Why Linux Might Be Worth Another Look

Posted on Wednesday, August 13th, 2008 at 5:16pm by Rob Wilkerson

No, no. I’m still a Mac guy. Really. That said, a Mac just isn’t an option at work; something about “fiscal responsibility, blah, blah, blah”. So this week, in a fit of fury over the fact that I desperately miss my powerful command line and a few annoying quirks in my development environment, I decided to create a Linux partition that I could dual boot into. I have to admit that I’ve been very pleasantly surprised.

I’ve tried to use a Linux desktop environment many, well, several, times over the last 5, 6, maybe 8 years. I’ve tried Redhat 9, SuSe 8, Fedora Core 1 & 3, Ubuntu 6.10 (I can’t remember which silly name it had) and a few other, less prominent distros. None of them quite did it for me. In a desktop, I’m looking for ease of setup and use – I don’t want to have to futz endlessly with stuff just to make it usable. This time, after two years since my last dalliance, I decided to roll with Ubuntu again since it’s still all the rage and has an active user community that I expect I’ll need for a while. I installed 8.04 (Hardy Heron).

Although I’m only a few days in – which means I’ll have plenty to write about over the next few days, weeks and maybe months – I thought I’d write a bit about a few reasons that I think Linux on the desktop – even your desktop – might be worth another look.

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windows, linux, mac 0 Comments

OS X Wireless Network Auto-Detection

Posted on Tuesday, August 5th, 2008 at 4:03pm by Rob Wilkerson

At home I’m completely wireless. My OCD gets tweaked by cords, so I’m Bluetooth and 802.11g all the way. My minimalistic skills are so advanced that I sometimes lament the need for a power cord. If I didn’t need power, my desk would be positively pristine.

For the last several months, I’ve noticed that my wireless network is no longer auto-detected when I boot up or whatnot. I can’t be sure exactly when it happened beyond knowing that it’s been a problem “for a while now” so I have no way of knowing what triggered it. The end result is that all of my apps start up (and try to connect) before I’m connected and errors are thrown. Oh, and that I have to sit and wait while all of the wireless networks in range are sought out and detected.

Although it’s annoying, it hasn’t been so annoying that I’ve been willing to invest a lot of (read: any) time in tracking down a solution. And, since I had no idea of the precipitating event, I honestly had no idea where to start.

Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good.

This weekend I did one of my periodic system audits to clear out applications that I installed, but haven’t used enough to keep them. In the process, I noticed that I had accidentally moved my System Preferences application. I know it was accidental because I have moved it to /Applications/Uninstallers, a directory I created to store – can you guess? – uninstallers for the various applications that have them.

Recognizing that it shouldn’t be there, I moved it back out to /Applications and – gasp! – my wireless networks are auto-connecting again. Magic. Moral of the story: Do not move the System Preferences application. Ever. Or anywhere.

mac, wireless, system preferences 0 Comments

Quicksilver is Making My CPU Its Bitch

Posted on Friday, July 18th, 2008 at 8:18pm by Rob Wilkerson

I love Quicksilver. I don’t even use more than a third of its capabilities and I still couldn’t do without it. As nothing more than an application launcher, it’s completely indispensable to me. Because of it, I’m able to autohide my dock and, quite honestly, never see it. I don’t keep a single application icon on it (save those that are running, of course).

For the last few weeks, though, I’ve been noticing that Quicksilver has been absolutely monopolizing my CPU cycles to the tune of 65%-95% according to Activity Monitor. I don’t know when this started and I don’t recall any kind of “precipitating event” in the recent past that even might be the cause. If I only saw this kind of monopolization when it was reindexing, it would make some sense. That’s not the case, though. Usually, Quicksilver’s Task Viewer indicates nothing happening at all. The only thing I know for certain is that the application seems to have gone rogue on me. It’s out of control.

I thought I’d found a solution on Mac OS X Hints, but…no. And, by the way, if anyone else cares to try that hint, note that the Quicksilver caches are located in ~/Library/Quicksilver, not in /Library/Quicksilver as the hint indicates (the comments point this out as well). Deleting the specified directory (and a few others) briefly offered hope only to snuff it out. Cruel.

I don’t appear to be the only one seeing this, but it’s not something I’ve heard much rumbling about nor have I found a working solution. Has anyone else seen this and maybe dug up any kind of explanation, fix or workaround?

Update 7/31/2008: And then, just as quickly as it appeared, it was gone. Quicksilver seems to have righted itself and my CPU is happily idling along at ~4%. I don’t know what I did, but it may have something to do with the wall-to-wall counseling I gave it yesterday (7/30/2008).

performance, mac, quicksilver 0 Comments

Spaces Becomes Usable

Posted on Friday, May 30th, 2008 at 7:06pm by Rob Wilkerson

I’ve had two big problems with Spaces up to and including 10.5.2:

1. When Command-Tab’ing to an application, Spaces would shift me to a different Space that already included a window of that application rather than allow me to open a new window in my current space. More »
2. When I had multiple windows of an application open in multiple desktops, Command-Tab’ing didn’t, by default, place the focus on the window of that app that was open in the same desktop I was already in. It didn’t do anything, really. It’s like that action confused the OS. More »

After a while, I was able to track down a fix – and by fix, I really mean glorified hack – for the first problem (which seems to have a real fix in 10.5.3 via a System Preference, by the way) and 10.5.3 seems to have addressed the second quite nicely.

Zang.

usability, mac, spaces 0 Comments

Quitting Caffeine the Mac Way

Posted on Monday, May 12th, 2008 at 3:08am by Rob Wilkerson

From time to time, I find the need to start Caffeine on my Mac, but my use is infrequent enough that it’s not something I like to keep open and available all the time. Invariably, once it’s running, I forget how to quit the application to get it off of my menu bar. It’s not an easy thing to Google so, for the sake of my own sanity, I give you:

1. Cmd+Click the menu bar icon (the coffee cup)
2. Select the Quit option

It’s a simple enough process, but I guess it’s just different enough from that of other menu bar icons that I can never seem to remember it.

mac, caffeine, howto 0 Comments