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.

XCode Colours (RGB)
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Comments: 0, 116, 0
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Documentation Comments Keywords: 2, 61, 16
Strings: 196, 26, 22
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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
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Default font: Menlo 11

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.

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.

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

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

The Cruzer features a thing called U3 which is a like most things, a whole load of marketing crap. U3 is supposed to allow you to carry your personal settings between machines and also a place to store your applications. It has it’s own list of software that you can download to store on the special U3 system. so in essence U3 is just an application launcher. (wow a funky marketing name like U3 for a basic old computing idea! Smells like Microsoft to me.)

To achieve this automatic launch they have basically used a special kind on CD file so they can use the auto launch that a lot of windows CD’s use. This combined with carrying data between machines means? you guessed it viruses and nasty stuff can migrate nice and easy. So really if you wanted to use this to move work around and stuff your out of luck as most companies don’t like anything that could inject nasty stuff on to their systems and you could find your self getting lynched by the IT nerd squad.

Anyway this U3 stuff is Windows only so the nasty stuff doesn’t hurt my Mac but the silly CD image used to launch it all on Windows still pops up and gets in the way. The most annoying part is that even if you format the drive the U3 disk image stays there. I spent some time looking round the net and found the U3 website, they don’t provide any direct links from what I could see but you can uninstall this crap and return the stick back to a normal memory stick. The only problem with this is that the uninstall software is Windows only so you if your a Mac, BSD or Linux user your gonna need to either emulate Windows or use another machine.

Uninstalling U3
To uninstall the U3 stuff head over to www.u3.com/uninstall and answer the questions (don’t worry they don’t ask for any personal information so thats cool.) Just tick the options you want like if your a Mac or Linux user check the “I use Mac OS or Linux” option so these companies know we are buying stuff and they should support us better than they do, download the little app and run it. Done U3 gone forever! Now you can use your nice memory stick in peace, I formated mine as FAT32 so I can use it on all platforms.

To start off go and get the latest version of MySQL. Hopefully you have downloaded a nice diskimage (.dmg) this should contain the startup item install package (.pkg) and the MySQL package (.pkg) there is normally also a control panel in the diskimage. I don’t use the startup item as I like to just turn on MySQL when I want it.

Ok make sure MySQL is off, if you have MySQL installed and the control pannel just go to ‘System Preferences’ and click the MySQL icon and hit the ‘Stop MySQL button. Ok Install the the MySQL package, this will install MySQL in the directory /usr/local/ . Sorry but this bit need the terminal people so open it up. Do the following :

I wrote this of the top of my head so let me know if you have a problem.