linux to an imac: 2002/09: dummynet ::.terms and sgml-mode ::.dmg and linux? ::post-jag emacs::jag diffs

Being a bit of a - I was going to say luser but my interpretation of that term was a little off-mark when I looked on the www ... (I'm not that bad) - being a bit of a person who should know about it already, with my interest multiplied by a growing worry about the bloat of this page, I found this section of man ipfw in Jaguar quite exciting:

     Should we like to simulate a bidirectional link with bandwidth limita-
     tions, the correct way is the following:

           ipfw add pipe 1 ip from any to any out
           ipfw add pipe 2 ip from any to any in
           ipfw pipe 1 config bw 64Kbit/s queue 10Kbytes
           ipfw pipe 2 config bw 64Kbit/s queue 10Kbytes

     The above can be very useful, e.g. if you want to see how your fancy Web
     page will look for a residential user which is connected only through a
     slow link.

Unfortunately, every attempt I made to replicate this in the command line failed with ipfw bringing up a usage message that failed to mention the pipe command.

dummynet is what's lacking. Part of the FreeBSD kernel. But if you really, really want it, it can be done, albeit with some serious, if not too difficult hacking (my reading of the mail is that it's refactoring rather than reimplementing).

2002-09-16 23:08 / .terms and sgml-mode »

.term files - and plists in general - are xml files. So, to get emacs to recognise them as such, and give you syntax highlighting (provided font-lock-mode or global-font-lock-mode is set) as well as menus and commands aplenty, add this to your ~/.emacs (substitute extensions and modes for other file types as appropriate, e.g. .t and cperl-mode for perl tests; .shtml and html-mode for SSIs):

(setq auto-mode-alist
      (append
       (list
        '("\\.term\\'" . sgml-mode)
        )
       auto-mode-alist))

2002-09-10 11:50 / .dmg and linux? »

"The ability to distribute disk images (.dmg) files is currently exclusive to Mac OS X." The core hdiutil - used to manipulate (create, convert, attach, burn, ...) disk images - isn't open source yet, partially because of some proprietrary codecs it uses. There's been a request on darwin-development for it to be so, with an encouraging response, but nothing definite was said. So .dmgs aren't even available in Darwin without OS X, let alone linux, windows, or, I'm pretty sure, OS 9. (It's barely worth mentioning how short-sighted it is to have an OS specific means of distributing software, and that even more so for plain old source code.)

2002-09-05 22:09 / post-jag emacs »

Seems to be emacs-on-aqua. (Addendum: In fact it's been pointed out to me - thankyou :-) - that the cvs emacs can now be built for carbon. Instructions are here, and it even - yaay - opens files from the cli with open -a /Application/Emacs.app myfile.)

2002-09-04 10:35 / jag diffs »

I've hacked together a list of the programs from /usr/bin and /usr/sbin that changed pre- and post-Jaguar. I claim no accuracy since I muck about with my system so much, and some might have simply moved from somewhere else.

What's in there anyway? Well, there's the whole set of bz* compression and searching utilities; a suite - and enormous api (in C not Obj-C but I guess there'll be a cocoa wrapper) - of ldap programs; info; the nicely-named wire-test that tests for NFS services and dumps ip config stuff; an smb suite; python; ruby; screen, which is damned useful, although I might have just installed it myself; amd; and cups, as heralded. Many of the extras are either (a) disk admin tools, (b) security and authentification daemons and apps via ldap, kerberos, or (c) ip6 tools. Lots of detail from Apple here.

Oh, and pmset works now as well.