has_many :thoughts: Tag OSX

Flushing OS X DNS cache

Colin A. Bartlett — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 11:39:00 -0500

I don’t know why it took me so long to learn this but this command is very handy:

dscacheutil -flushcache

update: I originally posted that the command was dnscacheutil. It’s actually just dscacheutil. I’ve fixed it above. I also learned this is a Leopard-only tool.

It’s equivelant to the following Windows, which was always very handy when changing DNS configuration around:

ipconfig /flushdns

Time Machine is Awesome

Colin A. Bartlett — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 15:51:00 -0500

Nothing more to say.

It just rocks. So easy to setup. So easy to use.

Once again, Apple, I bow before thee.

Compiling Git for Mac OS X Leopard (10.5)

Justin Reagor — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 23:48:00 -0400

The following is the exact compilation steps I took for compiling Git onto the new retail version of Leopard. Definitely a big change since my previous article on installing in Tiger (next to pre-installed SVN, bye bye CVS!)...

Commands

curl -O http://surfnet.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/expat/expat-2.0.1.tar.gz
tar zxvf expat-2.0.1.tar.gz 
cd expat-2.0.1
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
make check
sudo make install
cd ..

curl -O http://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/git-1.5.3.4.tar.bz2
tar jxvf git-1.5.3.4.tar.bz2
cd git-1.5.3.4
make prefix=/usr/local all
make prefix=/usr/local test && echo $?
sudo make prefix=/usr/local install
cd ..

curl -O http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/git-manpages-1.5.3.4.tar.bz2
sudo tar xjv -C /usr/local/man -f git-manpages-1.5.3.4.tar.bz2

Notes

You may need to adjust your default MANPATH environment variable. You can either apply something along the lines of…

export MANPATH="/usr/local/man:$MANPATH"

...to your .bash_login, profile or what have you. Or you can look into editing /private/etc/man.conf (or un-tar the manpages into a directory in your MANPATH already).

Also, no need to fiddle around with SVN bindings for Perl, or whatever the problem was with git-svn before.

You may also wish to surf our past articles hear on this blog for upgrading Git. The upgrading should be identical on Leopard.

Next Time

My next article will cover developing outside of a traditional distributed Git environment. Using Git to manage personal branching/merging/local copies, then committing to a main SVN repo. Happy hacking.

Here goes nothing...

Colin A. Bartlett — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 20:51:00 -0400

I’ve got the Leopard t-shirt on and I’m ready to go!

Update!

Install complete! Took exactly 60 mins.

Reactions:

The installer ‘estimated time to completion’ said 2 hours and 58 minutes at first. It steadily declined but was never accurate at all. Oh well.
First boot up took for freaking-ever. To be expected, I guess.
My wireless seems finicky. Could just be my access point or something. I hope so. Because I kept loosing and regaining internet access. I’m plugged into wired now and it seems fine. Hopefully it’s not a bug or anything…
My CPU is churning hard core. Something called ‘mds’ is sucking it up. A web search shows that’s Spotlight. So maybe just a reindex.

But the most important news…

The rails stack seems to be functioning fine. Ruby 1.8.6 and everything. Got an app running; no problems.

So far so good! I can’t wait to try out the new Mail. It looks good enough to maybe switch to from Thunderbird.

Leopard Day, the Ruby on Rails way...

Justin Reagor — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 09:40:00 -0400

Since everyone around here thinks I’m a huge, obnoxious Apple fanboy (and they’re all so completely right about everything…) I thought I’d simply share this link to a great wiki article on the new Rails/Ruby installation in Leopard (thanks Randy). Enjoy, and hope you get your free t-shirt!

“Now that Leopard, the next release of Mac OS X, is available to everyone, you may wonder what changed from the Ruby developer’s perspective.“

What’s New in Leopard? Ruby/Rails

Open new terminal window

Colin A. Bartlett — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 20:37:00 -0400

I’ve always thought it would be nice to be able to quickly open a new terminal window in the same folder you were already in.

Enter a handy little script Randy pointed me to that does just that.

I put it in my home directory and then added this to my .bash_login:


alias new='. ~/openterminal.sh'

Now, I can just type ‘new’ at any prompt and up pops a new Terminal window which automatically cd’s to the same directory I was in.

Super handy! Thanks Randy!

Anyone else find widgets useless?

Colin A. Bartlett — Sat, 16 Jun 2007 15:21:00 -0400

I remember when desktop “widgets” first appeared in Windows 95. I think they were called “channels” and you could subscribe to bits of info that would appear on your “Active Desktop”.

I tried then to get some usefullness out of them and couldn’t. I don’t know many other people that did and that feature faded away in Windows.

But they never really did go away. Konfabulator, now Yahoo! Widgets, Google widgets, and now Windows Vista and OS X all provide the same functionality. Little apps that sit on your desktop for all sorts of uses. I just never found them useful. They take up space and they just seem so useless. If I want to know the weather, I’ll open up weather.com.

I knew I could get some widgets to appear in OS X if I hit F12 but I never used them. It wasn’t until I looked at my Activity Monitor that I realized that even if I’m not using them, OS X widgets are still sucking up system resources. So I found this handy article that explains how to disable them completely.

Hurray, I’ve reclaimed 20 MB of RAM that I didn’t even know was taken by something I never even used.

Handy textmate bundle installer

Colin A. Bartlett — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 19:41:00 -0400

I just came across this list of bundle installer shell scripts for TextMate.

Being new to TextMate, I had no idea how to install the HAML bundle I wanted to try out. Luckily, this page provides a handy link to a shell script for each bundle that does all the installing for you.

Simply curl the file down to your machine, make it executable, and execute it. Bang, bundle installed.

So far, TextMate has been pretty neat and a refreshingly lightweight to my former environment of RadRails. Admittedly though, I haven’t had much opportunity to a lot of development since switching to OS X / TextMate so I have a lot to learn about it.