Jonathan Rentzsch showed us the anti-caps lock bias of the new Apple aluminum keyboards. With the arrival of my new MacBook Pro today, I’ve observed the same bias with the built-in keyboard: the caps lock keys have to be pressed and held down to turn on caps lock, but will turn off caps lock with the slightest press. Apple to bloggers, IRC denizens, and email authors everywhere: STOP YELLING.
Today marks the release of my first application for Mac OS X: CPU History. CPU History is a 10.5-compatible shameless ripoff of Apple’s original CPU Monitor, which I used in 10.2 to 10.4, but stopped working in 10.5.
CPU History is designed to do one thing, and do it well: graph your CPU usage history. It graphs the user, system, nice, and idle usage in the Dock icon, and optionally in a window which can be set to float above all others. CPU History lets you change the update frequency and the bar width, along with setting colors for each type of CPU usage.
Activity Monitor is a resource hog for this simple Dock icon graphing: between Activity Monitor and its pmTool background process, the two consumed 15–20% CPU on my iBook G4 in 10.5. By comparison, CPU History consumes 0.8–1.2%.
CPU History 1.0.1 is available over at its new home on cbowns.com, along with a git repository of the source code.
Much thanks to Bernhard Baehr and Peter Hosey for their applications, Memory Monitor and CPU Usage. Thanks to their source code, I was able to graft pieces of each onto the other and come up with a useful new application.
Toast 8, a CD/DVD burning utility for the Mac, introduced a new feature: when you add files to a data CD above what a single disc can hold, it offers to burn them onto separate discs. When I went to back up (and remove from my hard drive) about 40 GB of ripped DVDs, this looked like a fantastic feature. However, I wanted to make sure that, should I need to use the discs on a PC, on a Unix machine, or on a newer or older Mac. I couldn’t let myself be tied to a platform, OS, or application.
Fortunately, Roxio has ensured that, short of losing one of the discs, you’ll be able to get at your data somehow.
First, Toast copies a text-editable Disc Index.plist to each disc, hidden at the root level of the drive, gzipped to save space. It’s identical across all discs in the session, so any disc has a complete copy. It contains a dictionary of all the files in the session, including their size, whether they’re invisible, their date modified, whether to copy them onto a PC, and for a spanned file, the discs on which to find the file.
I first tested the included Mac version of their disc spanning utility: it simply copies the pieces of the files and concatenates them together (more on that in a minute). The discs also include a Windows exe, though I haven’t tested it. The spanned and remerged files emerging from the utility are, as you would hope, binary identical to the original.
Initially, I was wary of using disc spanning: a proprietary utility to reassemble files? An unknown format to recover them from? But it turns out that their utility is a very pretty interface for a couple of simple Unix commands. By concatenating together the two (or more) pieces of the files, in order, you produce an exact copy of the original file. I tested this on a split AVI: cat file1.spanned > testfile; cat file2.spanned >> testfile; md5sum testfile originalfile; will produce identical MD5 checksums.
So, at the end of the day, I went ahead and burned a 10 disc session of movies to DVDs. If I lose any of the discs, sure, the data is lost and the remainder is unrecoverable, but I have a list of what was lost in the Disc Index.plist, and can BitTorrent as needed to replace it. Would I span a disk image with a backup across two pieces of media? Probably not without burning two or three copies of the session, and testing each. But for movies, it’s a great way to back them up.
Inspired by warpedvisions:
“It’s all geek to me.”
(Dear reader: I’m sorry. It’s finals, and I’m scraping the barrel for something to post here. I swear, I’ll make it up to you after this is all done.)
We have our PHP error logging turned back to E_ERROR | E_PARSE_ERROR. Why, you ask, if it’s in the log, and it’s good to know what’s going on? Why, because if we turn on E_ALL, the logfile grows very fast (!) and the server goes down when it’s over 2 GB.
*shakes head* WHAT?!? That’s the dumbest thing I’ve heard today. Either fix your damn errors so a logfile doesn’t kill things, or have a cronjob take care of log rotation/compression/deletion. Good god.
Rixstep just published an article about why spatial file navigation doesn’t work in today’s file systems: there’s just too many files. And if you assume you’re trying to assign a unique location on screen to each folder, you’re absolutely right: you’d have to be insane. But navigating in (for the moment, we’ll use the OS 9 Finder as our benchmark, seeing as OS X’s brokenness) Ye Olde Finder, I never have more than a few folders open at once, and when I do, they relate to each other. What are the odds that I’ll be opening ~/Documents/Desktop Pictures at the same time as /usr/share/lib? Or, for that matter, why in the world would I navigate the Unix underpinning (/bin, /dev, /var) with Finder at all? Any manipulations I want to perform on the contents of those folders are only available in a shell to begin with, so why bother navigating through them spatially?
I suppose that very flaw may be part of their argument, but, if you separate out navigation into “Duh, use zsh” for the Unix underside of OS X, and, “Let me drag and drop my files!” in ~/Documents or ~/Desktop or ~/Pictures, spatial navigation becomes more useful. I’ll say it again: spatial navigation makes blindingly obvious sense in certain cases, and just because it doesn’t work everywhere doesn’t mean it never works anywhere.
No thanks to @duncan, @gruber, and other Twitter miscreants, I’ve spent the last 15 minutes playing with Panic Sans, a modified version of DejaVu Sans, as a replacement to my Inconsolata.
Panic Sans fixes the underscores and hyphens of DejaVu Sans. I’m going to try it for a day or two and see what I think. It’s available if you tear open the .app package of Coda, their web design application.
Update: this post never really made it up when I first started using Panic Sans. For the most part, I’m a fan of it, though there is one part that’s holding me back from using TinkerTool to replace the system monospaced font with it: the line-spacing on Panic Sans is too small, so lines with descenders (like g or p) get overlapped with the ascenders of the following line, cutting them off. I had to adjust the vertical spacing setting in Terminal to make it work properly.
A technology generalization, stemming from a Brijit article summary I just read.
To be useful and successful, technology has to have access to content. Technology without content is useless: what’s an iPod without MP3s? A DVD player with no discs? A Wii with no games? This is especially important to new and emerging technology: without content to feed it and drive both investment and innovative uses, the technology will die.
I’ve just spent the past two hours today, and two hours on Wednesday, hunting down a bug that popped up when we migrated PEAR database objects from DB to MDB2. Turns out, two single quote marks: ’ ’ in a select clause is completely fine with DB, but MDB2 won’t even parse an SQL statement with those in them for prepared statement placeholders.
Good god. That was painful.
Fake Steve on Google’s OpenSocial project and handset alliance:
Companies don’t form alliances and consortia when they’re winning.
…Whenever you see companies start talking about being “open,” it means they’re getting their ass kicked. You think Google will be forming an OpenSearch alliance any time soon, to help also-rans in search get a share of the spoils? Me neither.
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