I was quite upset since yesterday because of this: a little while after booting my MacBook, CPU load went up over 50%, always. It was easy to detect because, besides the system being less responsive, FanControl put the fans over 5000rpm which makes a lot of noise.
The “Activity Monitor” showed that one of the two cores was always running at 100% and the other had the usual load, so the average was around 55-60%. However, none of the tasks on the task list table was over 4-6% CPU. No idea who was to blame.
I tried removing every gadget I had (like Growl, iScrobbler, InsomniaX…) from the start-up items, even rebooting and logging in with a “clean”, new user. Just the same.
Today I’ve tried directly with the terminal, and with ps have discovered that syslog was running at 100% CPU, so I knew where to look: on /var/log, the last system.log was over 250Mb while the previous ones (after bunzip2-ing) weighted less than 10Mb each. The file was full with AppFresh’s errors, not that important but they had this nasty side-effect. After killing syslogd CPU levels went back to normal, but the system re-launched it and CPU use spiked again. Removing the last system.log file wouldn’t solve the problem, either.
So with a clearer idea of what was going on I googled about it and found this post with a comment that suggested lowering the max allowed size for the asl.db file (mine was almost 50Mb). I’ve followed these instructions, killed syslogd again, and problem solved! My MacBook is as silent and resonsive as before. :)
If you listen to audiobooks on your iPod you wouldn’t want to get that data submitted to last.fm with the rest of the music mp3 files. iScrobbler 2.0 has a series of hidden configuration options accessible from the terminal, and there’s one to filter the tracks by name or id3, so all you’d have to do is tag your audiobooks with the appropriate genre.
I’m using the following filter and it’s working great for me (copy-paste this line on a terminal to activate it):
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defaults write org.bergstrand.iscrobbler “Track Filters” ‘("Speech", "Audiobook", "Audiobooks", "Audio Book", "Vocal")’
There are new releases of both Darwine and ies4osx available. Go get them while they’re still hot!
En un post anterior sobre mi migración a MacOS X comentaba algunos programas que estaba usando. Desde entonces he encontrado alguna que otra joya sobre las que ya he ido escribiendo en ocasiones. Voy a resumir aquà éstas nuevas aportaciones más algún que otro programa del que no he contado nada todavÃa.
En ningún orden en particular:
Mike has released a new version of ies4osx, including a new GUI installer (no more fiddling with the terminal), IE7 support, and the FreeType library providing anti-aliased fonts. Besides the project’s got a new web site.
HINT: If the installer finishes without doing nothing, just rename it to “InstallIes4osx.app” (remove the blank).
Llevo tiempo queriéndome acostumbrar a usar algún software de calendario para organizarme mejor, porque la verdad es que soy bastante desastre. El problema es que con un programa de escritorio sólo tendrás los datos en un ordenador, te vas p.ej. de casa al trabajo y ya no tienes el calendario accesible. Una solución on-line, como Google Calendar, está muy bien pero para ciertas cosas sigo prefiriendo un programa de escritorio, aparte de que tengo una conexión un tanto inestable que me puede dejar tirado en cualquier momento, con lo que no puedo confiar en una solución exclusivamente on-line.
Lo ideal para mà serÃa tener un programa que pueda sincronizarse con una aplicación on-line, preferiblemente Google Calendar, porque detalles como los avisos por SMS y la posibilidad de acceder con el móvil valen su peso en oro. El problema es que con la mayorÃa de programas, p.ej. iCal, te puedes suscribir a un calendario de Google pero no hacer modificaciones, sólo acceder a los datos. No me sirve: quiero poder hacer cambios en local y sincronizarlos, y si en ese momento no tengo conexión, que la sincronización se espere a cuando tenga acceso a la red. Y viceversa, claro, que si accedo desde fuera de casa a la aplicación web, los cambios que haga me aparezcan luego en el programa de escritorio.
Llevo un rato cacharreando con GCALDaemon, un programa en Java que sincroniza bidireccionalmente cualquier programa que use ficheros en formato iCal con Google Calendar. Hace bastantes más cosas, p.ej. permite acceder mediante LDAP local a los contactos de GMail, importar RSS en iCal, etc., pero por ahora sólo estoy usando la sincronización de calendarios y parece que funciona muy bien.
La instalación no es excesivamente complicada pero hay que meterse en consola y se configura en un fichero de texto, con lo que los usuarios más acostumbrados a arrastrar un icono a Aplicaciones pueden tenerlo chungo. Una alternativa para ellos (comercial, eso sÃ) puede ser Spanning Sync.
Mike has adapted ies4linux, following my howto here to install Internet Explorer on MacOS X. It’s called ies4osx and can be downloaded here.
Nice job, Mike! :D
This is the magic of Internet al Free Software: communication, collaboration, good vibrations… or real synergy as the suits put it.
UPDATE: Mike has developed a GUI installer that automates all this lengthy process. More info here: ies4osx.
Yesterday I got to watch DVDs from other regions on MacOS X. Today I’ve got to run one of the other few things I missed on OS X: Internet Explorer. :-)
Please don’t get me wrong: I don’t really miss Explorer, but you’ve got to admit that you need it from time to time, just to check if it’s compatible with some new web you’re developing. Like it or not, it’s the browser most people use, so your webs have to render OK on it. And I didn’t felt like installing a whole Windows system with VMware Fusion, Parallels or Qemu just for the sake of running Explorer… I wanted something simpler, like ies4linux but for the Mac.
So, why looking any further? Why shouldn’t ies4linux work on MacOS X? There’s a wine port, Darwine. Of course it isn’t really that simple, both Darwine and ies4linux have dependencies that don’t come out of the box with OS X. But there’re ports of all these apps that can be easily installed in our system.
For the terminal-impaired ;) out there: I’ll assume that you’re going to download and unzip any needed files directly on the Desktop.
- Install Apple’s X11 port. It can be found on the MacOS X install CDs/DVDs. There’s an upgrade available on Apple’s support page, but I don’t know if it installs without having the CD version installed first.
- Install Darwine. There’s no official release, but there are at least two unofficial ones that I know of: this one and this other one. Either of them should work. Just mount the .dmg file and copy the whole Darwine folder (the foder itself, not just its contents) into your Applications folder.
- Install fink. In case of trouble, follow the instructions on its web page.
- Using fink, install the wget and freetype2 ports:
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sudo fink install wget freetype2
- Link the Darwine binaries and the “share” folder into fink’s folder structure:
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sudo ln -sf /Applications/Darwine/Wine.bundle/Contents/bin/* /sw/bin
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sudo ln -sf /Applications/Darwine/Wine.bundle/Contents/share/wine/ /sw/share
- Download the corefonts for wine (direct link). Unzip it on the Desktop and copy the “cabextract” file on the fink dir structure (there’s a cabextract port on fink’s repositories, but it’s outdated and doesn’t work with ies4linux):
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sudo cp $HOME/Desktop/corefonts/cabextract /sw/bin
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cd $HOME/Desktop/ies4linux-*
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./ies4linux
- Chose which Explorer version(s) you want to install, the language, etc.
- Go back to the corefonts folder and edit the “get_corefonts.sh” file (with TextEdit is OK) and modify the very last line from:
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cp fonts/* ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/fonts/
to:
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cp fonts/* ~/.ies4linux/ie6/drive_c/windows/fonts/
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cd $HOME/Desktop/corefonts
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chmod +x get_corefonts.sh
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./get_corefonts.sh
- Download the iexplore shell-script. Let’s say it’s on your Desktop, you’ll have to give it execution permissions (with chmod, only the first time) and run it with:
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cd $HOME/Desktop
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chmod +x iexplore
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./iexplore
And that’s all! After running the script two windows should open: a terminal window X11 opens (don’t know why) and the Explorer window itself. In order to run Explorer you’ll always have to open a terminal and run the shell-script as above, cd Desktop and then ./iexplore, still don’t know how to run a shell-script from MacOS’ GUI. O:)
Any update, improvements, comments… or if somebody does a shell-script doing all these steps automatically… would be really appreciated. This worked for me. :)
Si te ha interesado, ¿me invitas a una cerveza? / If you liked the post, would you buy me a beer?
One of the few things I still missed on MacOS X was being able to play DVDs from foreign regions. Not that I have many R1 DVDs, but I have a couple and had been unable to play them on my MacBook Pro until now. I’ve just discovered that RPC-1 firmwares are already available for the Matshita drives on the newer MacBook Pros. :D
Before going on: keep in mind that if something goes wrong, the DVD drive on your laptop may become useless. You’ve been warned. ;-)
- Run “Utilities -> System Profiler”, there to “ATA”, and write down your DVD’s model and revision. For example, mine is a MATSHITADVD-R UJ-857E Rev. ZA0E.
- Download the patched firmware for your DVD. Careful! Be sure to download the one for your model AND revision #.
- Unzip and run the “Update XXXX to region free” program. It takes less than a minute, during which it is very important that your computer doesn’t lock or powers off (not that dangerous on a laptop with batery and all, but anyway…)
- Reboot when told to, and cross your fingers. ;)
- Check with DVD_Info_X that your DVD is already “RPC-1 (region free)”
Now your DVD drive is already region-free, but when you put a DVD in it you still get the usual dialog window asking to change zones, with the feared limit counter. There are two options here:
- Download Region X and use it to change zones as many times as you need.
- The one asking you to change zones is actually the DVD player bundled with MacOS X. You can use any other program you want to watch your DVDs, like VLC, and you’re set.
En mi post sobre Yoigo con un Mac comentaba que me daba la impresión de que el soporte Bluetooth en MacOS X no era para echar cohetes precisamente. Además llevo unos dÃas con bastantes problemas con la conexión a Internet y ya no tengo claro que la culpa sea realmente de Yoigo o del Mac.
Sólo me faltaba leer artÃculos como el siguiente de www.faq-mac.com, el artÃculo de SlashDot al que apunta y la discusión en el foro de Apple:
¿Alguien sabe cómo usar el cable de datos USB del Toshiba TS705 desde MacOS X? :-/
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