Command-Tab

Saturday, December 23rd, 2006 at 6:22 PM

While burning a CD image today, I discovered a really quick and easy way to do it from a Terminal window with zero hassle. Without launching Toast, Burn, Disco, or any of the myriad of point-and-click disc burning applications, you can simply type hdiutil burn ~/Desktop/you/disk.dmg. The burn begins immediately, with all default settings set as expected (max burn speed, verify on, etc.) It’s not good looking compared to the alternatives, but memory usage is minimal, and it’s a fast way to dump an image onto a disk if you’re already working in the Terminal, or have a session open.

Aside from burning disks, hdiutil and its sidekick diskutil can do everything Apple’s Disk Utility application can do, thus they have a very robust set of commands to choose from. Together, they can create, mount, and convert disk images, create and rebuild Mac OS X RAIDs, mount and eject physical disks, and even repair permissions. By typing hdiutil of diskutil at the command line, you’ll be presented with the long list of options available for each program. Check them out — you might just find a quick way to automate some of those tasks you do often.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 23rd, 2006 at 6:22 pm and is filed under Misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Sunday, November 5th, 2006 at 5:37 PM

For the past few weeks, Gravatar images have been running very slowly due to the increasingly massive amount of requests they process. A forthcoming update to their infrastructure should provide much improved responsiveness, and in turn speed up loading of individual posts here at Command-Tab. With any luck, the transition should be seamless, allowing existing plugins to work without requiring changes. We’ll see.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 5th, 2006 at 5:37 pm and is filed under Misc, WordPress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Thursday, November 2nd, 2006 at 8:51 PM

Just a few days ago, I learned that my web host of choice, CrashProne is going to be shutting down, so I had a month to find a new home for my site and a few other sites I host. As luck would have it, I had just read about a new web host offering from MediaTemple, where sites are hosted on a grid of servers instead of one shared machine. Added speed and great price combined with a phenominal amount of storage and bandwidth easily convinced me to make the jump to (mt).

Now that the transition is complete and all my sites are up and running on the grid server, I am pleased to report that I could not be more satisfied with my decision. MediaTemple’s unique control panel made domain setup easy, and the SSH and remote MySQL access were welcome features that also aided in the transition. A full terabyte of bandwidth per month should ensure that Command-Tab can handle much more traffic than before, so thanks again for being a reader, and check out (mt) if you’re in need of a great web host!

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 2nd, 2006 at 8:51 pm and is filed under Misc, Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Tuesday, October 17th, 2006 at 8:02 PM

While removing the few spam emails that Mail didn’t catch this evening, I had the idea of combining the Akismet comment spam filter API with Mail (or any email client, for that matter). Akismet does such a great job of catching comment spam, I thought that using a continually updated database of email spam could perhaps do the same for my inbox.

However, this idea is not without email privacy concerns. Every email would have to be sent to the Akismet servers, where they are checked and flagged as “spam” or “not spam,” much like the current blog plugins work. While I don’t believe the Akismet spam database is able to be publicly browsed, the text of every email received would have to be sent to and scanned by a third party system, and I’m sure some will object to this (heck, some people don’t even like the idea of Google’s bots placing targeted ads in Gmail).

I’m sure plugins for Mail and Thunderbird could be created in short order, but I’m not positive that their spam database would be accurate until a bunch of people started using it and flagging spam emails. As Mail’s spam filtering abilities only seem to increase with each release of Mac OS X, I think it’s about time to take matters into our own distributed hands.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 17th, 2006 at 8:02 pm and is filed under Misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.