MenuMeters is a very cool, free (as in freedom) system monitoring tool for OS X that sits in the menu bar and shows you live statistics, including such values as current bandwidth usage, current network activity, memory usage, page faults, etc. One thing that has been irritating me lately is that there’s a cosmetic error [...]
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SSH, Subversion through SOCKS proxy on Mac OS X
UPDATE Nov 1, 2010 Due to the complete lack of updates for tsocks, I recommend the use of proxychains over tsocks on OS X 10.5+. It still does not resolve DNS properly (proxychains — as of this post’s publication time — uses a hack by calling to dig @4.2.2.2 for DNS), but at least is [...]
Fixing undefined library symbols for compiling PHP 5.2.8
So while compiling PHP 5.2.8 on OS X 10.5, you might run into something like: Undefined symbols for architecture i386: “_xmlTextReaderSchemaValidate”, referenced from: _zim_xmlreader_setSchema in php_xmlreader.o “_xmlTextReaderSetup”, referenced from: _zim_xmlreader_XML in php_xmlreader.o ld: symbol(s) not found for architecture i386 collect2: ld returned 1 exit status Undefined symbols for architecture x86_64: “_xmlTextReaderSchemaValidate”, referenced from: _zim_xmlreader_setSchema in [...]
Testing a POP3 server via telnet or OpenSSL
Sometimes you can’t be bothered to install and setup a command-line mail client and/or VPN, but you still need to access a POP 3 server from a remote machine. Sometimes you just need to know if a POP3 server is working or not. As a largely text-based protocol much like the HTTP protocol, telnet or [...]
Building from source package on Debian / Ubuntu to fix sudo PATH issue
So I’ve been kicking around an Ubuntu installation, hoping to replace my aging Fedora 5 deployment. Last time I touched a Debian distro was…well…sufficiently long ago that it’s more or less all new to me. What’s less new is the sudo path inheritance issue — this one’s been around. Ubuntu’s sudo hard-codes its PATH variable [...]
check last exit status code in bash shell
In case you’re curious (while debugging a program or a script) about the exit status code returned by the last shell command you ran, the incantation to retrieve it in the bash shell is: echo $? Given the nature of this variable (no one indexes text like ‘$?’), it’s annoyingly hard to Google for.
Apple Remote Desktop black screen and old machines
There appears to be some sort of limitation on screen colors when using ARD 3.2.2 to control an older Mac remotely. The symptom of this is a black screen when you attempt to Observe or Control the remote machine. Unfortunately, this same symptom usually appears when you have a blocked network port (ARD uses TCP [...]
DocPreview – browser plug-in to view Microsoft Word documents in Safari
UPDATE: 7/21/2011 – DocPreview DOES NOT work with Safari 5.1 on OS X 10.6+. This is because the WebKit Plugin APIs it depended on are deprecated by Apple. This has broken a number of .webplugin extensions, including some of my favorites like the current (as of today) version of XML View. If you have upgraded [...]
Change IP address via (ab)use of DHCP client id
Nowadays customers using cable modems tend to be re-assigned the same IP address once they get one. This is apparently done based on the client MAC address — unless that IP was already taken from the pool when the client connects, the DHCP server will tend to re-issue the old IP. Fairly nice, in that [...]
