Eric di Luccio » os x

2*sin(Pi/3)+tan(Pi/4) = 2.732050

Eric — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 21:32:43 +0000

I stumbled upon this today: I just found out that Spotlight (in MacOS X for you people using OS from the darkside) can do some maths on the fly. Awesome…

chmod 775

Eric — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 00:17:08 +0000

Among all the MacOS X releases, 10.5 (leopard) is definitively not the most stable. It’s getting better update after update though. In my experience 10.3.x was the most stable.

If for some reasons you get the infamous grey screen which last for ever during the boot, or if the mac keeps on doing loops during the boot, here a solution to your problem by booting in single user mode.

1- reboot the system or force reboot the system if it is stuck by pressing : ctrl+apple+start button

2- immediately after the starting chime, press and hold apple+s

The mac will start in a single user mode which is just a hoardcore unix terminal mode. At this stage, be very careful because you will have full privileges on the system.

3- type: fsck -fy then press enter. fsck command will check/repair your hard-drive.

4- type: mount -uw / then press enter

5 – type: chmod 775 / then press enter

6 – type: reboot then press enter. The mac will reboot and the glitch is gone…(hopefully)

Internet nearly everywhere

Eric — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 02:31:58 +0000

This other day, I tethered my cellphone (Samsung SLM A747) on my MacbookPro over a bluetooth connection. Now I can use my cellphone to connect to the internet virtually everywhere. The nice thing is that you don’t have wires in you way. How to do it ? First you need a cellphone with an edge/3G network and bluetooth . After it is very straightforward using with Mac OS X (10.5) . Once your cellphone and mac are able to see each other, go to Preference panel / network / bluetooth. Click on “configure a bluetooth device” and follow the instructions, select your cellphone in the list. When it asks “do you want to connect to internet using your cellphone ?” select yes. When you are done on the bluetooth panel (network preferences), select “display modem status in the menu bar”. Done ! To connect, just go to the menu bar and select ” bluetooth connect”

The good thing: Internet pretty much everywhere totally wirelessly. The speed depends on the strength of your cellphone reception. The bad thing: expensive since without DATA plan, ATT charge $0.01 per 1Kb. So I added the unlimited DATA plan (MEdia Max Unlimited) to my contract so I won’t have to pay a ridiculous expensive bill.