Tuesday October 03, 2006 I recently got into a fairly heated debate on one of the Apple fora about the value of Disk Utility's Repair Permissions.
Specifically, someone suggested the repairing permissions was necessary before and after installing any patches, and could be the fix for application slowness.
Madness.
Utter madness.
Permissions are purely about files and directory access. You either have permission to open the requested file in the manner in which the application requests or you don't. The OS doesn't say - hey, I know, you've not got the right permissions, so I'll make you wait a bit, then grant you access. No, it returns EACCES straight away.
I see repair permissions being suggested as fixes for any weirdness that people can't find an instant explanation for, when, in reality, the only time you should need to repair permissions is if you're seeing permission denied in log files or similar behaviour.
Repairing permissions is very similar to pkgchk -f on Solaris. I don't recall ever recommending a customer should run this.
I worry that much of the "Windows" mentality of utilities being produced to do things that you expect the OS to do (such as tidying up thumbnail caches, or cleaning up the registry, or protecting against viruses, etc) is spreading to the Mac and even Linux world.
The other claim that was made in this same thread was that writing to large files was significantly slower than writing to small files. Apparently, this was because you had to read the file into memory and cache it before you could write to it.
What?!!!!!!!!!!!
Why the hell would you read a file into memory just so you can then write to it? It's possibly the most ludicrous statement I've ever heard.
All that happens is you open the file, get a file descriptor, fstat it, then write the data. Surely anyone who's spent 5 minutes around any flavour of UNIX should know this?
Posted by ajt [Mac] ( October 03, 2006 11:14 PM ) Permalink
Wednesday September 13, 2006 ..has finally arrived!
He was born at 10.33am on 27th August, weighing in at 8lbs exactly. Mother and baby doing just brilliantly, thank you very much!
Wednesday May 24, 2006 I've recently had a couple of questions from folks about my blog entry on HumaneText.
One of these was around the fact that Safari now maps CMD-{ and CMD-} to moving between tabs, which are also the keybindings for HumaneText.
This can be changed with the following 2 commands, run from the Terminal:
defaults write com.apple.Safari NSUserKeyEquivalents \ -dict-add "Select Previous Tab" '@$\UF702'
defaults write com.apple.Safari NSUserKeyEquivalents \ -dict-add "Select Next Tab" '@$\UF703'
I hope this helps!
Update...
Will Critchlow tells me that you can just edit ~/Library/Services/HumaneText.service/Contents/Info.plist and change the key mapping for HumaneText in there - look at NSUserKeyEquivalents - then log out/in, and there you go...
Posted by ajt [Mac] ( May 24, 2006 10:12 AM ) Permalink |
Sunday April 09, 2006 Barcelona
What a funny place! Everyone I know that's been has raved about it, but I just didn't get it. Yeah, there was some really weird stuff by Gaudi there, but that was it.
What have I missed? We visited the Casa Mila, which is an apartment block designed by someone who's clearly had one too many mushrooms - take a look at these chimney stacks:
We also saw the Park Guel and the Sagrada Familia, both designed by the same wacky, mushroom munching genius, and they were cool.
But, the place had no soul. You go to Florence, or Rome, or Lisbon, and these places have an identity, some atmosphere or culture that makes them unique and alive. Barcelona just didn't have that. Hell, it didn't even have any culinary identity - even the guide book said "there's no such thing as local cuisine"!
And don't get me started on vegetarian food ...
Posted by ajt [General] ( April 09, 2006 02:14 AM ) Permalink
Thursday March 23, 2006 
Tuesday March 21, 2006
Monday March 20, 2006 Here's one I took in Wales at New Year.
Sunrise at Porthmadog, looking towards Snowdon - the small pointy peak that's lit up by the morning sun.
It seems I've won a video iPod... I already own an iPod, of course (what self-respecting Mac user wouldn't?), but who could object to getting a shiny, new one?
I won it for filling in an internal survey on how much e-mail we receive, and why it's so bad...
I don't know whether my name was just drawn out of a hat, or if they chose a response that was vaguely useful (probably the hat...), but my responses are below. Most of them are straight from Merlin Mann's excellent 43 Folders site. Well worth a read, if you have the time.
Would you like to see the amount of email that you receive reduced?
Yes.
Most e-mail I receive that is not directly addressed to me is long-winded, usually irrelevant, and gets deleted instantly.
Would you like to receive better quality e-mails ?
Posted by ajt [Mac] ( March 20, 2006 09:18 PM ) Permalink Comments [1]Yes.
Because of the quantity of e-mail, I believe that the following rules should apply when sending:
Subject lines can convey whole messages: e.g.
- XYZ Meeting Tues 28/02 MOVED to 15:00
- Lunch resched to Friday @ 1pm
- REQ: Resend Larry Tate zip file?
- Thanks for the new liver?works great!
Be brief. Exceptionally brief. 1 paragraph is ideal.
Use small paragraphs - people do not, apparently, like reading dense text off a screen.
Don't bury the message. Put the one thing that you want to convey in a one liner at the top of the e-mail.
If you must be long-winded, follow rule 4, above, then explain in long and tedious detail. i.e. an e-mail should consist of:
- A one liner summarising the whole mail.
- An explanation
I strongly suggest that everyone, particularly those in senior management, read : http://www.43folders.com/2005/09/19/writing-sensible-email-messages/
Saturday July 02, 2005 
Rosie tried to encourage me to take up the "Air Lute" instead, as a cheaper and less offensive occupation, and one that would probably require less wearing of velvet jackets and funny curly-toed shoes...
All this got me wondering, in a silly way, what the top ten "Air Lute" songs would be? You know, like top ten Air Guitar albums and all that...
Obviously, it'd have to include Greensleeves, I mean, come on, what rocking Air Lute album would be complete without it? But what else? Anyone? :-)
Posted by ajt
[Music] ( July 02, 2005 10:10 PM )
Permalink
Sunday May 01, 2005 It turns out that spotlight can be disabled, if you're seeing too much of a performance hit:
In /etc/hostconfig, set
SPOTLIGHT=-NO-
Then reboot!
Posted by ajt [Mac] ( May 01, 2005 01:24 PM ) PermalinkI pre-ordered my copy, having seen a friend's developer connection installs go well over the last few months, and liking what I saw in terms of features.
I thought I'd try an upgrade first, rather than clean install, play around for a bit, then do a clean install once I'd got to grips with it.
Well, the install went very smoothly, and everything seemed ok when I rebooted, but very slow. Turns out the spotlight indexer was running away, trying to index the 20 or so gigs that were on my drive.
Until... I started trying to use Mail.app. It kept hanging - it would list my mailboxes, and show me a list of messages in my mailbox, but it would just sit there spinning. tcpdump showed IMAP traffic, but nothing very interesting. So, I tried rlogging into one of our SunRay servers, and mutt-ing from there. Absolutely fine. Tried mutt from the Mac - locks up solid. tcpdump -vv port 143 shows lots of traffic, but with all tcp bad cksum errors. Weird. All other traffic looks fine.
At this point I suspected either something firewally or maybe the fact that I had Cisco VPN client, so disabled/removed both of them. And rebooted. Same problem. Fiddled some more, rebooted some more. Nothing
So, a clean install later, and everything's working as I expected.
Although... Spotlight is cool, but a real pig when it decides to index something (like the file contents of my iPod) at random times. It absolutely slaughters your machine.
One of the most significant improvements for me is the addition of a slideshow to Finder, coupled with the fact that image previews seem to build significantly quicker (thumbnails, I mean).
More rants or praise when I've played some more!
Posted by ajt [Mac] ( May 01, 2005 01:49 AM ) Permalink
Friday April 08, 2005 I'm sure this site isn't news to many people - I'd seen it cropping up more and more in various blogs and discussions that I've been reading, so I decided to give it a go.
What an ace idea - keep track of your bookmarks online, but also tell you how many other people link to it, and allow you to view their bookmarks : a very quick way to get totally absorbed in the web for a few hours!
Give it a go!
My measly collection of bookmarks (I've been using it 10 minutes) is here.
Posted by ajt [General] ( April 08, 2005 09:03 PM ) Permalink
Friday March 25, 2005 I've recently been reading 43Folders, initially as a great resource for Mac "productivity" software (aka stuff on which to waste my time), but after reading more and more about Getting Things Done, I decided to get the book and see if I could sort my chaotic life out.
Well, I haven't got there yet, but I reckon it's improving.
Being a geek, though, I wasn't prepared to implement it with having some automated way of producing the various lists that it requires. I'm not going to go into loads of detail here about what the method entails, only to say that the basics consist of:
- capture all the stuff you have in your life in an Inbox (or inboxes, e.g. e-mail and paper)
- regularly process that stuff
- decide whether to the item you're processing now, defer it, or delegate it
- if you defer it, where does it live? Assign it a context in which it can be done, e.g. @Home, @Work, etc.
Various geek solutions have been proposed, using things like OmniOutliner, VimOutliner, etc, but something was lacking for me - it's probably the way I'm "interpreting" the GTD system (I haven't finished the book yet!), but I couldn't cope with having Next Actions in both Contexts and Projects lists - I couldn't persuade a tool to produce a Contexts list from the Projects lists. Obviously a bit of sed/awk/perl/grep trickery was in order.
Except... a bit of browsing brought me to this page. Which almost gave me the answer - automatic generating of action lists...
A little bit of tweaking later, and I have a script and some snippets which let me enter all my next actions in a single file : projects.txt, in the following format
Project Title
-------------
[ ] @context: Task [Project Title]
for agenda items, then I have date and time fields too. Now, there is a bit of duplication (entering the project title twice), but a little bit of tweaking should sort that out too.
The TextMate snippets to create that are:
[ ] @agenda: ${1:date} ${2:time} ${3:action} [${4:project}]
[ ] @calls: ${1:action} [${2:project}]
And I assign a tab trigger of @c or @a, etc.
The ruby code to extract the data from the above into a context list is exactly the same as that on the web page I mentioned earlier. So, basically, none of this work is mine!
All plugged into GeekTool, and my next actions list appears on my desktop...
The best bit? It's all text-based, so it'll work anywhere, ready for the next time my Mac blows up...
Posted by ajt [General] ( March 25, 2005 12:27 AM ) Permalink
Wednesday March 23, 2005 A while ago I posted that I'd had a good experience using a digital SLR, which made me, at the time, feel I needed to take a shower.
Well, since then, I've gone out and point a digital SLR (Nikon), and haven't looked back. I've picked up my Mamiya twice, I think. Once to put it in its bag, the other to bring it in to the office to lend it to someone. Shame, because it's a beautiful camera.
I've shot around three thousand frames since I got the Nikon late last year, and here are some observations about shooting digital:
- You shoot more crap
- Digital sensor dynamic range is roughly equivalent to shooting slide film (i.e. the range in stops between black and white is roughly 5)
- Viewfinders this size are nigh on impossible to manual focus with
- All your mates get bored of the RAW vs JPG argument very quickly :-)
