smart stuff

Welcome in service hell!

Imagine this .. I buy a mac mini online .. all goes well .. I get a confirmation code and wait and wait an no parcel arrives .. then I login and see the order is cancelled. Do you think they would bother to email or call me to tell me that they cancelled the order? Thank you Apple.

NeXT and NeXTStep

A very long read about my old love :-).

Burning a cd from an iso image from the commandline

OS X can do, it too :-) Insert a blank cd, and off it goes :-).

 hdiutil burn image.iso

 $ hdiutil  burn  KNOPPIX_V5.1.1CD-2007-01-04-EN.iso
 Preparing data for burn
 Opening session
 Opening track
 Writing track
 ..............................................................................
 Closing track
 ..............................................................................
 Closing session
 ..............................................................................
 Finishing burn
 Verifying burn...
 Verifying
 ...............................................................................
 Burn completed successfully
 ...............................................................................
 hdiutil: burn: completed

Good old trusted linux does it with cdrecord :-)

 cdrecord  speed=2 dev=0,1,0 -data sol-9-install-sparc.iso

OSX filesystems

Great link at kernelthread.com. I am playing with webdav in rails these days .. so I had to learn about webdav :-)

Fun with Spotlight

Thank to Sven C. Koehler for the following scripts. He uses spotlight to datamine the Enron email data :-).

# convertEnronEmail

 #!/usr/bin/perl -0p
 s/^M//gsm;
 ($date) = /^(Date: [^\n]+)/sm;
 ($from) = /^From:\s*([^\n]+)/sm;
 print "From $from @{[scalar localtime]}\n";
 s/\Z/\n/;

#enronEmailsForKeyword

 #! /bin/sh
 mdfind "kMDItemTextContent == '${1+"$@"}'" | grep /enron/

#enronGrep

 #! /bin/sh
 enronEmailsForKeyword ${1+"$@"} | xargs grep ${1+"$@"}

#enronMailBoxForKeyword

 #! /bin/sh
 enronEmailsForKeyword ${1+"$@"} | xargs -n+1 convertEnronEmail

#enronThreadForKeyword

 #! /bin/sh
 enronEmailsForKeyword ${1+"$@"} | xargs cat

WireTap

WireTap is a utility that allows to record anything that your Mac plays. Snapz Pro is the same thing for video. WireTap costs $19 and Snapz Pro $20. Free trial versions of both can be downloaded.

Google Earth for OS X

I admit this post is late, but better late than never. Grab Google Earth and enjoy it.

Adium: instant messaging

Adium is a free instant messaging application for Mac OS X that can connect to AIM, MSN, Jabber, Yahoo, and more

After some searching and experimentation I recommend Adium on os X. On Linux I prefer gaim. Adium uses libgaim.

Screenshots on OS X

In a nutshell:

the entire screen: Command-Shift-3
region of the screen: Command-Shift-4; Then click and drag the cursor to mark the area you want to capture.

The files are normally saved as Picture-* on the Desktop.

Further reading: MacDevCenter about more fancy capturing using timers, etc.

A good OS X blog

Thanks to Sven C. Koehler for the link. www.macosxhints.com/index.php?topic=pick

A few months ago I did buy a mac mini. My excuse to my girl-friend was that it would make less noise than my hyper big server. The mac mini looks really nice and OS-X is cute, too. I got to admit, I do love the GUI and the poor fact that most things like WLAN, etc. seem to work out of the box. But the definite downside is that coming from Debian/Gentoo/Suse I got some expectations towards the development tools. Now I waste hours installing fink, etc. .. fighting with different philosophies, but I still enjoy the new journey.

RDoc Dashboard Widget

This Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) Dashboard Widget is designed as a quick reference tool for Ruby programmers. It is able to display RDoc generated API documentation from any web source.

widgets.precisionis.com.au/

Good article about Tiger

My girlfriend told me to get a computer that makes less noise .. so I took the opportunity to buy a Mac-Mini and to have a nice computer to play with :-).

Thanks to Sven for emailing me this link .. a good overview article about Tiger. arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars