Cloning a DVD on Mac OS X 
Saturday, 25 July 2009, 12:47 PM
  1. Ensure that dvdrtools is installed (it includes growisofs tool). With MacPorts installed on your machine this is just as easy as running sudo port install dvdrtools.
  2. Rip the DVD using MacTheRipper. It keeps the original format and removes any DVD protection.
  3. growisofs -dvd-compat -Z /dev/rdisk1 -dvd-video -V <your_dvd_title> <directory>. Note that <directory> is not copied to the DVD, only its content.

If you have Path Finder installed, you do not need growisofs. After having selected the directories (inclusive!) you want to have, just click the Burn icon, choose the Hybrid format.

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Wake on LAN 
Monday, 6 July 2009, 09:21 PM
Wake on LAN is a technology that allows a network professional to remotely power on a computer or to wake it up from sleep mode. By remotely triggering the computer to wake up and perform scheduled maintenance tasks, the technician does not have to physically visit each computer on the network.

A more detailed definition can be found on Wikipedia.

A small Mac OS X application, WakeOnLan, helps you to wake up resp. put a connected computer into sleeping mode.

To know how to wake a sleeping Mac with via Automator go here. If you want to 'control' a Windows machine, you first have to perform some configuration steps on the target box.

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Safari 4 hidden menus: Develop and Debug 
Sunday, 5 July 2009, 09:35 PM
I just discovered that Safari 4 comes with two hidden menus which can be easily switched on and which are quite useful for developers: Develop and Debug. To activate the Develop menu, go to Preferences > Advanced > "Show Develop menu in menu bar" (see picture below).



To activate the Debug menu, enter the following in a terminal window:

defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeInternalDebugMenu 1


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eyePlorer.com 
Tuesday, 30 June 2009, 09:31 PM
Another pretty cool knowledge engine: http://www.eyeplorer.com/.
vionto GmbH develops knowledge machines. Machines that know. Machines that think. Machines you can interact and communicate with. Our knowledge machines are based on advanced semantic technologies.

Our approach is inspired by current research results from cognitive science, computational linguistics and neurobiology. We aim at radically improving the way users interact with knowledge and information online. Recent studies show that human thought processes have a strong visual component and that the brain can process images significantly faster than textual information. We are convinced that it is time for innovative, interactive, visual methods of working with and discovering facts and information instead of wading through ever longer lists of documents and search results.


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-XX:-HeapDumpOnOutOfMemoryError 
Saturday, 27 June 2009, 04:05 AM
This Java Virtual Machine (VM) option came with Java 6. It dumps the heap to file when a java.lang.OutOfMemoryError is thrown.

A heap dump is useful in production systems where you need to diagnose an unexpected failure.

-XX:+HeapDumpOnOutOfMemoryError does not impact performance , it is simply a flag to indicate that a heap dump should be generated when the first thread throws a java.lang.OutOfMemoryError.

Because this option is so useful, it has been backported to Java 5u7 and Java 1.4.2_12.

More on VM options can be found here.


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