Quarter Life Crisis

The world according to Sven-S. Porst

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Miscellanea

638 words

More tcsh goodness courtesy of Erik. Adds in nicely with this list of tweaks for your .tcshrc in an attempt to make the shell an all gain, no pain business. My own additions to the .tcshrc file have been limited to the following two so far:

alias nmb nmblookup -U 134.76.63.253 -R
alias ssh /sw/bin/myssh

The first being helpful when needing to access computers on a non-trivial Windows network despite Apple's severely limited/broken support for them; The second points to a slightly tweaked version of ssh that removes built-in limitations (the reasons for which I don't understand) in ssh, allowing it to use the Keychain for passwords thanks to Bill Bumgarner's SSHPassKey.

Has anyone else noticed that even when only moderately busy, OS X will stop working, not being able to create new processes. This already happened to me a couple of times. Applications won't launch anymore, etc. With 'moderately busy', I mean about 20 applications running. That sounds a lot, but isn't as there are so many you just have to keep on: Finder, Dock, Mail, Terminal, Address Book, iCal, iTunes, Safari, Stickies, GeburtstagsChecker, NetNewsWire, Watson, RBrowser, TextEdit, some IM app like Fire or Proteus (can't decide yet). So that's 16 applications for doing nothing. Then add TeXShop, BibDesk, AcrobatReader for working. And the occasional UnicodeChecker, GraphicConverter, WordLookup and, sadly, System Preferences, X11 or ProjectBuilder.

That sounds like scaringly many applications, coming to think of it, but most of them are just sleeping in the background most of the time. On top of that come an ssh session for tunneling my Mail, and a couple of httpds, smbds due to the virus infested Windows machines on our network. The problem is: I don't feel the computer should stop working when I have the impression that it's doing next to nothing. Never ran into this? Want to try it out yourself? Try running this line in your Terminal:

echo "sleep 120 &" > /tmp/s ; chmod a+x /tmp/s; repeat 1000 /tmp/s

I guess there's a better way to do this in one command only but I couldn't figure out the correct syntax for it. The above will keep your computer from starting new processes (or even generating new threads?) for two minutes. There shouldn't be any serious harm done.

Also in todays feeds, a discussion on the (non-)differences between G3s and G4s on yet another blog that hides its writer's name. One of the comments has information on the many different incarnations of the G4. My experience: Judging from my dad's 'Pismo' 400MHz G3 powerbook and my 400 G4 Powerbook, I can hardly tell the speed difference when it comes to everyday applications. Somehow I always have the impression that the G4's disk access is slower – but that may just be my overloaded disk. Once you start using applications like iTunes or watching films, the G4 takes them on more easily. Steffen told me that he can clearly feel the impact of iTunes on compile speed in his iBook, for example.

Talking about G3s, I was happy to hear that Jörg made the move to use his beige G3 desktop again with OSX for internet routing and music. It sounded like getting the DSL, internet and file sharing running 'just worked', unlike with his Windows and Linux computers. It's not fast enough for most film playback unfortunately.

Bill Bumgarner thought about the legal implications of iTunes library sharing. I don't understand all of it but reading it, I hope having a link to my password protected music library isn't considered a problem.

Matthew discovered this translator. Fun. The site is called crummy.com. Reminds me of the McIntosh Jr. ad.

The AMS website currently crashes Safari.

May 11, 2003, 16:26

Comments

Comment by d.w.: User icon

Small world dept. my good friend / ex-girlfriend works for the AMS.

May 11, 2003, 18:21

Comment by Jamie Gillespie: User icon

Blog writer’s name is Jamie Gillespie. ;-)

May 12, 2003, 2:23

Comment by ssp: User icon

Hi Jamie.

Erik already pointed me to your post yesterday.

Besides me not having had read that post, I’d still say your blog hides your name. In my opinion, the writer’s name and a contact or details link should be on every page or at the very least on the main page.

That makes it easier to refer to people. I find it quite odd using blog names for reference as if they were people.

Back in ‘93 (or whenever I first saw the web), virtually every page used to have the creator’s name and mail address at the bottom and it was easy to tell who authored the page. (Although I suspect this was often done to have an excuse for using the then exciting hr tag.)

May 12, 2003, 19:33

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