This is a rant. Here is a 10 years long Apple customer, generally satisfied with the quality of the product, but my stance started to change recently, and radically. Apple is pushing it too far. As I smelled long ago with the introduction of the App marketplace, their plan apparently is to make OSX like [...]
Occasionally, I get to find very interesting scientific apps for the Mac. In light of the recent events, SeisMac is definitely one of those. While not technically useful for the general public, it is a very important application for research. All Mac laptops include the so-called Sudden Motion Sensor, a Micromechanical system (MEMS) accelerometer. This [...]
I recently bought this 240 Gigabytes of awesomeness, conveniently packed into a 2.5″ SATA box. It’s an Other World Computing Mercury Extreme Solid State Hard Drive. It has no moving parts, it consumes less battery, and it’s fast. Damn fast. This thing is so fast it opens applications before you lift your finger from the [...]
I just installed Snow Leopard, MacOSX 10.6, on my laptop. It is indeed much faster. Considerably faster. I don’t have actual measures, but you can appreciate it. The interface is much snappier in response. There are many tiny improvements around, minor things, nothing revolutionary, although I really appreciate the new Expose’: now you can recall [...]
Sometimes it happens to me that my hard drive starts being accessed in a very aggressive and noisy way. I found a couple of commands to see who is responsible: sudo fs_usage -f filesys and also sudo iotop In the last one, you could get error messages like dtrace: error on enabled probe ID …. [...]
Apparently, something changed in the ls command with the release of Leopard. I don’t remember seeing this kind of report on Tiger, although it looks like the features already existed since long time. Now, take this information with a grain of salt, as I am not a MacOSX expert, just a (very busy) occasional tinkerer [...]
Looks like I am not the only one suffering of keyboard freezes in MacOSX Leopard on a laptop. Looks like upgrading to 10.5.1 does not solve either. A temporary solution for this problem, while waiting for Apple to release a patch, is to keep numlock pressed for some seconds. When the led turns on, the [...]
I wrote the first part of some research I did on script relocatability. The basic problem is to make a script and its resources relocatable. It is not meant to be correct, actually I believe there are many errors and inaccuracies, but it brings a lot of arguments to discuss. I will write the second [...]