Yan Pritzker photographer, entrepreneur, software engineer, musician, skier

Disabling spindump on OSX to prevent slowdown after a crash

Update: it’s better to use a spindump script that sleeps, otherwise launchd keeps trying to restart it every ten seconds. Thanks to Steve Ryner for the script. And yes, it’s very simple but here it is :-)

#!/bin/sh
while true
do
sleep 60000
done

Sometimes when things crash on OSX (biggest offenders: Quicktime, and Safari playing flash movies), a program called [...]

Limiting options in UI design: why I like OS X

I’ve been reading Joel on Software’s ui design book, where he makes several astute observations.

“But wait!” you say. “It’s important to have options for advanced users who want to tweak their environments!” In reality, it’s not as important as you think.
[...] It’s true that the first time they realized you could completely remap the [...]

OS X productivity tip: dock as taskbar

After converting to Mac from Linux (aah, how refreshing), I’ve been finding cool new ways to make my life easier. First of all, I’m assuming anyone who cares about productivity on a Mac has already installed one of the Launcher products. I personally use Butler.
If you’re using these things, you’ll find you’re very rarely [...]

memcached on OSX running fast!

Thanks to Topfunky’s post on memcached, my life has been made much simpler! He’s put together a great little script that downloads memcached and applies the fix that will cause it to run at normal speeds under OS X. I spent about two hours trying to get the sources from darwinports and applying the patch [...]