cestdelamerde.com - macosx

Apache Virtual Hosts and DNS Web Redirection

nospam@example.com (philou) — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 15:54:15 +0200

A friend of mine tried to setup some days ago an Apache web server with two virtual hosts. Unfortunately, he was only able to reach it's first defined virtual host. We found nothing bad in the Apache conf files. So we suspected an Apple conspiracy as the server was launched from an mac mini.

But it was not a conspiracy

He was using Gandi as registrar, DNS provider and registered what Gandi calls DNS Web Redirection : you hosts your zone on gandi DNS servers, all subdomain (eg www or blog) are recorded as a CNAME of webredir.vip.gandi.net. Then webredir.vip.gandi.net acts as a proxy to the real website of your choice (eg: a Mac Mini behind a Free DSL connection).

This method DOES NOT WORK when the target website uses Apache Virtual Hosts. (wrong Host header)

Do not use those kind of hacky redirection unless there is no other choice available. Use A and CNAME records, like cestdelamerde does :



@ 10800 IN A 217.70.191.204 

* 10800 IN CNAME cestdelamerde.com.

The ultimate DNS zone file if you are hosting all you're VH under the same IP...

Photoshop CS3 Crash at Launch ; a Solution to a Very Specific Issue

nospam@example.com (philou) — Mon, 26 May 2008 10:16:16 +0200

A couple of month ago, I've tried to install a copy of Photoshop CS3 downloaded from the adobe website.

Unfortunately, photoshop always crashed when I tried to start it. (an exception was thrown in some CoreFoundation code)

I first was thinking that something was wrong in my system, maybe CS3 is not compatible with my version of Leopard... But After some hours of hunting, I discovered that it was entirely my fault : remeber my hack to disable font anti aliasing, it was consisting in setting a new global preference named AppleAntiAliasingThreshold with the command :



defaults write .GlobalPreferences AppleAntiAliasingThreshold 200

This command adds the new property in the ~/Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences.plist file as a String and Photoshop tries to parse it as a Number thus resulting in an awful exception ; so the solution is either you remove the property or you change it's type. (any plist can be open file from the command line using the open command)

From Tiger to Leopard - Activity Monitor Crashes

nospam@example.com (philou) — Mon, 26 May 2008 09:27:27 +0200

After I have upgraded my Macbook Pro to Leopard some month ago, I was wondering why I couldn't launch the Activity Monitor anymore (I was having an error claiming some symbol was not found in /usr/lib/libSystem.B.dydl or somthing like that).

As usual ; my first comment about that was : again, mac os x is a piece of crap... This is not totally true, only the installer of MacOS actually is a piece of crap

Yesterday I figured out that I have two version of the Activity Monitor : one in /Application (the buggy Tiger version) and one in /Application/Utilities (the Leopard version). So I deleted the Tiger version and start using the new Leopard version and a miracle happened : it worked !

Firefox and Color Management

nospam@example.com (philou) — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 17:17:07 +0100

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 !

Shortcut Psycho

nospam@example.com (philou) — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 11:44:56 +0100

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

Killing Mac OS X Swapping : How To Disable dynamic_pager

nospam@example.com (philou) — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 21:21:48 +0100

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.

Disabling Spotlight in Leopard

nospam@example.com (philou) — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 20:25:46 +0100

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.

Mac OS Disk Cache - A Piece Of Crap

nospam@example.com (philou) — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 10:21:38 +0100

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 !

How To Disable iPhoto Automatic Launch

nospam@example.com (philou) — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 08:30:29 +0100

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

Bye Bye iPhoto

nospam@example.com (philou) — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 08:21:14 +0100

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

Firefox 3 beta 2

nospam@example.com (philou) — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 13:59:44 +0100

A few days ago, I've installed Firefox 3 beta 2 for Mac OS X.

It features new security mechanisms, a new URL bar auto-completion, a download manager that can be used by a human, a new password management and a faster rendering engine a bit more integrated to the os.

The first thing that surprised me is the new rendering engine using a new way to render fonts that forbids the use of non anti-aliased fonts : even setting "AppleAntiAliasingThreshold" to a very high value does not disable anti-aliasing

Anyway, it looks faster and this is a good news as Firefox is quite slow compared to Internet Explorer and Opera. But the more useful new feature is the way stored password are managed. The password manager do not ask you anymore before submitting a password form if you want save this password, but it asks you after you've submitted the form. This is especially useful because you can choose to remember the password only if the login was successful and not a priori.

Download Firefox Beta Version.
Firefox 3 beta 2 Release Notes.

How To Disable Font Anti-Aliasing in MacOS X

nospam@example.com (philou) — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 21:22:03 +0100

As everybody knows, font AA sucks a lot Especially the Apple sub-pixel rendering that seems to only works well on apple screens !

If you are using Tiger you can use the wonderful Unsanity Silk. It lets you control font rendering by application, fonts can be substituted...

Unfortunately it does not work with Leopard anymore. So here is a hacky method to disable font AA in mac os. It used to work with all mac os x versions (10.x) :



defaults write  .GlobalPreferences AppleAntiAliasingThreshold 200

The above code disables font AA for all fonts having a size less than 200 points (this value can be increased if needed). However, title bars and menus are still rendered with some anti aliasing

MacOS X 10.5.1 Released

nospam@example.com (philou) — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 10:03:42 +0100

A few weeks only after the Leopard release, Apple released an update to Leopard : 10.5.1 Releases Notes

Even worse : the above update fix really serious security issues : 10.5.1 security fixes

Those hot fixes just remember me how often Microsoft is releasing updates for Windows... (and how serious security issues they are trying to fix )

Timemachine & Network Shares

nospam@example.com (philou) — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 18:09:31 +0100

By default, the Leopard TimeMachine is not able to write to Windows network shares. But it comes with an hidden option that allows this to happen. You only have to do this :

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1