Steven S. Ross

Just passing this along. Found this article at google and yay! Sync’ing is cool! read

Just in! Go grab some final code VmWare Fusion 2.0 After using the beta for awhile I can assure you that it is a vast improvement over 1.0 I have yet to try out this version. Downloading it as we speak and I’ll post an update soon.

So, I wrote an article on what Macports is but, what tools are out there for web developers? Well one I have used in the past is Siege to steal the quote from what Siege is I’ll just blatantly plagiarize the author’s website: Siege is an http regression testing and benchmarking utility. It was designed to let web developers measure the performance of their code under duress, to see how it will stand up to load on the internet. Siege supports basic authentication, cookies, HTTP and HTTPS protocols. It allows the user hit a web server with a configurable number of concurrent simulated users. Those users place the webserver “under siege.”

So to install Siege it couldn’t be easier: “sudo port install siege”. Now, you might think that your machine could generate tons of requests and flood a site with traffic but, unless you are on some ridiculous MacPro quad CPU Goliath then you probably can’t generate a ton of simultaneous requests.

Another tool I have used to do command line conversion of mp3 files is SoX (sound exchange) and Lame. Both can be installed using Macports. So get out there and start using the terminal!

Read: More info about Siege

Chances are if you have used any other nix OS then you have used a package manager to install software. Some package managers on nix: yum, aptitude, rpm, and there is fink for the mac which mainly targets open source software. Now I have never used fink, just because I first found Macports and although people complain about the speed of Macports I have never found it to be an issue. So yesterday I needed to add wget to my mac so I could easily download some files via the command line. With macports its easy, you just have to run one command: “sudo port install wget”, first you might want to make sure you have the application name right by running “port search wget”. That returns a list of programs that match your phrase and they you can run the install.

The nice thing about Macports is that it installs everything to /opt/local so that if you upgrade your OS or Apple comes out with a patch that might change things in one of your common /bin directories then everything is safe and sound and still unscathed in /opt/local.

Now apparently there is a bug in the installer that took me awhile to get past, it is supposed to be fixed in the next release but, to get around it if you get the error about running the post-flight script then go here Macports Support Issue 4 and run that script, then run “sudo port selfupdate” and you should be up and running fine.

So for the most part, you won’t have to download and compile things manually on your Mac unless of course you want to run the bleeding edge release. Happy package management. Tomorrow, some useful tools on Macports for web developers.

My first impressions of the latest version of VMware Fusion 2 are great. Its really the simplicity of things where Fusion 2 shines. Cut and paste no longer requires that I switch keys between CMD and CTRL on the mac. Making working with my VM much more seamless (at least this is my experience with Windows XP Pro). Not sure if that works on all operating systems. The suspend / restore functionality is much much faster now too. That saves a lot of time when you need it. I’m sure if I had plenty of memory to spare this wouldn’t be that big of a deal but, since I am on a Core Duo box and I can only run 2GB then it makes a big difference not having to wait so long to free up some memory. Fusion also supports multiple monitors, built in camera and bluetooth now on my Macbook Pro.

Here are a few issues I have run into, spaces support seems a bit buggy when running in Unity mode. It would also be nice if that when you run things in Unity that the icons that you can cmd-tab to would somehow have a mark that they are your VM and not any of your regular mac apps. Hopefully they will work out these bugs in the beta phase.

I’ve only been using it for about a day and a half so as I run into new features I’ll be sure to post them.

I don't know how I missed this one but, apparently spotlight (or maybe just Leopard) has a help function that will now find menu items and not just items in the actual help documentation. At first I thought this was just a feature that was built into iWork as that was where I first discovered it but, low and behold, I quickly switched over to Safari and it works there too.

The easiest way to explain this is fire up Safari, hit help on the menu (or shift-cmd-?) and start typing (ie: bookmark) what you will see is two sets of results one "Menu items" and another "Help Topics". Now arrow down through the "Menu Items" and you'll see this cool floating arrow show you exactly where these items are in the menu. Want to do something cool with this? Type in something that is in your browsing history and it will automatically take you to the title of that item in your history. Very cool.

Check out the video on this if you aren't privy to owning a Mac or a Mac with Leopard on it.

Useful stuff when you are using the terminal

man [anycommand]

Can't believe I left that off... one of the most useful commands for figuring out what a command does, read the "man" (manual) page. Now that is easy to say but, you may need some help navigating it so to help with that use these commands:

q

Quit man

f

Go forward a page

b

Go backward a page

/string

Search for 'string'

Need even more help? you can always:

man man

Forget to sudo a command? just:

sudo !!

Need to reference something in your home directory?

prefix your path with ~/

Want to search for look for a specific line of text inside a file?

cat /the/file/path || grep 'what you are looking for'

ex: cat /etc/apache2/httpd.conf || grep 'http'

Grep (used above) can be used on any command as shown above you can "pipe" the output of one command to another. So you could use ls, cat, tail etc and search the output of that command with grep.

Need to watch some log file output?

tail -f /the/log/file.log

Want to create a shortcut to a command? You need to edit your .bash.profile. Open up your home directory and if the file doesn't exist create it. (make sure it is ".bash_profile" - notice the prefixing period). Now create your alias: (this particular alias lets you see colored output on the ls command.

alias ls='ls -GF'

Need to change ownership of a file? use chown

chown user:group /path/to/file.txt

Thats it for now, hope it helps you out.

For those of you who just long for a PC when you need to Diff some files or a directory because you miss Beyond Compare. Maybe this will bring you some comfort It has a lot (if not all) of the same great features in Beyond Compare. Even lets you script it and use it inside other apps.

Give it a try.

Short entry here. I just noticed chat and rich text are now supported in Safari on the mac, which should mean that gmail on the iPhone now supports that. Anyone care to test it out? I am pretty sure these features were not here yesterday (or even 10 minutes ago). Of course I could be just out of it as well.

update: Just for kicks I checked it out in the older version of safari on my laptop and it seems like this is only being supported in the latest release of Safari (and therefore Leopard). Still curious about the iPhone though.

I heard this questions at CFUnited last year when a fellow universal mind colleague was interrupted in his talk and I have been wanting to open up this can of worms. Not knocking all those folks out there using their windows boxes, just thought I’d share my experience.

When working with a mac or linux there are definitely some useful command line shortcuts worth knowing. Trying to shed a little light on the terminal without overwhelming your average GUI user! Start using the terminal today.