Interesting Things

mostly bold, sometimes eloquent… occasionally both.

Archive for the ‘Mac OS X’ Category

Glad to see Apple bring aboard Magnetosphere to iTunes 8.0. Very handy addition for “parties” and other times that visualization is handy and entertaining. Something that did not appear readily visible upon firing it up are the keys that can switch modes and help to control the visualizer somewhat. I thought that the following might serve a handy reference:

  • ? : Toggles the help.
  • m : Changes the mod.
  • p : Changes the palette.
  • i : Displays the track info.
  • c : Toggles auto-cycle.
  • f : Toggles freeze mode.
  • n : Toggles nebula mode.
  • l : Toggles camera lock.
  • +/- : Increase or decrease intensity.
  • a/s : add or subtract particles
Are there any others we’re missing?
Happy iTunes jamming and listening! :)
Note to Apple: Please give use a more robust library management utility so that we can manage libraries within iTunes and transfer music from one to another and so forth.

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ZFS on FreeBSD is a very elegant server solution. I certainly like to see some great GUIs created for ZFS, but it’s certainly not to hard to navigate without one. Here is an excellent article that encapsulates several things that I’ve learned over the last 8 months or so of running it myself.

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Just a reminder, we now have the all seeing `dtrace` with us on Mac OS X and there are so many incredible advantages to this.

Don’t forget to poke around. `grep`ing through some bin folders reveals some very useful scripts already written:

bitesize.d
cpuwalk.d
creatbyproc.d
dappprof
dapptrace
diskhits
dispqlen.d
dtruss
errinfo
execsnoop
fddist
filebyproc.d
hotspot.d
httpdstat.d
iofile.d
iopattern
iopending
iosnoop
iotop
kill.d
lastwords
loads.d
newproc.d
opensnoop
pathopens.d
pidpersec.d
priclass.d
priclass.d
pridist.d
pridist.d
procsystime
procsystime
runocc.d
rwbypid.d
rwbytype.d
rwsnoop
sampleproc
seeksize.d
setuids.d
sigdist.d
sigdist.d
syscallbypid.d
syscallbyproc.d
syscallbysysc.d
topsyscall
topsysproc
weblatency.d

Don’t forget about ‘/Developer/Applications/Instruments.app’ when you install the developer tools… Wow.

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About me

I'm a father of five with the spirit of a genuine explorer. Having these curious tendencies has alwasy led me down the entrepreneurial road in order to seek better situations for my family, my loved ones and my human family. Currently I am owner and president of a few companies, including a very exciting new startup that could be "the next big thing."

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