When do I get crazy-assed bikini models with sexual addiction issues lurking in the bushes? I think I could handle that. Instead, I get this tripe.

Hilarious mailing list exchange in which John C. Welch, who suffers no fools, goes from being helper to stalker in just four moves. Keep reading into the comments to see the inevitable appearance of a lawyer-wannabe (and his subsequent about-face). A must read.

After four decades, the future of the operating system is clouded, but its legacy will endure.

Regardless of the ultimate fate of Unix, the operating system born at Bell Labs 40 years ago has established a legacy likely to endure for decades more. It can claim parentage of a long list of popular software, including the Unix offerings of IBM, HP and Sun, Apple’s Mac OS X and Linux. It has also influenced systems with few direct roots in Unix, such as Microsoft’s Windows NT and the IBM and Microsoft versions of DOS.

The [Association for Computing Machinery] may have said it best in its 1983 Turing award citation in honor of Thompson and Ritchie’s Unix work: “The genius of the Unix system is its framework, which enables programmers to stand on the work of others.”

Using the command line tool opensnoop you can track any Mac application’s (or system process’) usage of the file system. This is a very handy tool for administrators and troubleshooting! The simplest way to use it is as follows:

sudo opensnoop -n Safari


You can also track a specific file, and what is accessing it, like so:

sudo opensnoop -f /etc/hosts


Tracking a specific process is as simple as just specifying the process id:

sudo opensnoop -p PID


opensnoop will keep tracking the file until the process itself is ended, so just hit Control-C in the Terminal to stop opensnoop from running. In case you’re wondering, opensnoop is based on DTrace, a popular UNIX tool.

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Would Will Hunting use OS X? He might now:

TeX is a typesetting standard that, among other things, allows you to typeset complex math formulas. One flavour of Tex is LaTeX, for which LaTeXiT serves as a front-end on Mac OS X. Using LaTeXiT, one can drag and drop complex math formulas to a number of apps — Pages, Keynote and TextEdit, to name a few.

In OS X any file or folder whose name is prefixed with a period is automatically invisible to the Finder and Terminal unless specifically requested.

Sometimes though, one might want to hide a file (or folder) without changing its name. Fortunately OS X provides a means to do this too. In the Terminal the command:

chflags hidden /path/to/my_secrets.txt


will hide my_secrets.txt from the Finder (but not the Terminal). The following command will reverse the action:

chflags nohidden /path/to/my_secrets.txt


Note that while the file is hidden from the Finder it is still accessible to the OS.

Fixing Countries in Address Book: Winfred van Kuijk presents an awesome plugin he has written which addresses (pun intended) two significant issues with OS X’s Address Book multi-country support:

• country names: you no longer have many variations for country names (so: all “United States”, instead of many variations like “USA”, “US”, “United States of America”);
• country address formats: it tells Address Book to use the formatting that belongs to that country (e.g. [van Kuijk’s] default format is for the Netherlands, which means for US addresses that state is missing and zip and city are switched).

Photo Credit: Trash Your Gifts by Euphoriefetzen

Everyone’s favourite uninstaller for OS X, AppZapper, recently generated a bit of a buzz as it metamorphosed into version 2 and acquired a slick new interface. AppZapper also seems to have grown beyond being a simple uninstaller, several pundits are now describing it as an “application manager.”

As an application manager one can view one’s applications in a pretty interface, sort them with various filters and even store their license codes within AppZapper. I have to say that license code management seems to me to be an odd addition to an uninstaller. There’s no synergy between the tasks of uninstalling applications that are no longer required and retrieving licensing details for those that are.

But that’s not my biggest issue with AppZapper. To me, whilst the application itself is extremely useful, the interface is completely redundant and, pretty as it is, it shouldn’t be there at all.

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Now this is a handy little hack. Over on the Mac OS X Hints site, robg has posted a script that will record the CPU usage of a specified process, with a configurable frequency over a configurable period of time. The script dumps the resulting data into a text file for further analysis/graphing.

I really like this. Very handy for debugging and keeping an eye on rogue processes. This script has a much smaller footprint than the Instruments program from the Xcode Developer Tools.

Because I’m a geek I thought it’d be “nice” to use GeekTool to tail -f my system.log onto my desktop. What an eye-opener that turned out to be.
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SheepShaver is a PowerPC emulator that runs under Mac OS X. It started life over 10 years ago as a commercial application for BeOS, but it is now open source and free. SheepShaver is a universal binary, so it runs natively on an Intel machine. SheepShaver lets you run any older system between Mac OS 8.5 and Mac OS 9.0.4.