Archiv des Autors: Tim Pritlove

Whirr… shhwip! :>POOF!<: *gleam*

Veröffentlicht am von
Antworten

Oh my god! They‘ve done it! As it seems, Apple has introduced a really cool under-the-hood feature into Mac OS X 10.3 (you know, the black cat thing). It is some kind of auto-defragmentation within the HFS+ file system.

As documented in this Ars Technica Forum Thread, the source code for this can be reviewed in the recently posted Darwin sources.

Heres how it works: files under 20 MB in size get checked for fragmentation on open and if they are too distributed, they get reallocated. So a contiguous block of data is allocated, the data is copied over and the old data gets cleared afterwards. The result is a nicely ordered file. No need for disk doctors anymore as this seems to be a viable solution to the problem of scattered data.

Here is the fun part: the source code itself contains a nice illustration of how this thing works. It‘s so great: whirr… shhwip! :>POOF!<: *gleam*

/*
 * Relocate a file to a new location on disk
 *  cnode must be locked on entry
 *
 * Relocation occurs by cloning the file‘s data from its
 * current set of blocks to a new set of blocks. During
 * the relocation all of the blocks (old and new) are
 * owned by the file.
 *
 * -----------------
 * |///////////////|
 * -----------------
 * 0               N (file offset)
 *
 * -----------------     `´`´`´`´`´`´`´`´`
 * |///////////////|     }    whirr...   {     STEP 1 (aquire new blocks)
 * -----------------     `´`´`´`´`´`´`´`´`
 * 0               N     N+1             2N
 *
 * -----------------     -----------------
 * |       ////////| ===}|///////        |     STEP 2 (clone data)
 * -----------------     -----------------
 * 0               N shhhwip!            2N
 *
 *                       -----------------
 *     :>POOF!<:         |////*gleam*////|     STEP 3 (head truncate blocks)
 *                       -----------------
 *                       0               N
 *
 * During steps 2 and 3 page-outs to file offsets less
 * than or equal to N are suspended.
 *
 * During step 3 page-ins to the file get supended.
 */

I love it.

Konfabulator makes the Desktop a reality and iChat even more useful

Veröffentlicht am von

I was a bit picky when taking a look at Konfabulator, a subsystem for Mac OS X allowing you to run menu-less widgets on your desktop. Widgets are written in JavaScript and usually do just a small thing much in the tradition of the UNIX toolbox („do one thing well“) but with the beauty of Mac OS X icons. Back then I was looking for my „killer widget“ in Konfabulator and I didn‘t find it.

Checking it out once more recently finally revealed even three of the that are now running on my desktop.

  1. The first killer widget is „Weather“ which comes bundled with the standard download. Just enter the name of your city into the preferences and the tool displays current weather conditions in more than well-designed graphic style on your desktop. You even get a two-day lookahead, ideal for couch potatoes that consider even a short peek at the outside a unworthy loss of computing time.
  2. Number two is „Calendar“, simply showing the current month with the current day highlighted and no other useless extra features.
  3. Number three, actually forcing me being a convert, is the well-hidden „iChat Bezel„, just recently improved by and called „iChat Bezel Enhanced“ with a bunch of welcome extra options. This widget couples with iChat and displays a OS X style „bezel“ window (lie the ones for brightness, volume etc.) for every status change of one your buddies. So you can immediately see when one of your buddies goes online or offline, becomes idle etc.

The creativity of widget designers seems to be endless. I just discovered a widget called „Berlin Clock“ that mimics the fancy „Ku-Damm Uhr“ that once stood in the center of Berlin (West) at Kurfürstendamm.

By the way: Konfabulator was just updated for Mac OS X 10.3 with version 1.5.2. The iChat Enhanced Bezel needs to be updated to work with this version. But you can do it for yourself: version 1.5.2 uses a new XML parser that seems to be a bit more strict (which is a good thing). The iChat Bezel widget uses a (non-standard) „macintosh“ encoding in one of its files so it does not parse. Heres how you fix it:

  1. Locate the „iChat Enhanced Bezel“ widget file in the Finder
  2. Select the „Show Package Contents“ action from the context menu
  3. Locate the „iChat Alert.kon“ file in the „Contents“ folder
  4. Drag the file to the TextEdit application
  5. Replace „macintosh“ with „utf-8“ in the first line. The file does not contain any non-ASCII characters so this is not a problem
  6. Save the file
  7. Restart Konfabulator and double-click the widget in the Finder to open it

Chaos Computer Club Public Wiki

Veröffentlicht am von
Antworten

Huh. We have finally managed to convert the Camp Wiki to a general Chaos Computer Club Public Wiki System. Radar has spent many hours separating the Camp content and putting it in its own section (called a „Web“ in Twiki speak). If you had an account on the Camp Wiki, it should still work.

This makes the Wiki usable for more than just a single event and the new „20C3“ section invites you to use the Wiki for planning your activities at the upcoming Chaos Communication Congress in December.

I admit the CCC Wiki is still no beauty albeit being useful. Unfortunately, even the next release of TWiki (which was expected in August but still isn‘t ready) won‘t bring much in terms of CSS-based design. So it would be another hack changing the templates to allow for a more sexy look. But so far at least the features are nice. Go ahead and use it!