First Google Chrome for OSX binaries

Here it is , the first precompiled version of google’s Chrome browser for OSX , whether you want to test your pages in it , or just take a firsthand look of the development so far on the mac version be aware that this is a very early revision and very unstable , for example it just crashes when loading nytimes.com , most websites i visited work fine however.

You can download it from here (or Chromium.app and TestShell.app individually), inside are two apps , Chromium.app and TestShell.app , they are the Release builds of revision 9854 for Leopard (10.5) of Google’s open source code behind Chrome , which is actually called Chromium.

TestShell.app is just the core rendering view , Chromium.app is the whole app so far but websites do not always load in it and rendering can be garbled , just use TestShell to test pages.

I am not affiliated with Google or Apple and i do not take any responsibility nor imply any functionality of these builds i am making available , have fun.

deleting junk and cache

For every folder you open in Finder it saves a .DS_Store file in that folder with the window settings , here is a easy way to get rid of them (texts in bold are shell commands to be put into Terminal ) the command recursively traverses all the directories , you can replace all the path with / for a system wide cleanup

find /Volumes/myvolume/mydir -name “.DS_Store” -print0 | xargs -0 rm -v

Like all operating systems there are some caches on osx that you might sometimes want to get rid off , to do so :

rm -rfv ~/Library/Caches/

removes all caches for the logged in user

sudo rm -rfv /System/Library/Caches/ /Library/Caches/

removes some system wide caches

sudo rm -rfv /private/var/folders/

removes Leopard specific cache folders

The osx kernel is a modular one meaning extensions are loaded into it as needed , to speed things up especially at boot caches are made that from time to time you might want to clear

sudo rm /System/Library/Extensions.kextcache /System/Library/Extensions.mkext /System/Library/Extensions/Caches/com.apple.kext.info

dual boot , one itunes library

Since i started dual booting either Tiger or Leopard one thing that really annoyed me was that i had to deal with 2 itunes libraries , not being able to have the same thing in itunes no matter what i boot into.

Well there is a very elegant and easy fix for that that i am going to detail in this post and it only requires you to have a extra partition besides the ones that you are booting from.
So let’s get to it (texts in bold are shell commands and should be entered via Terminal):

1 – move your itunes library to a partition you do not boot from (i put mine on the Storage partition)

mv ~/music/iTunes /Volumes/IStorage/

2 – boot into each of the os’es and delete ~/music/iTunes if existing and make a symbolic link to the new location in its place

ln -s /Volumes/IStorage/Itunes/ ~/music/iTunes

This works beautifully and it works at some extent for things like Photo Booth too , also tho it might work i do not advise to make the links with Finder , just stick to console.

avi movies in front row and itunes

Everyone has those divx movies , you can play them in quicktime given you have the proper codecs like Perian , but the pesky itunes will not add the files to its library.

What we need to do is basically change metadata of files by adding type “MooV” to them , the simplest way to do it is download this applescript droplet i wrote and just drag the files you want fixed on its icon.

A more involved way to do it that needs devtools (found on the install dvd) installed is by entering the bold text below in Terminal , after you modified the path and extension to suit your needs.

find /path/toyour/movies/directory -name “*.avi” -print0 | xargs -0 /developer/tools/SetFile -t “MooV”

Now that you can play those files with itunes how about having them show and play in Front Row from the confort of your remote ??!! , without even adding them to the itunes library , it is just a matter of making symbolic links in your ~/Movies folder to the directories containing your movies , you can use the shell or just alt+cmd drag them to ~/Movies to make the links.

osx and movies

OSX is nice , and not because it has no shortcomings , but because you can fix them as opposed to windows.This has a lot to do with the power of osx that stems from it having applescript and a posix compliant shell.

Here is how to change metadata of files so you can play divx movies with itunes for example , with terminal and devtools

find /path/toyour/movies/directory -name “*.avi” -print0 | xargs -0 /developer/tools/SetFile -t “MooV”

, with applescript http://forums.ilounge.com/showthread.php?t=214705

Now that you can play those files with itunes how about having them show and play in Front Row from the confort of your remote , without even adding them to the itunes library , it is just a matter of making symbolic links in your ~/Movies folder to the directories containing your movies , you can use the shell or just alt+cmd drag them to ~/Movies to make the links.

If yo do not know by now you can download movies from youtube just by selecting the file in Safari > Activity > Copy > Paste into downloads window.

How about playing every movie format there is including the flash movies you just downloaded from youtube in anything you like , quicktime , itunes , frontrow etc , well then just download http://perian.org/ and never care about formats of movies ever again.

To top it off i have a script for those times when you do want to know what are your movie files encoded with , this is a extremely fast shell script , with basic info , you can get it packaged as a osx app to drag folders to or directly as a cross-platform script.

commands for terminal lovers

There are some things the interface will just not tell you , or you just need a textual representation for , so here we go (texts in bold are shell commands to be put into Terminal)

open

Apple command , opens a file , just as if you had double-clicked the file’s icon , a wrapper to the os extensions useful in terminal to open a file with the app associated with it.

uptime

17:35 up 31 mins, 2 users, load averages: 0.03 0.10 0.07

Standard unix command showing load and time since boot.

uname -a

Darwin leopard 9.5.0 Darwin Kernel Version 9.5.0: Wed Sep 3 11:29:43 PDT 2008; root:xnu-1228.7.58~1/RELEASE_I386 i386

Apple only command showing kernel and os info.

sw_vers

ProductName: Mac OS X

ProductVersion: 10.5.5

BuildVersion: 9F33

Apple only command showing os name version and build number.

lsof

COMMAND PID USER FD TYPE DEVICE SIZE/OFF NODE NAME

SystemUIS 119 valexa 9u IPv4 0x2e700f8 0t0 UDP *:*

Dock 107 valexa cwd DIR 14,3 1326 2 /

……………………………………………………………………

Unix command showing list of open files/sockets/connections by running processes

EX lsof -c Dock shows all files open by Dock and sudo lsof -i | grep LISTEN shows all listening server applications running

vmmap

Virtual Memory Map of process 107 (Dock)

Output report format: 2.2 — 32-bit process

==== Non-writable regions for process 107

__PAGEZERO 00000000-00001000 [ 4K] —/— SM=NUL /System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app/Contents/MacOS/Dock

…………………………………………………………………………………

Apple command showing virtual memory of processes , used vmmap Dock for the example

fs_usage

18:05:55.034 lstat /Users/valexa/Library/Preferences 0.000053 fseventsd

18:05:55.036 pwrite F=23 B=0x4000 O=0x00659000 0.000024 mds

18:05:55.434 lstat /valexa/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Terminal.plist 0.000069 mdworker

Apple command showing real time information about all file/network accesses going on (needs to be ran as root)