Apple is hiding a lot of the directory structure from the regular user.
If for some reason you need to see everything in Finder you can configure this with the following:
To revert to the default setting:
\rant on
Guess everybody is aware of the extremely annoying thing issue of the Mac “uninstall”. Almost every app that needs more privileges than the standard user offers comes packaged as a pkg file. These files are absolutely awesome and offer endless possibilities.
There is problem though: in their arrogance, almost no application developer can conceive that somebody would ever try to get rid of their software. Effect: you are stuck with a program that you cannot uninstall in a easy/clean way.
A sort of a solution is to crack open the pkg file, and delete one file at a time using the Terminal.
The only free way I found so far to open a package, comes in the form of a QuickView (thing that pops up when you press space in Finder) plugin that allows you to view every operation that was performed on your system (and a list of files belonging to the app).
To view the contents of a pkg download, install SuspiciousPackage . I had to install the plugin globally for it to work.
I guess I hate more this blight then I love the insanely simple app installation procedure to just “copy to Applications”…
Apple should either whip some sense in the developers or provide some system-wide package management system that keeps track of all the files installed.
\rant off
To my amazement, Apple has a built in VNC in every OS X.
To access it you just have to open Finder and the Connect to Server:
I used before JollyFastVNC and ChickenOfTheVNC, but with both the mouse is lagging horribly (for most of the time you got 2 pointers and do not know which is the local one and the remote one).
Enjoy!!!!
The camera on the new IPhone 3GS is extremely nice, shame for the stupid autoexposure settings…
Since I am such an Apple fanboy I thought it’s high time to write some small IPhone app. With this occasion I would apply also some of my extensive theoretical photo knowledge.
Well guess what? There is no easy, or official way to access the low level functions related to the camera…
Way to go Apple for creating another nice gizmo, that gives close to ZERO tinkering possibilities.
The battle will be tough, but my courage I shall prove.
Will have to get my nice titanium plated, unibody I-shovel and start digging for a way that is not “supported” to control the camera.
When I received my Mac, I was so excited that I chose some retarded name which was bothering me for some time.
Mac has two different names, The Computer name which is visible on the network and the hostname, which is the thing you see in the terminal.
To change the network name you simply go to System Preferences->Sharing and change the Computer Name.
To change the hostname simply type
where your desired hostname is slackbook
Close the terminal and start it again and you should see the new name.
Today I was in an experimental mood and found yet another small trick that felt worth writing about.
At this point my hosting is fairly crappy (but also damn cheap), a virtual host with 128MB of RAM (and up to 512Mb burst). Even with just a few visitors, the server is very slow. Until now I was using WP-SuperCache plugin that converts dynamic WordPress PHP pages into static HTML and serves them. Unfortunately it cannot figure out on the fly that the cached page is out of date and keeps serving the static one until it expires (static lifetime I setup). This is especially annoying while I edit a post as I do not see the changes immediately.
A much more elegant solution is using a PHP caching extension. The one that felt easiest to use and was free was Alternative PHP Cache.
On Ubuntu the installation took a whole 5 minutes to complete (the longest time was wasted trying to figure out some obscure message about apxs). You need to install the following bunch of packages
After that install APC from the Php-Pear repository:
After it finished building, unless it found out your php.ini by itself, you will have to load the extension manually by adding extension=apc.so. For my system this was done with:
Wasn’t that easy now?
Inspired by this tutorial, I decided to try a similar thing, to speed up the TimeMachine backups of my VirtualBox virtual machines.
The results are quite nice, rather than backing up 20GB every time I boot the VM, it does only about 500MB. While this not spectacular – changing almost no data in the VM generates some traffic, at least is fast enough to let TM backup it up.
Same way as the tutorial, you create a sparse bundle image, mount it and you move inside it all your VM data. You can either tell VirtualBox that the new machines are located in a new location (the place where your image mounts), or create a symbolic link between your previous VM location and the mounted disk location. Notice that I said symbolic links and not an Alias from Finder. The VBox is not able to navigate through Aliases. To create a symbolic link you fire up a Terminal and type:
In the previous example my virtual machines were located under ~/Library/VirtualMachines and the name VirtualBox.
There are however a few annoying things about this whole setup. The disk has to be mounted before you start VirtualBox and it does not get unmounted automatically. I am sure that there is magical scripting solution for this, but I am yet to find it.
The advantage of Sparse bundle images over the regular dmg images is that they can expand dynamically up to the maximum size allocated (they can resized however if you decide you want more space). They are also allocated in 8MB stripes, thus allowing you to perform incremental backups.
Unfortunately they do not shrink automatically after you deleted some data. This can be achieved with the following terminal command:
A similar bloating phenomenon happens with your VBox disk files if you made the expand.
The first step is to zero out the free space. If your VM is Windows boot it, download sdelete and run it from a command prompt:
After that is done shutdown the VM and run:
It is rather annoying having to deal with 2 layers of self adjusting container images.
I have been annoyed for some time now that my favourite cloud storage project – Wuala – could never integrate with Windows. A few days back during an usual Wuala upgrade I noticed that it wanted to install a new proggie to “enhance” OS integration. The library in question is called Dokan.
This is a library that implements user land filesystem drivers. The library itself takes care of handling all the nasty windows kernel calls needed for the usual filesystem driver, providing a simpler interface to the programmer. The actual functionality is provided through plugins which do not need Administrator privileges.
Besides the nice development implications of this, I was happy to finally be able to attach a network disk to a remote SSH location, something that SSHFS+FUSE was doing for ages now under Linux. The FUSE project started pretty much to support SSH and FTP filesystem mounting.
This is absolutely awesome news for all those forced to constantly peddle data between Windows/Linux with WinSCP or likes. This gets old really fast since running local apps on remote data, you are forced to copy data locally and re-upload it by hand. The SSHFS module gives you a comfy GooWee for mounting.
Unfortunately I never got the SSHFS module for Dokan to work under Windows7 64-bit, but worked like charmed under WinXP.
As soon as somebody writes an NFS module, Windoze and Linux will play together much nicer (at this point the only way to mount NFS is through Microsoft Windows Services for Unix suite, which is an absolute pain to use).
Today I am uploading a bunch of digital Infrared shots I took over time.
Stay tuned as I will also write my first tutorial on how to take such photos.
Kudos to the guy that wrote FancyZoom. Best thing since bread came sliced.
