My article for the MacTech June 2012 issue

Title: Selecting photos in iOS
Subtitle: How to select a photo from the Photo Library in an iOS Application

Mountain Lion: Page Outs

This is the output of the iStat Pro Dashboard Widget.
What it shows is the there are ZERO Page Outs on my iMac running Mountain Lion after 3.1 mil Page Ins!
This for me means that Mountain Lion has better memory management than Lion (and the other Mac OS X versions)!

iPhone 5? (rumors)

I really like its design!

Wireshark and Mountain Lion

$ wireshark 
(process:28125): Gtk-WARNING **: Locale not supported by C library.
Using the fallback 'C' locale.
(wireshark:28125): Gtk-WARNING **: cannot open display: 


The Wireshark Macports version does not work on Mountain Lion so I downloaded WireShark from http://www.wireshark.org/download.html.


The problem was X11. The solution can be found at: http://xquartz.macosforge.org/landing/.

Installing (MacPorts) MySQL on Mountain Lion

$ sudo port install mysql55 mysql55-server

The following command makes MySQL use a "normal" MySQL configuration file because the default is not good at all:


$ sudo cp -av /opt/local/share/mysql55/support-files/my-small.cnf /opt/local/etc/mysql55/my.cnf


$ sudo /opt/local/share/mysql55/support-files/mysql.server start
$ sudo -u _mysql /opt/local/lib/mysql55/bin/mysql_install_db
$ sudo /opt/local/lib/mysql55/bin/mysql_secure_installation


And you are done!

Twitter is down...

http://status.twitter.com

Before leaving Lion

I will wait for the following things to completely go to Mountain Lion:

• MacPorts compatibility
• LaTeX compatibility
• Finish a MacTech article I am writing :)
• Check if my HP OfficeJet 8500 printer is supported

All of them are very important to me and I want to make sure that they will be fine.

I think of doing a clean install.

Mountain Lion officially released!

Mountain Lion will be officially released on Wednesday 25 July 2012!
I may try to do a clean installation – it takes more time but generally I think it is better.

My twitter account

I created a Twitter account: @mactsouk
It will be a low volume account.

Why I like my Cisco

I really like my Cisco 877W ADSL router. Although its setup is relatively difficult, its capabilities are a huge time saver.
In order to reboot it, I just execute the following command:

$ ssh cisco reload
Password: 


Proceed with reload? [confirm]y
Connection to cisco closed by remote host.


If I had a cheaper ADSL router with a Web interface, it would take much longer!

Adobe Flash Player 11.3

SetFile command

If for some reason you cannot see a HD as an icon on your Desktop, run the following command (replace the <Drive Name> with the actual name):


$ SetFile -a v /Volumes/<Drive Name>/

Mac OS X 10.8

Mountain Lion

Being a Developer has its advantages. One of them is that I will try Mountain Lion before its official release :)

Steve Jobs on programming

"I think everyone should learn how to program a computer, because it teaches you how to think. I view computer science as a liberal art, something everyone should learn to do."

Steve Jobs

Angry Birds Seasons free!

It is free for today -- the only Angry Birds game I did not have!

A simple dd test (SSD vs HD)

This is a simple and not scientific benchmark, using the dd UNIX command, that will give you an idea of how faster an SSD than a usual hard disk is.

1TB SATA hard disk

$ dd if=/dev/zero of=bigfile1 bs=10000000 count=512

512+0 records in

512+0 records out

5120000000 bytes transferred in 59.423885 secs (86160640 bytes/sec)

256Gb SATA SSD

$ dd if=/dev/zero of=bigfile1 bs=10000000 count=512

512+0 records in

512+0 records out

5120000000 bytes transferred in 22.594125 secs (226607583 bytes/sec)

The results are impressive!