Solving the Airplay problem

Using pasteboard from command line on OSX

pbcopy, pbpaste - provide copying and pasting to the pasteboard (the Clipboard) from command line. Here are few examples

Loading an agent on OSX

Simulating slow network connection in OSX

Setup
sudo ipfw pipe 1 config bw 16Kbit/s delay 350ms

sudo ipfw add 1 pipe 1 src-port 80
sudo ipfw add 2 pipe 1 dst-port 80


Remove
sudo ipfw delete 1
sudo ipfw delete 2

sudo ipfw pipe 1 delete

Resize and position windows with AppleScript

-- get the dimensions of the desktop, set up few variables
tell application "Finder"
 set displayAreaDimensions to bounds of window of desktop
 set x1 to item 1 of displayAreaDimensions
 set y1 to item 2 of displayAreaDimensions
 set x2 to item 3 of displayAreaDimensions
 set y2 to item 4 of displayAreaDimensions
end tell

set width to x2 - x1
set height to y2 - y1

-- positioning iTunes, make it fullscreen
tell application "iTunes"
 set the bounds of the first window to {x1, y1, x2, y2}
end tell

-- positioning Safari, halfwidth on the right
tell application "Safari"
 set the bounds of the first window to {x1 + width / 2, y1, x2, y2}
end tell

-- positioning iTerm
tell application "iTerm"
 set the bounds of the first window to {x1, y1, x1 + 1000, y1 + 600}
end tell

There are few useful blogposts about the topic.
www.ithug.com/2007/09/applescript-moving-and-resizing-windows or
www.ithug.com/2008/12/applescript-arranging-multiple-windows/

or you can use Divvy, which is an amazing window management app.

useful iterm2 shortcuts

iTerm2 is a good replacement for Terminal on OS X

Splitting the window: Command+D to split the window vertically, or Command+Shift+D to split the window horizontally.

Switching between the sub-windows: Command+[ or Command+] or Command+Opt+arrows

Fullscreen: Command+Enter

md5sum on Snow Leopard

The MD5 hash (or checksum) functions as a compact digital fingerprint of a file.

You can check the md5 hash of a file with the md5 command
md5 test.txt

The output looks like this
MD5 (test.txt) = ab41fdba223f971be13b1845122353cb

Get folder size on OSX

Haruka had this problem, here is a simple solution
du -sh FOLDER_NAME

du (abbreviated from disk usage) is a standard Unix program used to estimate the file space usage—space used under a particular directory or files on a file system.

Apache on Snow Leopard, "ulimit: open files: cannot modify limit: Invalid argument"

When I started apache on my Snow Leopard i got a weird exception

/usr/sbin/apachectl: line 82: ulimit: open files: cannot modify limit: Invalid argument


So I opened the script and found that there is something wrong with $ULIMIT_MAX_FILES

The error message says that 'cannot modify limit' so i changed its value to empty string

# ULIMIT_MAX_FILES="ulimit -S -n `ulimit -H -n`"
ULIMIT_MAX_FILES=""


Voila, it works, but deeper investigation need.

Finder shortcuts

Today I realized that i don't know enough Finder shortcuts, here you are.


Command-A Select All Items
Command-C Copy Selected Items
Command-D Duplicate Selected Items
Command-F Search with Spotlight
Command-H Hide Window
Command-I Open Get Info (Property) Pane

Command-M Minimize Window
Command-N Open New Window
Command-O Open Selected Items
Command-V Paste Items
Command-W Close Finder Window

Command-1 View as Icons
Command-2 View as Lists
Command-3 View as Columns
Command-4 View as Coverflow

Command-Shift-A Go to Application Folder
Command-Shift-H Go to Home Folder
Command-Shift-N Create New Folder
Command-Option-O Open File and Close Finder

Changing the default style in Kod

Kod is a promising text editor for OS X.

One of the great things is that, you can style the editor with CSS.

mkdir ~/.kod
cp /Applications/Kod.app/Contents/Resources/style/default.css ~/.kod/

defaults write se.hunch.kod style/url ~/.kod/default.css

kod ~/.kod/default.css


then don't forget to reload the style in Kod, View menu/Reload style

snoop file opens on Snow Leopard

Opensnoop tracks file opens.
sudo opensnoop

or you can watch only a process
sudo opensnoop -n Google Chrome

What changed in your home folder today.

You can perform a simple Spotlight search from the shell

mdfind [query]

for instance

mdfind Ruby
mdfind -name stdlib.h

and then you pipe the result as you want

mdfind Ruby | grep 'pdf'

You can redefine your search by specifying any of the metadata attribute keys.
Here is a helpful list of metadata attributes that you can use.

You'd like to see what changed in your home directory today, easy.

mdfind -onlyin ~/ '(kMDItemFSContentChangeDate >= $time.today)'


Monitoring file system activity on OS X

My hard disk is quite slow, so It seemed a good idea to see what's going on under the hood, why the filesystem is so busy.
I came across fslogger, which is a great user-space program that subscribes to the kernel's file system change notification service.

Sounds great and actually monitoring file system activity with fslogger is quite easy. It must be run as root but that's it.

The output is little bit verbose but you can cut it with awk.

# changed files
sudo fslogger | awk '/FSE_ARG_STRING/ { print $5 }'

# file change type
sudo fslogger | awk '/type.*=/ { print $3 }'

# process that caused the change
sudo fslogger | awk '/pid.*=.*\(.*\)/ { print $4$5 }'



Helpful.