Rubénerd Blog :)

Having fun with FreeBSD on my Libretto this afternoon, I didn’t have internet access to install Vim from ports so I decided to finally learn more about the bundled nvi editor. I missed syntax highlighting, but if you customise it right it’s still a nice, lightweight, capable editor.

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You can use a real, physical drive as a bootable hard disk in Sun Oracle VirtualBox using an undocumented feature, and it even works on Mac hosts!

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I tried to extract a ZIP file I was send this afternoon and got the following error with unzip…

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When I first bought this Western Digital MyBook back in 2008 I thought 1TB was so gigantically massive as to be practically infinite, but here I am in 2010 with four of them and they’re almost all full to bursting. Because I travel and study abroad I need external drives, and I spent extra money to have FireWire versions, so I decided to swap out the 1TB drive from one of the enclosures and fit in a 1.5TB instead of buying another separate unit.

Thanks to some detailed instructions from Carlton Bale it didn’t take too long and am now in the process of moving all my stuff over to the new drive. Wonder how long this one will last?

Having just come back to Singapore I tried to use my Huawei E180 dongle to connect to SingTel’s mobile broadband, but it completely failed in Snow Leopard. Fortunately there’s a simple enough fix.

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I can never seem to remember this line, so I’ve decided to put it here. If you want access to the BIOS in VMware Fusion virtual machines so you can change the device boot order and so forth, add the following line to the machine’s .vmx file:

bios.forceSetupOnce = "TRUE"

When you reboot the VM will load the BIOS configuration screen without you having to frantically press a command key like F2 or DEL. When you reboot, the default behaviour returns.

The problem is, Fusion VMs are configured by default to boot from the hard drive first then the optical drive, meaning once you’ve installed an OS it ignores booting from the optical drive entirely. This will let you take care of this.

Grilled cheese sandwiches have cheese.

One of the most common uses for the Stacks feature on Leopard and Snow Leopard is to have an icon for the primary hard drive sitting in the Dock; it allows you to navigate most parts of the entire filesystem include user folders, applications and so on. Problem is, you need a separate icon for each drive.

This afternoon though I found a way to have one Stack icon for all your drives: drag the /Volumes folder onto the dock instead! /Volumes is the hidden folder on your Mac’s primary hard drive that contains the mounts for each of your other drives.

To unhide /Volumes so you can drag it onto the Dock:

1. open the Finder
2. click Go to folder on the Go menu
3. enter /Volumes (including the forward slash) and hit Return
4. click the column view toolbar button

Unfortunately, the bad news is List view just displays a series of aliases that launch in the Finder. If you use the Grid view on Snow Leopard though you can now navigate to all the folders on all your mounted drives with one icon.

Appropriate photo of plate stacks by Egan Snow on The Wikipedias.

Linked lists are useful for replicating and extending the functionality of object arrays, but they can also be used to replicate other linear strings of data such as a stack. From my high school days as an Apprentice Perl Monk I got used to using push and pop with arrays and hashes; turns out they were functions for a form of stack.

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Given my MacBook Pro’s sudden loss of a screen I’ve had to rely on my ThinkPad X40 with Debian to be my mobile workhorse not just a netbook while I get it fixed. As such I’ve decided to start a small series of posts on how to make the Gnome desktop more Mac like. Riveting stuff!

If you’re used to Mac OS X, the title bar buttons all seem to be in the wrong places in Unix like desktop environments. In KDE and Xfce it’s easy to modify their positioning, but in Gnome you have to use the Configuration Editor.

Fire up the Configuration Editor from the Applications > System Tools menu, then expand out the apps folder, then the metacity, then click general. The eighth item down is titled button_label and by default has the following:

menu:minimize,maximize,close

You can emulate the layout of Mac OS X by changing it to:

close,minimize,maximize:menu

Note the American spelling, a few times I wrote that line and couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t working, turns out I was spelling the words with s not z!

These steps are current as of Gnome 2.26.1.