else, oddly enough), reinstalled Darwin Ports, and it worked! Yay.
“Commit Patch”: Managing your mess
If I’m working on a bug or a new feature I end up making other random enhancements or fixes that aren’t at all related. With commit-patch, I now can precisely specify the patch I want to commit and leave the rest behind as uncommitted changes in my working directory.