Randquist Rants » os x

Clearing your DNS cache on OS X

CobyR — Sat, 30 May 2009 21:29:04 +0000

To clear the DNS cache on Mac OS X 10.5 use:

dscacheutil -flushdnscache

on 10.4 and earlier try:

lookupd -flushdnscache

Needed this just now as I was setting up the new sub-domain for Goruco 2009 Confreaks site.

CentOS – Parallels Virtual Appliance

CobyR — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 16:56:49 +0000

Parallels, provides as part of their community section a nice directory of virtual appliances for download with Parallels 2.0 and above. You can find it at Parallels Appliance Directory. The CentOS 5 Server application has been a great starting point for me for testing deployments of some of our applications. I really do love the ability to spin up multiple virtual machines for development and testing purposes.

yafinr – Yet Another Forum (in Ruby)

CobyR — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 09:09:22 +0000

After installing and supporting YAF.NET (http://www.yetanotherforum.net) for a couple of clients, I have decided to build another YAF, but I’ll do it in Ruby. The trips back into the land of ASP.NET and C# have been painful to say the least.

So tonight I started hacking… haven’t done much of that in a while, too busy wrapping my head around the trappings of managing an increasing team of developers at YELLOWPAGES.COM. So I got the latest rails, created a respository on my dreamhost account for SVN, and then realized… wait… why SVN? Why not git?

I have an account on github, so in an effort not to fall too far behind I went to install git:

port install git-core

-bash: port: command not found

Ah yes… this is not my personal Mac, it is my YPC Mac, MacPorts has not yet been installed. So I went out and got 1.60 of MacPorts… installed nice and easy, and started the git install. Well I forgot the amount of time required to install git on a pretty clean Mac. It’s still fetching bits and pieces, building ncurses as I type.

So tomorrow night I’ll actually through a basic site up on yafinr.randquist.us, and go from there.

My initial thoughts are to reverse engineer the functionality of yaf.net. I like the product, just don’t like moding it.

On another note I fired off quotations (some late) to RubyNation, “Voices that Matter: Professional Ruby Conference”, and the WindyCity Rails Conf.

Cleaning up the .svn directories from OS X or Linux

CobyR — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 22:38:42 +0000

Handy little command to quickly remove all those .svn subdirectories from a project.

find . -type d -name .svn | xargs rm -rf

another alternative

find  . -type d -name .svn' -print0 | xargs  -0 rm -rdf

Personal Brain 4.0

CobyR — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 08:35:55 +0000

I’ve been using Personal Brain (http://www.thebrain.com) for a little over five years now. With this latest version they have finally released a client for OS X as well as for Linux.

It is great to not have to use Parallels to access it. For a while I switched to Journlr under OS X, but I have so much stuff and time into Personal Brains that Journlr inspite of some really cool features, couldn’t overcome my history.

Now with PB 4.0 on the mac, I have made a couple of additional utilities. I wrote a small ruby script that I can run from a command line that creates entries into a text file. Then I wrote an applescript that will read the log file and locate the appropriate thoughts in my brain and add the children thoughts to it.

It’s been fun and interesting… next step is to play with RubyOSA, although I don’t think that will go very far. Currently Personal Brain is not a scriptable app with apple script, so RubyOSA can’t find a definition.

Journler

CobyR — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 03:22:56 +0000

I’ve been playing on my Macbook Pro, and came across an application called Journler (http://journler.com).

It seems to be a very flexible and supports auto-posting to blogs that support the MetaWeb-API, as well as directly posting to LiveJournal.

Mac OS X / Ruby – RubyConf 2006

CobyR — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 23:03:37 +0000

As luck would have it, a little over two weeks after I purchase my Macbook Pro, Apple bumps from Core Duo to the Core 2 Duo http://www.macmegasite.com/node/3237.

At RubyConf 2006 this past weekend, Laurent Sansonetti of Apple Computer gave a great presentation on Ruby OSA http://rubyosa.rubyforge.org/ for manipulating Apple Events in Ruby.

Michael Granger presented his Linquistics library Ruby Linguistics for ruby that looks to be a lot of fun for Natural Language Processing with Ruby.

There were several other highlights, one of which for me was getting to meet other people working with this language and making a living doing so, and on that note I would regreat not mentioning Nathaniel Talbott and his presentation on “Open Classes, Open Companies”. See his web site at http://terralien.com/.