FreeBSD 8.0 is coming soon. Todays SVN Update from Ken Smit: Predict when 8.0-RELEASE will be announced => 2009-11-25 8.0-RELEASE.

Lukas Pitschl released a bugfix version for GPGMail. It works with Snow Leopards Mail.app (32bit only). Grab the file http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/20215/GPGMail-1.2.1.mailbundle.zip and drop it in your /username/Library/Mail/Bundles folder. Make sure mail.app is not running. Relaunch after the file is dropped in.

you can also try the official http://sourceforge.net/projects/gpgmail/ project. Not sure if this one works yet.

Apple will release Snow Leopard retail soon. At the time I'm writing this, macports 1.7 (known as darwinports) are not working well with previous builds of Snow Leopard. I'm sure that everything will work out of the box with macports > 1.7.1 a few weeks after the retail release of OSX 10.6 in September 2009. Make sure to install Xcode from the 10.6 DVD! It will update gcc to version 4.2. My description wont work with old gcc 4.0 from 10.5.

To improve our chance for a working ports tree, we have to use the latest subversion source code (August 2009).

1. Open up the Terminal
2. svn co http://svn.macports.org/repository/macports/trunk/base/ (Wait for it to finish checking out files)
3. cd base
4. ./configure
5. make
6. sudo make install
7. sudo /opt/local/bin/port -v selfupdate

I had to add /Developer/usr/bin and /Developer/usr/sbin to my .bash_profile
export PATH=/Developer/usr/bin:/Developer/usr/sbin:/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:$PATH

There are mailing list entries about problems with compiling python on Snow Leopard. This might change soon but be aware of such problems.

Update:Use sudo port upgrade --enforce-variants and then sudo port upgrade outdated to update all your old installed ports after selfupdate.
If you see errors like: ld: warning: in /opt/local/lib/libz.dylib, file is not of required architecture then you've to remove zlib and libiconv as installed ports and re-install it again.

sudo port uninstall -f libiconv zlib
sudo port install libiconv zlib

This may break some old dependencies. If so then you have to rebuild all related ports as well.

A friend of mine recommended an interesting PDF tool to me. Skim is a PDF reader and note-taker for OS X. It is designed to help you read and annotate scientific papers in PDF, but is also great for viewing any PDF file. Best things are free

In case i forget my Serendipity (Version <=1.4.1) password again:

mysql -u root -p $DBNAME
mysql> UPDATE serendipity_authors SET password = md5('newpassword') where username = "$USER";


In s9y >= 1.5.x md5 was replaced with sha1.

mysql -u root -p $DBNAME
mysql> UPDATE serendipity_authors SET password = sha1('newpassword') where username = "$USER";

Kip Macy has prepared ZFS v13 patches for RELENG_7. It's just a few days away from an official MFC (merge from current). You can download the latest patches from: http://svn.freebsd.org/base/user/kmacy/ZFS_MFC/

Please be careful. This has only been lightly tested. Please do not use it with data you care about at this time.

ClickToFlash is a WebKit plug-in that prevents automatic loading of Adobe Flash content. If you want to see the content, you can opt-in by clicking on it or adding an entire site to the whitelist.

Try control-clicking (or right-clicking) on an unloaded Flash box to access ClickToFlash's contextual menu which allows you to do advanced things like edit its whitelist, specify settings, and load all Flash on the page.

Download ClickToFlash.

Ram disk is the use of a part of read-write memory (RAM) as a hard disk. Creating a ram disk on OS X is easy with shell commands. But as we know, most Mac users prefer a GUI. Esperance DV is a module for System Preferences making a ram disk (memory disk). You can place temporary files for speed saving video, speed recording a lot of pictures, building your application with xCode,...

Have you ever tried to dim your iMac display? Apples iMac default brightness controll is not very satisfying.

Charcoal Design Shades is a little application that gives you fine control over how bright or dim your iMac's display is. It runs in the background providing always-available fine-grained control over the brightness of your display via a Mac-like interface. It performs this without actually changing the real brightness of your display. It applies an opacity filter to your Desktop similar to Splasms Software Brightness Control

Both tools have no power saving effect! Shades is available as ppc, intel and universal binary.

You may wonder yourself what your ISP is doing or what his carrier is doing after a major outage. Let's use a real life example from Tuesday, April 14 2009. There was a fiber cut near Frankfurt, Germany.



First step:
You have to admit that a problem exists


Second step:
Inform your customer and identify the location of the problem. In our example it looks like:

The fiber break has been identified near motorway crossing BAB 5/67, 26.6 km from Lorsch in direction towards Frankfurt. The break is in a motorway crossing. Engineers are at the site for resolution.

Third step:
Give your customer more information.

The damage to the fibers has been caused due to drilling works at the site.Digging works will be started in 30 minutes. No ETR as yet.

Add some abbreviations in common use like ETR which means "Estimated Time of Repair". Looks more geeky

All other steps are simliar to the third step. Start fixing it and update your customer as much as possible.

Update 4

The digging works are still in progress to find the duct route. As this is a laborious task it takes some time. We will keep you updated and give an ETR as soon as possible.

Update 5

The digging works are still in progress. The duct route for the north side of the cable cut has been found.

Update 6

Our providers are still working on the issue. The splicing works will commence in another 2 hours. The approximate ETR to fix all live services is around 10:00 GMT. We will update you once the splicing works are started.

Important: Add GMT or Timezone information. Not every customer lives in the same timezone as you.

Update 7

Splicing works are still in progress. One of our sections from Frankfurt to Strasbourg is up restoring a lot of traffic. A lot of traffic yet remains impacted and we are working towards a speedy resolution .As of now due to the huge task ahead the ETR remains unchanged – 10 GMT

Update 8

A majority of the services have been restored as works are in progress. We are still waiting for the complete resolution and ETR remains unchanged.
We will keep you updated on the issue.

Update 9

Majority of services have now been restored. Splicing repairs still ongoing. Full restoration of services expected in an hour.

Update 10

Full restoration of services completed

Thats how it should be done and thats who interoute.com has handled it last night. Well done. It may look obvious but it's not the common way most ISP/Carrier keep their customer informed.

After a long beta and release candidate cycle FreeBSD 6.4-RELEASE is near. Ken Smith, FreeBSD Release manager predicts 2008-11-28 as an official release date. It looks like there might be one more loose end. And what about FreeBSD 7.1-RELEASE? Well, at least it has now it's RELENG_7_1 directory. I guess 7.1 is coming soon

Today the Port management team released the FreeBSD Ports Tree. It's now in the "slush" state. This means no sweeping commits until FreeBSD 6.4 and 7.1 releases are announced. Currently the cluster is building the required packages for the upcoming -RELEASES.

crashinfo(8) analyze a core dump of the operating system and it's included in all upcoming FreeBSD releases (6.4 and 7.1).

The crashinfo utility automatic analyzes a core dump saved by savecore(8) in /var/crash/. Once crashinfo has located a core dump and kernel, it uses several utilities to analyze the core including dmesg(8), fstat(1), iostat(8), ipcs(1), kgdb(1), netstat(1), nfsstat(1), ps(1), pstat(8), and vmstat(8). For a given core dump file named vmcore.XX the generated text file will be named core.txt.XX.

A handy tool. I hope this improves kernel panic reports from unexperienced user in the future.

I assume DarwinPorts are already installed (http://darwinports.com/install/). All my examples are done with lftp a powerful command line ftp client (System: OS X 10.5.3 intel).



Update the darwin ports tree:
sudo port selfupdate

Search for a port. The search facility uses standard regular expression syntax for complex searches:
sudo port search 'lftp'

Check what variations of that port are available to use. Variants provide additional configuration options for a port:
sudo port variants lftp

See what dependencies a port has:
sudo port deps lftp

Find out which ports depends on a already installed port:
port dependents

Install a port:
sudo port install lftp

Delete all the intermediate files that DarwinPorts has created while building the port:
sudo port clean lftp
sudo port clean --all lftp

Getting Information about installed port:
sudo port info lftp
sudo port contents lftp

Show all installed ports:
sudo port installed

Check if lftp is outdated (ports tree should be up to date):
sudo port outdated lftp

Show all outdated ports (ports tree should be up to date):
sudo port outdated

Upgrade lftp port:
sudo port upgrade lftp

This will deactivate the old version and install the new. It also install the latest versions of the dependencies of the lftp port.

Just upgrade a port without the dependencies of this port:
sudo port -n upgrade lftp

Upgrade ALL installed ports (could take ages):
sudo port upgrade installed

Uninstall a port:
sudo port uninstall lftp

Uninstall inactive ports (makes sense after a port upgrade):
sudo port -f uninstall inactive

Brave poeple can use (read: man port for all options):
sudo port -fvdRnu upgrade outdated
sudo port -fvdR clean --all installed
sudo port -fvdR uninstall inactive
sudo port -fvdR clean --all uninstalled

Yesterday Pawel Jakub Dawidek commited ZFS to the FreeBSD base (Current).
As many poeple on the mailing lists I also want to thank you, awesome work Pawel!

Hi.
I'm happy to inform that the ZFS file system is now part of the FreeBSD operating system. ZFS is available in the HEAD branch and will be available in FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE as an experimental feature.

Commit log:
Please welcome ZFS - The last word in file systems.
ZFS file system was ported from OpenSolaris operating system. The code in under CDDL license.
I'd like to thank all SUN developers that created this great piece of software.

Supported by: Wheel LTD (http://www.wheel.pl/)

Supported by: The FreeBSD Foundation (http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/)

Supported by: Sentex (http://www.sentex.net/)

Limitations:
Currently ZFS is only compiled as kernel module and is only available for i386 architecture. Amd64 should be available very soon, the other archs will come later, as we implement needed atomic operations.

Missing functionality:

We don't have iSCSI target daemon in the tree, so sharing ZVOLs via iSCSI is also not supported at this point. This should be fixed in the future, we may also add support for sharing ZVOLs over ggate.

There is no support for ACLs and extended attributes.

There is no support for booting off of ZFS file system.

Other than that, ZFS should be fully-functional.
Enjoy!