One Giant Robot After Another

Improving VLC Player load times of .MKV files on Snow Leopard

Kang — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 05:29:19 +0000

Ever notice that MKV files load significantly slower than before in VLC on Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard)? I did, and for someone who has a lot of media files encoded in the format, it’s almost unusable to have to wait a minute while seeing the CPU on one core maxed out. The version of VLC player I have is 1.0.3, the latest as of this post. However, the issue seems to be around since at least 1.0.1 as discussed on this page:http://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=64302&start=15

The fix is pretty simple assuming you are not scared of entering a command in the terminal:

Open terminal (Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app)
Copy and paste this: ‘sudo chmod a+w /usr/X11/var/cache/fontconfig’ without the quotes
Enter your admin password (for most people, that’s just your current account’s password if you are an admin)
Open a .MKV file and close it after it starts playing
Now open any .MKV file again and things should be as snappy as before!

Updating Your Ruby on Rails Application Custom Environment via Passenger Pane

Kang — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 05:41:59 +0000

If you are working with a relatively up-to-date Ruby on Rails stack, chances are you would be using Phusion Passenger to deploy your application. Although passenger makes it extremely easy to deploy and restart your app, it also added a bit more complication when managing the Apache configuration files. The Passenger Pane (for Mac only) helped alleviate this problem by providing a nice little visual panel in your Mac’s Preference Pane:

The nifty little add-on allows you to easily add a new Rails project, set it to development or production mode, and also restart it. It’s great if you are not sure/forgot where all the virtual host files are for your apache configuration.

As with all things in life, nothing is perfect. In this case, I work on a project with multiple environments: development, staging, preprodstaging, and production just to name a few. The passenger pane was great when you just had to choose between development or production but what do you do if your desired environment is named something else? Don’t sweat, apparently there’s a simple little trick to customize your configuration file exactly to your liking even if the pane does not offer those options. To do so, simply select the project your want to edit from the project list and then drag the it to your favorite text editor on the dock, in this case, Textmate.Now that the file is opened in the editor, edit to your heart’s content, save, restart your passenger instance for the project and you are ready to see your updated changes!

Enhanced Open Terminal Here, for Leopard at Maururu

Kang — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 16:48:34 +0000

Ever find it annoying that you can’t go from the terminal to the same directory in the finder or vice versa on the Mac? So am I! It just seems terribly inefficient for power users who are proficient with the terminal to have to open up the terminal app and then manually cd into the current directory. Aside from just a waste of time and extra keystrokes (yes, tab to auto-complete does help a lot), it’s not easy to remember the exact path to the current directory. On top of that, OS X likes to make it harder for regular users to access root folders and it becomes a pain to use. I finally gave up and googled for solutions to go from finder to terminal today and found a great time-saver: Enhanced Open Terminal Here.

To install Open Terminal Here, unzip the downloaded file and store in a place that you won’t accidentally delete. Then right click (or if you don’t have a two button mouse, Ctrl+click) on the toolbar area of a finder window and select “Customize Toolbar…”. This brings up the toolbar customization dropdown. Now drag and drop the Open Terminal Here icon to the existing toolbear area and click done. You can now open a terminal window to the same location as where you are in the finder. For more convenience, cmd+click to open the current folder in a new tab in terminal or alt+click to cd into the current directory on the foremost tab of the foremost window in terminal. You can read up more about this cool script at Enhanced Open Terminal Here, for Leopard at Maururu.

Mac finder window with Open Terminal Here installed

So what about the other way around of going from the current directory in terminal to finder? This is pretty simple, all you need to do is enter: “open .”

Inserting new line in echo command

Kang — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 23:38:41 +0000

Out of curiosity and the perfectionist in me, I “had” to print a line of text in the output inside a BASH shell script. I didn’t really want to split them into multiple echo statements since it’s a waste of space and actually harder to read for me. The first thing I tried was:

> echo “Line1\nLine2″ # Line1\nLine2

That clearly didn’t work out so well… so I thought maybe my Mac (OS X 10.5.7) likes ‘\r\n’ more:

> echo “Line1\r\nLine2″ # line1\r\nline2

Still nope! As I found out later on though, not all versions of echo supports backslash escape characters. A quick look up in the MAN page for echo revealed that I needed to pass in the -e option in order to enable this capability:

> echo -e “Line1\nLine2″

Line1
Line2

TADA! Third time is the charm!

One Giant Robot After Another

Kang — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 05:20:05 +0000

Changed from ‘Code Monkey’ to ‘One Giant Robot After Another’! Where did I get the inspiration from? Well, I initially really liked ThoughtBot’s blog, Giant Robot Smashing Into Other Giant Robots, but copying them would be boring and probably not make those guys very happy. However, I recently came across some articles about a couple of giant robots being built in Japan on Gizmodo: a giant Gundam (done building) and Tetsujin (under construction). For the lack of better naming schemes, I just took the sequential order of how the robots are built as the new name, literally ‘One Giant Robot After Another’.

Manually Downgrading iPhone OS

Kang — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 07:03:46 +0000

If for some reason you’ve ran into a situation where you want to downgrade your iPhone’s OS but iTunes just won’t comply with your command, I’ve found that there’s an easy way to force the action:

Connect your iPhone to the computer and have iTunes opened
Hold down both the power and home buttons until the iPhone disappeared from the devices list in iTunes
Release the power button but continue to hold down the home button until iTunes detects there’s a device in recovery mode
Hold down shift on Windows or option key on the Mac while pressing Restore in the iPhone screen in iTunes to initiate a restore to the desired version of firmware

Live!

Kang — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 07:32:23 +0000

Finally finished setting up my site and basic wordpress installation! It took me awhile just to settle on the combination of hosting and domain registrar. In the end, I decided to go with Site5.com for the hosting and GoDaddy for domain. Site5 is currently (and has been) promoting 25% discount but it’s not hard to find the 26% discount if you look just a little bit harder. The promotion code I used to get the 26% discount was ‘BPJOBBRD’.

So what’s my impression of Site5 so far? Not bad at all actually! I was initially a little suspicious of their offer of unlimited bandwidth and storage as it’s usually a recipe for disaster as hosting companies will try to overcrowd their server with clients just to make up for the margin. However, the highest load I’ve seen so far on my server is a mere 1.5, very respectable considering they claim to have ‘cat /proc/cpuinfo’ reveals they have 8 cores on the machine.

[~]# uptime
02:23:45 up 35 days, 16:57, 1 user, load average: 0.75, 0.74, 0.80