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Valgrind on Mac OS X merged to trunk!

Nicholas Nethercote just posted about Valgrind on Mac OS X having been merged to the Valgrind’s trunk. Valgrind is an incredible debugging tool, if you aren’t familiar with it already I’d really recommend you take a look. As far as I’m concerned this is one of the most exciting things to happen to Mac OS X […]
2009 05 28
9 months, 15 days ago. Comments (0)

So what is /dev/autofs_nowait ?

When examining running processes and logfiles on OS X, it’s quite common to see calls to open ‘/dev/autofs_nowait’, but what’s the file for?? Looking at the on-disk file doesn’t give many clues: ls -al /dev/autofs_nowait crw-rw-rw- 1 root wheel 10, 27 May 4 17:29 /dev/autofs_nowait So just how often is this file getting […] Tagged , , ,
2009 05 10
10 months, 3 days ago. apple Comments (2)

OS X Semaphores

Amongst many others, OS X has the following synchronization primitives: Named POSIX semaphores pthread condition variables Mach Semaphores Unnamed POSIX Semaphores (sem_init()) are not supported (the function is defined in the header but calling it returns ENOSYS). Named POSIX semaphores and condition variables are implemented internally using Mach semaphores which in their own right […]
2008 12 25
1 year, 2 months ago. Comments (0)

virtualenv

This looks really useful… (via James Bennet’s article on pip). Python, Software
2008 12 15
1 year, 2 months ago. Comments (0)

Fun with duplicity

I was playing around with crontabs and duplicity today on OS X 10.5 Leopard. I’d written a python script that executes duplicity, my script ran just fine from the shell, but churned out the following cryptic error message when run from crontab: … Cleanup of temporary directory /var/folders/7Q/7Qlu3ZqFHeuxCbNgaimO2E+++TI/-Tmp-/duplicity-ben2Y6-tempdir failed - this is probably a bug. Traceback (most recent […]
2008 12 13
1 year, 2 months ago. Comments (0)

frustration

It’s a little frustrating when you google for information on something only to find that the top links are things you’ve written. Software
2008 11 18
1 year, 3 months ago. Comments (0)

Opt-In?

Yesterday I ordered tickets on Fandango, at the end of the process I was rewarded with a familiar popup window at the bottom of the browser. Turns out, Fandango are nice enough to automagically add a post to your Facebook minifeed when you order movie tickets through them. The sad part is that this is turned on […] Tagged ,
2008 08 17
1 year, 6 months ago. Comments (0)

Hidden Gems

Google just released an open source C++ style guide, lots of good solid advice in there. Software
2008 06 29
1 year, 8 months ago. Comments (0)

Make

Much to my chagrin, I seem to be finding myself in need of understanding and making fundamental changes to Makefiles for various projects I’m not familiar with, every few months. I’ve found the $(warning “foo”) and $(error “foo”) directives pretty useful in this capacity, the former printing some text during a Makefile’s evaluation, and the latter […] Tagged
2008 05 18
1 year, 9 months ago. Comments (2)

Batteries Included

A neat property of Python’s sort function is that it automatically sorts list of tuples by the first value of the tuple, this means that if you have a list, lets say of files and their sizes and you want to sort by filesize, you can do: >>> a = [(200, ‘foo.txt’), (100, ‘bar.txt’)] >>> a.sort() >>> a [(100, […] Tagged ,
2008 04 27
1 year, 10 months ago. Comments (0)