Category Archives: Mac OS X

Mac OS X

What are the best utilities in Mac OS X?

There are whole websites dedicated to answering these kinds of questions. However, for the kind of work I do as a computational scientist, I have found some favorites over the last seven years of using Mac OS X. From now on, my current favorites with brief rationale for each one will be posted on the tools page of this blog. That page has also been added to the navigation bar at the top.

Please let me know if your favorites differ from mine and why — there might be a better program out there that I’m missing out on!

Leopard 10.5.2 Is Out

Apple has finally released the much-anticipated 10.5.2 update. Unfortunately, Mail.app still says I have 4.3 billion email messages. Sadly, I’m not that popular unless you maybe count spam.

Hopefully they’ll get that one in 10.5.3.

I’ve updated my lab machine, a 2x dual-core Xeon machine, and it seems to be working alright so far. The big test will be whether it fixes the stupid airport network non-listing problem on my MacBook.

How Many iPods Do You Own?

There’s an interesting iPod ownership survey over on MacOSXHints.com — a site I often find answers on when doing Google searches for Mac issues. I have three, though one of them was an old Shuffle found lost on the street in our neighborhood, so I’ve only ever purchased two.

How many do you own? Take the poll here.

So far “1” is winning with “2” and “3” close behind.

Command Line Tricks – Using mdfind and mdls in Mac OS X

Beginning with version 10.4 (“Tiger”), Mac OS X has had a powerful indexing and search engine built in. This can be used from the graphical interface, which is how most mac users interact with it. However, a command-line interface allows for some powerful searching and scripting.

This article by Andy Lester goes through the basic usage of the mdfind and mdls utilities, and gives examples of how to use them with UNIX pipes and in shell scripts.

Just as an example, to find text in any file on the system with find and grep, you’d have to do something like:
find / | xargs grep "my search string"

This would run grep on every file in the system, which is horribly inefficient and will take forever. With mdfind, you’d simply type:
mdfind "my search string"
This will use the existing search database to find the appropriate documents.

(N.B. – Spotlight cannot actually do a “phrase” search like the find/grep example above. See this story for more detail and some work-arounds.)

Turning off IPV6 in Leopard

I was unable to use dial-up over my T-mobile phone until I disabled IPV6 in Leopard. The command to do that is:

sudo networksetup -setv6off <interface>

For me, interface was Bluetooth for the Bluetooth connection and the name of my phone for the USB connection. This will depend on whatever your phone calls itself over USB.