There are some really great places online to buy music. The small independents are getting the right idea. The store I was on today was the best yet, full length previews, all formats the same price just a great experience.

It’s pretty simple, listen to the album you want to buy, click BUY, select your format (MP3, AAC, ALAC, FLAC etc…) enter you Paypal details and boom your downloading your stuff. No signing up, no messing about.

It was easy, simple, and overall a good way to buy music. I still prefer CD’s but as they offer ALAC and FLAC it’s fine and reduces wear on my CD drive.

Bought an album and an EP for £8, all FLAC so I can convert to any format I want, just good stuff.

I’ve recently ordered a new computer and like with all things when they are new you gotta check them out for faults. Screens are always a worry, so with this in mind I’ve knocked together a little tool that simply allows you to check the display for various little things.

The tool is set out in two phases, the first phase consists of the tones white, black, light gray, gray, and dark gray. These will let you spot the easy pixels, gray is nice as you’ll be able to see if the panel is evenly lit. The second phase is just an RGB test, cycles red, green, blue, yellow and magenta. This will show any pixels that are stuck in those main colours.

It’s pretty simple and a tiny download written in Java so you’ll need Java installed. Mac OS X users have the Java system by default, Windows users will need it, thats if you don’t have it already, most people do. There is a Read Me included in the download with full instructions.

Any problems / help, or if you have something to say let me know.

I really like the colours of the syntax highlighting in Apple’s XCode, I apply the colouring to all of the other code editing applications I use, these being Netbeans and BBEdit. For the 3.2.x versions there are only some small changes in the colours. With the advent of OS 10.6 Snow Leopard we get Apple’s new Menlo font which is very nice. Colour values were taken from XCode 3.2.3.

XCode Colours (RGB)
Selection: 167, 201, 255
Comments: 0, 116, 0
Documentation Comments: 0, 116, 0
Documentation Comments Keywords: 2, 61, 16
Strings: 196, 26, 22
Characters: 28, 0, 207
Numbers: 28, 0, 207
Keywords: 170, 13, 145
Pre-Processor Statements: 100, 56, 32
URLs: 14, 14, 225
Attributes: 131, 108, 40
Project Class Names: 63, 110, 116
Project Functions and Method Names: 38, 71, 75
Project Constants: 38, 71, 75
Project Type Names: 63, 110, 116
Project Instance Variables and Globals: 63, 110, 116

Default font: Menlo 11

On Mac OS X 10.5 the default compiler is GCC 4.0.1, Apple does provide GCC 4.2.1 as part of the XCode Developer Tools releases for 10.5 but it isn’t setup as the default.

The main tools are located in /usr/bin. In this folder you will find both gcc 4.0 and 4.2 along with g++ 4.0 and 4.2. The commands gcc, g++, cc, and gcov are all symbolic links to the default 4.0 versions. To make 4.2 the default we just need to modify the symbolic links.

To do this we need to go in to the Terminal and issue the following commands:

Now you should have a complete working gcc 4.2.1 tool chain. If there is a problem you can verify the symbolic links are pointing at the correct targets by typing ls -l Hope this helps someone else.

I’ve been having some rather odd Safari problems today for the first time since I can remember. I really dig Safari, it’s everything I want in a browser and getting better with each release. I’ve been using Safari since the public beta back in January 2003 back when Mac OS X 10.2 was the main OS.

Anyway this afternoon I noticed that Safari kept using 100% CPU and becoming un responsive. I kept force quitting it but the problem kept coming back after about 10 mins. I tried the usual repair permissions, delete preferences and caches etc to no avail. I then thought I would try the Safari 4 Developer Preview, I downloaded it and installed it. It was perfectly stable and very fast, can’t wait for the finial release of that badboy! At this point I was still stumped as to why 3.2.1 was holding the CPU hostage but Safari 4 was fine. I uninstalled Safari 4 and reinstalled 3.2.1.. On restarting everything seemed fine but yet again it took all the CPU, back where I started. Just launching Safari and then closing the window and waiting would cause the CPU to be held hostage again.

I ran a filesystem trace to see what files Safari was touching, I basically sat and waited until the high CPU condition happened then took a look to see what files were accessed. After an hour of watching and timing the problem it seemed that Safari was continuously reading from the filesystem which is what was causing the massive CPU load. It was triggered by an unusual cache file hit, I did a check to see what network connections were established and saw some odd looking google server addresses, it then dawned on me that Safari 3.2 features anti-phishing protection that uses a blacklist provided by google.

This also explained why the the Safari 4 Developer Preview worked correctly as it doesn’t yet have the anti-phishing stuff. I turned off the anti-phishing stuff in Safari 3.2.1 and sure enough everything went back to normal. Me being me I was still bothered because why would it suddenly cause problems, it’s been working fine until today. I went back and took a look at the cache files it was using for the blacklists, I thought that corruption of some kind was most likely so I deleted them. I then re-enabled the anti-phishing mode in Safari 3.2.1, now been three hours and all is well again.

Relaunch Safari and all should be well. I couldn’t find any references to this problem online so I though I would post something.

I thought I would check my old email account and got a nice total of 4124 messages! Every single one was junk. Apple Mail’s Junk mail filter caught 4122 of them so thats an accuracy of 99.95% very impressive! I thought I would dig a little deeper and ran a virus check on the emails, 37 were infected with various trojans, viruses, and general nasty spyware. Pretty interesting, I haven’t actively been using that account since about 2003 / early 2004, since then I haven’t sent anything from the account and have been looking now and then at what comes in, and from who. I think it’s time to forget that mailbox.

Was a bit bored so I made a nice little Wikipedia Bookmarlet. To use the bookmarklet just right click and bookmark This link

Any questions or praise let me know!

If you fancy using BlueJ on Mac OS X, head over to bluej.org and grab the stable version for Mac OS X. Once downloaded you will have the BlueJ folder, just put this where you keep your other apps. This is a stock BlueJ install so you will need to add the OU components.

Note: I have seen another site that says to put bsh-2.0b4.jar and ou.jar in /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.5.0/Home/lib/ext/ this location is the actual Java system and should not really be touched. The Location /Library/Java/Extensions is the official location for additional jars and classes specified by Apple, all extensions are loaded when the JavaVM is started up. Another advantage of this approach is that if Apple updates the Java installation which is common this location is static and will just work with future versions.

If you want some more info, or find this useful leave me a comment.

I got fed up with the standard Mac OS X removable media icon on my USB stick so I have made a nice SanDisk Cruzer icon.

All the files are in there for both Mac and Windows. If there is some problem the png’s of the different sizes (16×16 to 512×512) are also in there. For Mac users it’s best to just copy the icon and paste it on the USB stick in the “Get Info” window. Sorry Windows users your on your own. For more info on the Cruzer see USB Flash Drive – Removing U3

Spotlight is the search system built into Mac OS 10.4 or higher, whenever you make a change to a file spotlight comes along and indexes the metadata of that file. This feature is great it means that you can find stuff really fast. Whenever you attach an external disk to the system Spotlight will index the drive also, this can be very annoying if say for example you have a separate partition with another copy of Mac OS X that you don’t won’t indexed, or it could be a partition containing your backups.

There is a configuration panel in System Preferences for things to exclude from the Spotlight search but drives don’t seem to stick. Under the hood of the OS there are some utils that can help here. one is called mdutil. mdutil which I suppose is named metadatautil really lets you turn Spotlight on/off and lets you delete the metadata store so that it could be rebuilt.

To deactivate Spotlight on a certain drive (in my case my firewire drive called “TinyDrive”) just enter the terminal and do the following.

If you want to reactivate Spotlight use the main command above but changing off to on

Hope this helps