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10.5.2 Odissey: a small journey in Mac OS X services and components

Well, I'm really happy with OSX 10.5.2. Even I'm not the one that blamed Apple for the translucent menu bar that everyone dislikes.. well, I like it. I don't care about the TM menu bar tool, because I haven't bought (yet) the nifty Time Capsule, I like the spinner in the Airport menu and, most of all, I really like the updates to the BluetoothSCOAudioDriver.kext that drives my bluetooth headset.

Spotlight also feels faster and faster on every upgrade, and I'm a heavy spotlight user, so this makes me really happy. Thanks Apple engineers!

Back to the topic: why odissey? Because as per my battery hints, I managed to make my MacBook2,1 SHUT DOWN while at 74% of the "Writing files" phase of the combo update... resulting in a completely broken system, as every geek could imagine Smiling. Apple updated some libraries, and upon reboot simply nothing worked, and the darwin console was filled with lots of error messages.

Google Maps

how to keep your apple notebook battery healthy

3 simple rules:

- DO NOT leave your charger connected when the battery is charged, even when you go to sleep.

- DO let it discharge completely, when using it wait till it reaches 0%, when sleeping it leave it alone, when you'll wake up and you'll open it, a resume from suspend to disk will greet you. OSX FTW.

- Monitor it and show off OSX performance counters to your friends (images courtesy of CoconutBattery.app and System Profiler.app)

healthy battery 2

healthy battery cycle count

Python2.4's urllib2 broken by default on Solaris Express 5.11

While happily installing prerequisites to build an app on Solaris 10, i enjoyed having Mercurial already installed in the "base system".. except for a BIG issue: digest authentication was broken. I tcpdumped the traffic exchanged between the mercurial client and the CGI server and I saw that no Authorization header was sent, and obivously the server refused to serve the hg repository.

Before reinstalling python, maybe from source and replacing the default installation or having side by side two different versions, with consequent nuisances and dirt around the system, I tried a very very small patch to urllib2.py that... amusingly enough, fixed my problem:

Active Gibberish

Localization for Active Record error messages

Today i had to answer to one of the questions every non-english Rails developer stumbles upon now or after.. how to localize AR error messages for pleasant appearance to a non-english customer Eye-wink.

First off, thanks to defunkt's excellent gibberish plugin and to the way AR validation errors are exposed, the task was accomplished in an easy and clean manner, without messing too much with AR's internals.

Extracting data from Apple Safari's cache

Five minutes ago, i overwritten my super-shining-new CSS stylesheet that implements the "diarrea con sangue (liquid shit with blood)" color scheme i set up some days ago, because i wanted to restore the original color scheme and put it in a new theme for this site, so that people who enjoyed the old theme could continue to use it.

But as the most kiddie system administrator, i decompressed the original files from the backup archive OVER the current ones..

Safari to the rescue! Every cached item by safari is stored into a SQlite3 database located in ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.Safari, let's inspect how it is structured:

Java pleasure

"Saying that Java is nice because it works on all OSes is like
saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders." 
(Alanna)

( tks nextie Laughing out loud )

How to compile python2.5 on SCO_SV

* You must have PTH installed, and maybe other libs.
* This was tested on SCO_SV os507 3.2 5.0.7 i386

If you have UDK, run:

$ CFLAGS='-I/usr/local/include -belf' \
  LDFLAGS='-L/usr/local/lib'          \
  ./configure --with-threads --with-pth\
  --disable-shared --disable-ipv6

* Add /usr/local/include to BASECFLAGS in Makefile (autocrap sucks).
* Patch Modules/ctypes/_ctypes_test.c by putting an #ifdef HAVE_LONG_LONG around functions that use PY_LONG_LONG (hints: lines 384 and 318).

Sniffo.org now hosted by signalos.org

SignalOS, the other choice for the net

Huge thanks to aleksandr and his connectivity provider. Hostname will appear as temp.sniffo.org until DNS propagation completes Eye-wink. Keep http://sniffo.org/ in your bookmarks! Laughing out loud

Page execution time was 260.57 ms. YAY! Laughing out loud

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