My article about using rsync to mimic the behavior of Apple’s Time Machine generated a lot of traffic, and more important, a lot of feedback.
In this article I’ll summarize and try to clarify a few things.
rsync is one of the tools that have gradually infiltrated my day to day tool-box (aside Vim and Zsh).
Using rsync it’s very easy to mimic Mac OS X new feature called Time Machine. In this article I’ll show how to do it, but there is still a nice GUI missing – for those who like it shiny.
Installing Mac OS X on a Mac is a breeze, yet I usually do two things after the installation to improve stability.
About one year ago I bought a second generation MacBook Pro. At first everything was fine and I didn’t encounter any weird sounds or screen flickers known from previous models. Unfortunately after a few weeks, it started to make some weird sound sometimes when I open it (or switch it on).
Here my journey to get rid of the problem.
While reading “The Definitive ANTLR Reference” by Terence Parr I encountered this quote. I’m a bit sceptic about XML beyond its use of data exchange, so the quote has completely won me over for the book.
Don’t be afraid to build a human-readable configuration file (I implore everyone to please stop using XML as a human interface!) or to build domain-specific languages to make yourself more efficient. Designing new languages and building translators for existing languages, when appropriate, is the hallmark of a sophisticated developer. —Terence Parr, The Definitive ANTLR Reference, Page 23.
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Being an expert in XML is like being an expert in comma-separated values. —Terence Parr
Apple’s next generation operating system is nearing its release date. Time to face the truth – is it as awesome as Steve told us?
Since I’m a Mac user (despite my Vista adventures), I can only repeat what the brave people of The Joy of Tech published in September: Please Leopard, don’t suck!
Tiger is already far better than Vista – it does the small things so much better than all Windows versions together. Of course on a competitive market these “features” don’t count. But for me as user these are the features I really really love on Mac OS X.
Here my list of these things make OS X the better operating system:
Well, the list got a bit esoteric at some point, but many many things “just work”. Of course Apple is all but perfect, their “closed-system” policy is dangerous and very annoying. Doing things they don’t want you to do (for good or bad reason) is very hard (try to keep a Macbook running while the lid is closed, for example).
Anyway, closed systems also have their advantages, and if you don’t like it, you can always switch to some other operating system on your Intel Mac. Windows is easily installed on a Mac, and for Linux there are some guides found on the net (depending on your actual hardware).
At some point I didn’t want to care about operating systems anymore (Linux was great, but very time consuming), I wanted something that “just worked” (which ruled out Windows). OS X came to the rescue – and here I am several years later, more happy with my OS than ever.
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Please Leopard, don’t suck!
Vista constantly accesses my hard drive, here is how to do the exorcism (no, not the format-the-drive exorcism).
One thing I notice whenever I start Windows Vista (I usually rely on Linux) is that it always does something on my harddrive. I didn’t know what it was doing, so I started to investigate.
To keep it short, there are three things to disable to keep your harddisk from working permanently.
First, I disabled the “Indexing Service” which was an obvious candidate for accessing my drive(s). Unfortunately it wasn’t the only process digging on my harddrive.
The second service I disabled was the “System Restore” which was suggested here.
This still didn’t work out, so my quest wasn’t finished yet. The last process I disabled was “Superfetch”. This actually did the trick. I don’t know what it is supposed to do, but the OS didn’t suffer as far as I can tell.
I’ll leave the three processes disabled because I didn’t recognize a negative impact (well, the Index-Service might be important to some people).
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If something’s expensive to develop, and somebody’s not going to get paid, it won’t get developed. So you decide: Do you want software to be written, or not?—Bill Gates
Why, oh why didn’t they choose otherwise?
This weekend I tried to get my new keyboard (Microsoft Ergonomic Keyboard 4000) and my Logitech MX1000 Laser mouse to work properly. The Keyboard has many extra-keys I didn’t bother to count, and the mouse has 12 buttons which can be very useful at times.
Almost accidently I solved a bugging performance problem with the Firefox browser. It was incredibly slow when opening Google Spreadsheets, well the whole system was incredibly slow while loading the spreadsheet… .
The challenge-response spam-filter troubles me lately. If you don’t know it, here is how it works if both parties have a challenge-response spam-filter:
So far so good. Three questions pop up:
Windows Vista got a lot of bad press lately. Anyway, I installed it over the last few days. Here are my observations, and some solutions to my problems.
A small comparison of the basic features of Darcs and Mercurial from a Darcs user’s perspective.
I often tried to learn the great Emacs editor/IDE/operating system. The last
time I tried it, I spent some time getting comfortable with it until I wanted
to customize my .emacs file.
That was the point when I entered vi .emacs. As soon as I realized what
I’ve done, I knew that Vim has won me over a long time ago.
Somewhere around 2004 Tim O’Reilly gave a talk and asked the attendees if they still use bookmarks or not.
The majority said they use bookmarks, and Tim O’Reilly was a bit surprised because he doesn’t use bookmarks anymore. He checks Google or some other search engine to find the stuff again.
Years after the talk I finally got what he meant.
Haskell is a non-strict, or lazy, language. This means it evaluates expressions only when it needs their results.
Laziness is one of the things that make Haskell special – really special. Lazy evaluation allows easy handling of infinite data-structures.
The article I wrote yesterday was just the beginning, today we’ll look at the next step in becoming Haskell experts.
Yesterday we’ve learned how to split up our program and how to compile, or run it. Today we’ll look at some basic features of Haskell.
Currently we’ve got quite a discussion about climate change and terrifying prognoses for the future. Terrifying for us because it’s going to be incredible hot, or incredible cold, because disasters like floods, hurricanes, tornados, and fires will hit our homes and the ones we care about.
Danger! If you are happy with your current knowledge of programming languages, don’t read on – Haskell might be responsible for some serious defects in your motivation.
I was always some kind of programming language geek. I loved learning and playing around with all kinds of programming languages1. Currently I’m trying to learn Haskell. Even though I learned functional programming at my university (two semesters using Haskell), I didn’t really learn how to interact with the outside world. This is where things start to get messy, no matter how beautiful the language is.
You might have noticed that the quality of postings to sites like Digg, del.icio.us, and Reddit declines very quickly and people start to rant about it.
You probably heard about MacFUSE (announcement). MacFUSE is an OS X implementation of the popular FUSE project (well known to Linux enthusiasts).
I just found a tech-demo video showing some really interesting features and possibilities of FUSE (of course it’s not limited to MacFUSE).
Choosing the right tool for a job is very important, but often it is very tedious and bothersome to collect all the data you need.
Once I was searching for a replacement of my previous Blog-hoster and ended up with Hobix (see here). Hobix is certainly not for everyone – and most likely not for me, but currently I’m stuck with it.
Anyways, if you are searching for a good Blog-software, or Blog-hoster check out WeblogMatrix.com, a fresh Matrix-Wiki from the makers of WikiMatrix.com and ForumMatrix.com. Maybe you can also add your own favorite system?
Via it’s developer.
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The tools we use have a profound (and devious!) influence on our thinking habits, and, therefore, on our thinking abilities. —Edsger Dijkstra
Apple’s MacBook Pro computers are awesome, at least mine is. But one thing bothers me since I’ve got it: it’s called Laptop when it should be called “Burns your lap”-top.
I’ve found two tools that remedy the heat problem: CoolBook and smcFanControl.
