Phasenoise » Mac OS X

LCD Panel Tester

Paul Martin — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 13:52:00 +0000

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.

Download

Download LCD Panel Tester v1.0.1
MD5: f1b6fdd846d81a49bd748c2f6ab6168e

Download LCD Panel Tester v1.0.1 Source
MD5: b8d6b907f521f3371274012efdd345e0

Streamripper On Mac OS X

Paul Martin — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 04:18:25 +0000

I have written about Streamripper before (removed the older post as is was out of date), it’s an interesting little application that I use now and then. I originally wrote about compiling it back on OS 10.5 Leopard, at that time the current version was a bit busted but in the end I got it to work and posted the details here. Times have changed and software changes so I thought I would update the world on my use of Streamripper. After all the messing about I had with the 1.62.x range of Streamripper I had settled on using 1.61.27 with security patches. I used this for quite a while, last year I thought I would checkout the newer versions of Streamripper and found that they had taken the great little tool and added a whole bunch of stuff that had a dependency on the glib2 library, which is massive when you just want a single little tool. I suppose it’s ok if you are running on a Linux box where you have glib2 installed as it gets used by lots of applications, but on other platforms it’s just overkill and I can’t be bothered with it.

With this I mind I got the source code for the last of the standalone versions 1.62.3, it does everything, and doesn’t have a massive dependency problem like the recent versions. I made a small change to the source, compiled it and life is good again, much easier than compiling for 10.5 and all that bag of hurt of the older versions :)

The reason I have suddenly posted this is I have just re-compiled Streamripper for Snow Leopard using the new Clang and LLVM-GCC compilers. As all of Snow Leopards utils are in x86-64 I did Streamripper as x86-64, a few years back I never thought I’d be compiling Streamripper as 64-Bit just seems overkill, but why not :)

I won’t bother with all the building stuff like my last post on the subject as it’s not that hard really.

Enjoy!

Downloads

Download (Streamripper 1.62.3 x86-64)
SHA1: 390c33ce08b5a3f9d72f15cc77523fd153ed9379

Download (Streamripper 1.62.3 Modified Source Code)
SHA1: f4d8d01cc0293dc21e968cb08dc249513fd0e42c

Apple XCode 3.2.x IDE Colours

Paul Martin — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 03:55:14 +0000

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

Make GCC 4.2 The Default Compiler On Mac OS X

Paul Martin — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 12:50:37 +0000

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:

cd /usr/bin
sudo ln -Fs c++-4.2 c++
sudo ln -Fs gcc-4.2 cc
sudo ln -Fs g++-4.2 g++
sudo ln -Fs gcc-4.2 gcc
sudo ln -Fs gcov-4.2 gcov

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.

Safari 3.2.1 High CPU Usage

Paul Martin — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 23:28:07 +0000

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.

To kill the blacklist cache (which is rebuilt afterwards) first quit Safari then open the Terminal and type the following:

sudo rm -r /private/var/folders/*

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

Serious Junk Mail

Paul Martin — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 22:03:22 +0000

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.

Phasecam Widget 1.0

Paul Martin — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 03:24:44 +0000

Well it’s only taken me a few years to get to version 1.0. I started my Phasecam widget back before Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger came out, around January 2005 from what I remember. Last year around Christmas I released a brand new rebuilt version which I did using the beta version of Dashcode. Well this year as a small Christmas present for my fellow Mac OS X users here is 1.0.

Whats New:

Completely new Javascript.
Links checked and fixed, some removed and new ones added.
More Update options.
Updated looks and Phasenoise logos.
Smaller Download

Merry Christmas!

Downloads

Phasecam v1.0.1
SHA1: 918a85124d0118b8f0a147f4d73cca659c20bcbe

New Harddrive (The Click of Death)

Paul Martin — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 00:24:28 +0000

About a week or so before my wedding my good old HD which was a Toshiba drive which came pre-installed in my PowerBook started to show the old age death signs, it wasn’t much of a surprise as I had noticed quite a few bad blocks showing up on the disc and a general increase in noise from the drive. I can’t recall the model of the drive but it was a nice 80-Gig drive running at 5400 rpm and with a massive 16 megabyte cache, overall I was very happy with this drive, I use my machine for roughly 8 to 12 hours a day and over a period of 3 years the drive has never caused any problems. Even with the drive making odd gestures it still wasn’t really missing a beat, but like many things it’s best to take note of the signs and do something about it before the end.

I needed a replacement drive and looked in to the 100 gig version of the drive only to find out that it had been discontinued. I did some looking and my only real options seemed to be drives from Hitachi and Seagate, the Seagate drives were described as being much quieter so I went for the Seagate Momentus 7200.1 drive. As the model name indicates this is a 7200 rpm drive and I have noticed the speed boost.

Overall I was quite happy with the new drive apart from a loud ticking noise, I did some digging around and found out that this noise is related to the APM (Acoustic Power Management) built in to the drive, this tick that APM causes happens roughly every 20 to 30 seconds, this doesn’t sound too bad at first until you dig a little deeper, every tick and the Hard drives Load_Cycle_Count is incremented by 1, so roughly 69 Cycles an hour. The drives life span is rated at 600,000 cycles. At my current usage rate this drive isn’t gonna live too long.

Please note that this isn’t an isolated case either, this is known to Seagate and it’s not just Seagate that seam to have the problem, Toshiba drives fitted to MacBooks like Louisa’s also have high Load_Cycle_Counts Hitachi are also suffering with these problems. The cause of the problem is that the drive makers are setting the default APM values to the most aggressive value, the Operating System of the machine will normally set these values to a more moderate setting when booted up. There are however some systems that do not change these settings Mac OS X being one of them. So from this we can see there is no person that can correctly be blamed for this mess.

All I can really say is thankgod for Timemachine :) I guess I will just have to use the drive till one day in the future when it pings once too many. If your using a PowerBook, iBook, MacBook, MacBook Pro etc… then get hold of the smartmontools from sourceforge and check out your load cycles!

BlueJ On Mac OS X For The Open University (Updated)

Paul Martin — Sun, 03 Jun 2007 11:31:41 +0000

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.

Instructions

1. Right click, or control click if you have a single button mouse on the BlueJ icon. Select the option “Show Package Contents” this will open a window with a folder named “Contents”.

2. Navigate to the userlib folder Contents > Resources > Java > userlib.

3. Pop in the Course software CD, at the root of the CD is a folder named “libraryfiles” go inside here and copy the files bsh-2.0b4.jar and ou.jar to the userlib folder opened in the last step.

4. Next navigate to the folder Contents > Resources > Java > extensions.

5. From the root of the course CD copy the jars “eaextension.jar” and “ouwextension.jar”.

6. In the Finder navigate to the folder named Library in the root of your hard drive and scroll down to the folder Java, copy the same two jars bsh-2.0b4.jar and ou.jar
to the folder named Extensions.

Quick listing:
Inside BlueJ application bundle:
Resources > Java > extensions should contain the following:
eaextension.jar
ouwextension.jar

Inside BlueJ application bundle:
Resources > Java > userlib should contain
bsh-2.0b4.jar
ou.jar

In the Library Folder in the Hard Drive and not in your home folder.
/Library/Java/Extensions should contain the following:
bsh-2.0b4.jar
ou.jar

Thats it done. Now your good to go!

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.

Open University Firstclass Client On Mac OS X

Paul Martin — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 04:36:22 +0000

The Open University are terrible at supporting anything but Microsoft stuff. They seem to treat it like some sort of virus. The Open University use a piece of software for all the communications and stuff called Firstclass Client, they don’t say too much about the software as it comes on the CD that comes with the courses. What they failed to tell you is that it is cross platform! Thats right Mac OS X / Linux / Windows. As of version 8.3 I think it’s also a Universal Binary application so that means that both PowerPC and Intel are supported native.

Once you have downloaded and installed the Firstclass Client it will be missing the server settings for the Open Uni, I guess you could call up the OU computing help desk and get the details or you can use a Windows box to get the details. Just load up Firstclass and when the login in panel comes up click “Setup” and then just copy the server address your-course-server-here .open.ac.uk.

The user interface is the same on all platforms so the OU help desk should be able to help you if your really stuck. It would be pretty interesting to know how many OU people are using other platforms. If you come across this leave me a comment.

Download you flavour here! http://www.intl.firstclass.com/downloads/Clients

Here are some other OU posts I wrote recently, they might help someone out. I need to update the second one a bit.

BlueJ on Mac OS X for the Open University