MTR is a useful command-line utility which combines ping and traceroute to display the path packets are taking between two machines.
I’ve compiled mtr-0.71 it for Mac OS X, and you can get it here: mtr.zip.
The zip file contains a universal binary, a man page, and a README file telling you what to do with them.
If you like this, you might also like my ports of wget and bacula-fd.
Ah, lots of fun stuff this weekend. Here’s a great video clip showing what the kitten of today likes in the way of toys.
Thanks to Tom Coates for the link.
Vienna is a very nice RSS reader for the Mac. And it’s free.
I used to use a separate RSS reader in the early days of blogging, but stopped when Safari supported all the basic functions I needed, and did so very nicely. I’ve often considered switching to Firefox as my main browser, but I haven’t seen any extension which does RSS as neatly as Safari.
Vienna might just be nice enough to persuade me that a dedicated reader is a good idea again, though, which would free me to consider other browsers. Worth a look, anyway.
Hah! That’s nothing. See Giles Turnbull’s post on ‘Fast OS Switching’. “Until very recently, this sort of thing was just a daydream…”
I’ve also been doing some fun experiments with virtual machines.
What’s this?
It’s the entrance to a shop. Seen from below. It’s part of an nice set of photos of Apple’s new retail outlet on 5th Avenue, taken by Neil Epstein.
I also went to a Mac store today, in Palo Alto, to have a look at the new MacBook.
Much to my surprise, I found myself definitely drawn towards the black version, though not, I think, enough that I would pay the extra $150 Apple charges for black. I heard Tom Standage comment a couple of days ago that only Apple could charge for the colour that everyone else was using anyway!
The case has a slightly matt finish, so it’s probably a different material designed not to show the scratches in the way that the black iPods did, and it may cost a bit more. Probably about $2 more.
But if the case is now matt, the screens are now glossy, in the style beloved of Sony and others. They make photos look very nice (unless you have fingerprints on your screen) but in general I’m not a fan because they reflect too much. Remember the old days of CRT screens when you had to position your computer so your back wasn’t towards a window?
Otherwise, I think this is a lovely design at a reasonable price and deserves to do well. Anyone who’s had to replace the hard disk inside one of Apple’s other recent laptops will also really appreciate how easy it is on these in comparison.
Screencasts are very popular at present, and for obvious reasons; there’s no better way to demonstrate the features of some software you’ve written, or to learn more about software you own.
Here’s a new one by Allan Odgaard, the creator of the TextMate editor, which regular readers will know is one of my favourite pieces of Mac software. This one shows you some of the handy facilities for editing HTML in TextMate.
The best way to keep up with new hints is through the TextMate blog.
The time has come. My old and beautiful DVD player – a Pioneer DV-717 for which I paid £600 a long time ago – is starting to fade. It lost the ability to play CDs some years back, and it’s now regularly having problems with the scratches on rental DVDs as well, while other drives play them just fine. It was time to replace it. I could, of course, have bought a replacement at the supermarket for half the price I once paid for a region-free mod for my Pioneer. But they don’t make them like they used to – anything looks like a piece of junk when placed next to the 717. And, anyway, DVD’s are so last-decade….
Ah… cool. Not only can you subscribe to Google Calendars using iCal but you can subscribe to iCal-published calendars from Google. When you go to add another calendar, you can choose to add one with a ‘Public Calendar Address’. Simply put in the URL of the .ics file that you’re publishing from iCal, and it works fine.
TextMate is a fabulous text editor for the Mac. The best way to get a feel for its capabilities and see what all the fuss is about is to look at some of the screencasts.
Here’s one about writing screenplays.
Here’s another about Python programming.
And there’s an excellent new one about how to customise it which is well-worth watching, especially if a bit of shell-scripting doesn’t disturb you.
Highly recommended.
Just to prove it works, here’s a screenshot of Ubuntu running in a VM window on my Intel Mac:
This is using Parallels Workstation, which is still definitely beta, but shows lots of promise. I hope they make their money quickly, though, because it wouldn’t surprise me if Apple included this functionality in the next release of their OS.
There are a benefits of this over BootCamp besides not having to reboot. One is that the disk image is just a file, and you can clone it and move it around – so you can run your virtual machine from an external hard drive, for example. Also, it can be substantially smaller – you have to set aside 10G or so for BootCamp, while my 4GB ‘disk’ for the virtual Ubuntu installation is actually less than 3GB on the disk – presumably because the disk isn’t full and it does clever things with compressing sparse images.
I did a slightly more interesting experiment with this, too – see the Ndiyo blog for more info.
Wow! This is really interesting! Especially since I’ve just got a new Intel-based MacBook.
My trouble is that I don’t have enough disk space even for everything I want on Mac OS, let alone for another OS as well. It’s the single biggest problem with having a laptop, I find…
“Well,”, said Sam Gamgee, “I’m back”. And so am I, after nearly a month of travel; back to unpacking, clearing my in-tray (which now supports a pile of sufficient height that I’m hoping it may topple over and clear itself), and catching up with all the other things I should have been doing during March.
Of course, all of these might have been done more quickly if it weren’t for the fact that my new MacBook Pro arrived while I was away, so the first thing I had to do after kissing my wife, of course, was to set that up. The Apple migration tools are very good; I just plugged the old laptop and the new one together during the installation, and all my applications, settings, documents, photos, bookmarks and so forth were copied across with no trouble.
So this is my first posting from an Intel-based Mac, and so far, everything is working very nicely.
The new power connector is very neat, but it does mean that all the old Powerbook power adaptors I have lying around won’t work until somebody produces a convertor cable.
There are a couple of apps which don’t work under the Intel and I’ll need to wait for upgrades – NeoOffice and Final Cut being the main ones – but the fact that I’ve only hit a problem with these two is quite remarkable when you consider just how many apps and utilities on this machine were compiled for a completely different processor architecture. The Rosetta emulation technology is really very good and most normal apps and utilities just work.
Otherwise, frankly, it’s not very different from my old Powerbook except that it’s noticeably snappier and has a bit more disk space, and that’s just fine with me! As the saying goes: If it ain’t broke… just make it go a bit faster.
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