Entries by philou

If you are a Facebook user, you may have noticed that sometimes, you click on something you thought was a Facebook internal link, but you are redirected to another site. Facebook duped you !

See the picture below, the link is actually an ad with the Facebook CSS style : smart

While I was uploading pictures from Lightroom to the web (flickr), I used firefox on OS X to preview uploaded galleries and colors of uploaded picture were insipid. I've first suspected Lightroom to create fucked jpeg files, but viewing with another web browser like Safari just shows perfect colors.

It seems that the Mac OS X version of Firefox 2 is not able to apply right color profiles to render jpeg pictures. The screenshot below is self explanatory...

The only workaround is not to use Firefox !

When you have a bunch of tabs open in Firefox, at some point, it starts scrillong horizontally. To disable this behaviour set browser.tabs.tabMinWidth to 0 in the configuration page.

Some times ago, friends of mine was joking about my love for this great thing that emacs is ; saying you have to do unbelieveable key combo to do simple things.

I'm proud to annouce there is a soft with more crazy shortcuts : Adobe Lightroom :
- go to the Library module : Shift+Alt+Apple+1
- go to the Development module : Shift+Alt+Apple+2
- Copy/Paste development parameters : Shift+Apple+C/V
- Copy/Paste metadata : Shift+Alt+Apple+C/V

I'm running my new dynamic_pager during last 3 days, I've not noticed any bad side effects : here is my vm_stats output after 20hours uptime, heavy memory and disk usage :

Mach Virtual Memory Statistics: (page size of 4096 bytes)
Pages free: 67541.
Pages active: 336302.
Pages inactive: 58724.
Pages wired down: 59391.
"Translation faults": 13792984.
Pages copy-on-write: 63882.
Pages zero filled: 12479434.
Pages reactivated: 31.
Pageins: 55306.
Pageouts: 0.
Object cache: 12432 hits of 155686 lookups (7% hit rate)


The kernel does not writes pages to the swap anymore (0 pageouts). The amount of inactive memory used is exceptionnally low for such a high amount of active memory (1312Mb active, 229Mb inactive). The single swap file of 64Mb is not used : I'm owning my Macbook Pro since december 2006 and I only seen this right after a reboot of the system.

I'm not sure everything described above are the result of my dynamic_pager hack, but it damn works !

If like me you cannot deal with the swapping in OS X, and if you have tried everything possible, even not to launch dynamic_pager (and you've seen that you're system is not usable anymore (on my mac the 2Gb was detected but the system was refusing to use more then 1Gb )), then I have the solution : create another dynamic_pager that fits your needs

Actually, the original source code of dynamic_pager can be found at http://www.opensource.apple.com/darwinsource/10.5.2/system_cmds-433/dynamic_pager.tproj/dynamic_pager.c. You will need an apple developper account (that's free) do download it. If you know how to compile this, please add a comment to this post.

After a bit of hacking, (removing cryptic junk, calls to private code of the kernel that is not accessible for the public, hacks to make it compile and commented a macx_swapon call), here is the modified dynamic_pager.c. Once you downloaded it it can be compiled by using this awful command :

gcc -o dynamic_pager -no-cpp-precomp -DNO_DIRECT_RPC -framework CoreFoundation -framework IOKit -lSystem.B -R -DNO_DIRECT_RPC dynamic_pager.c -I/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.4u.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks/Kernel.framework/Versions/A/Headers -I/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.4u.sdk/usr/include


Then (after having done a backup of the regular dynamic_pager) copy your brand new dynamic_pager to /sbin. Reboot and enjoy : it will only create a single swap file (64Mb), no less, no more.

I'm currently running it and it seems to work really fine. All my memory is used, not only the first 1Gb. The Inactive Memory is high as usual, but the single swap file is only marginally used.

The code posted above is just a big hack, when I will have more time I will clean up the code so that it will be a bit more understandable.

Enjoy.

Spotlight is an indexing tool that listen to every file change and then index the file (eg: the name of the file, it's content if it is a text file or metadata of it's a picture...). This is not especially useful if you are a bit organized. Even worse, when you are creating a bunch a big files (like copying 2 gigabytes of RAW files to the picture folder) the amount of IO needed by spotlight prevents the mac from being used by an human, the swapfiles grows (even with 2Gb of system memory).

To remove this piece of crap, just follow this how to.

Some times ago, I noticed that doing a lot of IO operation on encrypted loopback partition (like FileVault disk images) was trashing my system memory : after a while, the system began to swap a lot. I first thought some app was allocating huge parts of memory, but that was not the case.

At this time I suspected some memory leaks in the encryption or the disk image code of the Mac OS kernel. So I tried to do a lot of IO on a regular HFS partition. The same issue was present, but the swap usage was increasing slowier this time. The only solution I found to avoid this, was not to use disk intensive applications.

Unfortunetaly, as now use my mac to process RAW picture using Adobe Lightroom and this is a disk intensive application, so I bought 1 Go of memory to double the amount of RAM available for Mac OS. I was hopping this would definitevely solve my swap issue.

This was not the case, when I process a bunch of RAW file in a short amount of time, the system cannot refrain itself from swapping. Lightroom only eat 800M of memory, and while no other application if running. This only happen while using intensive disk IO operation (eg: processing RAW files or compiling many java files) and after the application is shut down the amount of physical memory used by the system is really high, so I come to conclusion that the IO cache of the kernel is just a piece of crap, eating a lot of memory without trying to figure out if there is enough memory to cache something : swapping memory pages holding disk cache is just stupid.

Is someone else is experiencing same issues, please let me know !

Hatebook

The title is self explanatory

First option :
{code}cat /proc/net/dev{code}

This shows all network interfaces and some statistics associated with them, but is not very user friendly.

User friendly option : install Bandwidth Monitor NG (package name is bwm-ng in most common distribution) and execute it :
{code}bwm-ng{code}

It is now possible from kernel version 2.6.16 to drop Linux internal caches (page caches, inodes and dentry caches). This can be done by echoing a number into /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches :

To drop page cache :
echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

To drop inode and dentry cache :
echo 2 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

And finally to drop everything :
echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

Source : Drop Caches - linux-mm.org

Now I'm using Adobe Lightroom to view/edit my pictures, and when I plug a camera to the usb port of my Mac, iPhoto is automatically executed.

It is very easy to disable this behaviour :
- launch "Image Capture" ("Transfert d'Images" in french)
- edit the preference (you can even choose another application to launch).

That's it

cestdelamerde.com has now a new black and white skin.

What a wonderful site : hates-software.com.

After you subscribed to the hates-software mailing list, every new thread you post in that list becomes a post on the we hates software blog.

iPhoto is one of the simplest picture management tool ever written, so simple that it is not well suited to manage a huge picture library :
- it consumes a lot of memory,
- pictures are stored into a directory structure that only iPhoto developers seems to be able to understand thus organizing you picture files as you want is not possible,
- backups are not possible
- usage of removable media (DVD, hardrive...) is not possible,
- classification is painful, at the application launch all picture are displayed,

I finally installed Adobe LightRoom, and magically everything I wanted to do with my pictures is now possible.

LightRoom has a kick-ass GUI organized the same way Eclipse does : it features some kind of "perspectives" to classify, retouch, print and publish pictures. It can run fullscreen allowing to take advantage of modern large screens. It does not destroy you're files folder when importing picture directly from an hardrive, and has a convenient import tool. Batch editing is really easy eg: add 9 hours to dates of pictures of only one camera model = less than 5 clicks and no need to go to a menu... Surely the best GUI available today for a Mac OS X application.

I will never launch iPhoto again