I admit, I’m a suckar for the macbundles from Macheist, you usually get 1 or 2 really GOOD apps and then a few so-so apps that you would never buy, but some how glad they are included.
Mac Journal was included in the latest bundle. It’s “shocking” a journaling software that might just allow me to post more blog posts.. so I am testing it out, yes, atypical for a mac fan.
For OSX – dterm is a quick term, by no means is it a replacement for iterm or term. But it’s starting to be one of those apps that one uses daily. I highly suggest giving it a try! [ get it here ]
My favorite application on my mac is of course mail.app, but as you can see from prior threads, I’ve been having some issues! Mail.app just gets, boggled down, my “Envelope Index” grows up to 20MB and mail.app starts to fall apart and SLOW down.
So I recently found the All Mail folder on my gmail account, it had a crazy 30+ thousand messages. Here is the quick fix!
I’m going to link this to macosxhints.
I admit it, I have an iPhone, and I love it, but I hate the ear buds that come with it. So the other day I was talking to the great Shane Lowry and he had mentioned that he picked up some z.buds. I was in the market really for a new blue tooth head set since I have been doing a lot of driving, I have been using the Apple ear buds with the built-in mic, and they have been at best “ok”. So going on the advice of Shane, and a 35% coupon, I picked up the z.buds. I’ve had them officially 2 days, they are noise canceling and the sound out of them is A-W-E-S-O-M-E, don’t go spending $99 on the Bose earbuds, when you can get a better sound, with a mic, for much less.
A while ago I started having a lot of problems with one IMAP account I have configured in mail.app on my mac.
I took the standard approach to delete the account, re-create it, and so on. You can see from prior posts, I ran cli maintenance on the sqllite3 database that mail.app uses.
I got fed up and decided to try something, I would delete the Envelope Index file. The file was around 30mb in size, not huge, but decent size.
When I started mail.app back up, it had to understandably rebuild each of the mailboxes I have configured. When it finished, it is now only 10mb in size, you think there might have been some corruption?
Creating a Nagios plug-in looks daunting and hard at first. It’s really not as hard as you think.
Here is a couple things you should know:
Know what you want to monitor.
I create most of my plug-ins in bash scripts and perl scripts. (other languages supported, those are just what I use)
Know your exit codes.
Your plug-in output should be helpful and informative.
Exit codes are simple, and key to your plug-in success.
0 – OK
1 – WARN
2 – CRITICAL
3 – UKNOWN
Now those look family don’t they, they are the states or status of a service. i.e. my disk space is in OK state because I have 120GB free space.
here is a sample code snippet:
if [ $space -ge $CRITCAL ] ; then
echo "DISK SPACE CRITICAL - 90% disk space used [10GB free on /]"
exit 2;
fi
Need Nagios/Monitoring consulting? Maybe I can help, I am currently working on, as project lead, one of the biggest Nagios installs, for a Wal-Mart and Novell.
Assume knowledge = 0, start from there..
-Mohammed Shakir Ali
Boil the Ocean
The phrase “”Boil The Ocean” describes an attempt at something that is way too ambitious, effectively impossible. The first time I heard the term was several years ago from an IBM developer. I thought it was an IBM-ism but I’ve been hearing it more and more outside of IBM. When asked by a reporter what to do about U-boat sinkings during World War I, Will Rogers is said to have responded: “Boil the ocean”. “But how would you do that?” the reporter continued. Without a beat Rogers replied, “I’m just the idea man here. Get someone else to work out the details.”
http://www.comlay.net/ibmjarg.pdf
Hard stop in xx
I open an ssh tunnel all the time while I’m work. I found this nifty little app a while back for my Mac that manages all my ssh tunnels.
I could open up a term, and type ssh -N -p 22 -c 3des jhigley@XXX.dnsalias.com -L 6667:XXX.dnsalias.com:6667 each time I wanted to open up an ssh tunnel for IRC, but instead I open up STM and it auto connects each of my tunnels for me.
You can get it here.
MarcoPolo was a game we used to play in the pool. The idea, was one person was it, and would close their eyes and yell “Marco!” the other people in the pool would say “POLO” thus giving their location away. The person yelling marco would have to hunt down someone until they tagged someone. It’s a twist on the game of tag.
Recently I started consulting, I’m on the road a lot now. Mostly between 4 different locations: Home, Office1, Office2, Hotel. This application, call MarcoPolo allows me to define a few location, by probability, i.e. the wifi ssid I connect to is “Hotel” then I’m probably at the location Hotel, or if my ssid is guest and I hook my USB drive up, I could be at office1. After I define my locations and what happens at those locations comes the fun stuff, MarcoPolo kicks into gear, I can define rules, so I can say at office1,
Or when I get to the hotel, I wanna relax,
I recommend getting this app, it’s worth the download, best of all it’s free!
See more about it here.
My mail.app has been feeling a bit bloated lately, running a bit sluggish, wrong count numbers showing up, etc. So I went on a the hunt to make it faster and less bloated.
On your mac goto: ~/Library/Mail/ and you should see a file called: Envelope Index, note the size of that file.
Now, exit mail.app (command-q)
open Terminal
go to “cd ~/Library/Mail”
and run “sqlite3 Envelope\ Index”
now inside of sqllite, type “vacuum subjects;” this will vacuum the bloat out of your inbox, for 1 the size of Envelope Index should be a lot smaller, and for 2, your mail.app should be a lot faster!