fplanque: weblog - English

This weblog aggregates the following blogs:
IT world, dev blog & off topic.

Other blogs not included here:
State of the Evolution
IT world, dev blog, off topic & blog finance.

Sometimes you need an emergency reminder about how to find all files of a certain name in a directory structure… like say: find all .htaccess files hidden in my web site. Well, here’s the magic command:

Code:

Also if you want to look for all hidden files (all files starting with a dot), you’d go like this:

Code:

If you have several servers to maintain like I do, at some point you’ll want to know how old exactly an installation of Debian (or another flavor or Linux) has gotten since you last wiped it clean…

So how do you check the install date?

I found the easiest way was to simply check the date of the lost+found folder. This folder is created at installation time and basically never removed after that. So I just go with:

ls -l /home/

and look at the date for lost+found .

Parallels has recently announced in a video that their virtualization solution Parallels Desktop for Mac now “takes full advantage of the Retina Display on a Mac".

That sounds awesome, but it’s not true. It’s actually pretty much a lie! :( – You can take some advantage of the Retina display, but definitely not full advantage.

All you can do is set Windows to believe it is running with a 2880 x 1800 pixels display. And that is indeed the physical pixel resolution of a Macbook Pro Retina display…

But, in NO CIRCUMSTANCE can you actually map each pixel from the 2880 x 1800 virtual machine to a physical pixel of the actual screen.

What you get instead, is blurry scaling all the waty down!

On the first screenshot below (click to zoom) you will see how 2880 x 1800 is scaled down (and BLURRED down) to 1440 x 900 if you keep you Mac runnign with the default setting of “Best for retian display".

On the second screenshot below you will se how 2880 x 1800 is scaled down (and still blurred down) to 1920 x 1200 if you change your mac display settings to the highest scaled resolution. This solution makes your windows look a tiny little bit better but it also makes your mac apps look less sharp (because they are now scaled too! Remember, you are no longer running in “Best for Retina display” mode!)

Full story »

When you right-click (or control-click) on a file in the Mac OS X Finder, you get a contextual menu with a nice “Open With” option, which lets you open the selected file with any Application that you desire to.

That is pretty nice until that menu gets all clogged up with all sorts of old/broken apps that you don’t use any more.

Due to some caching mechanism, it seems that this menu never cleans itself up :/

So here is how to reset it:

1. Open a Terminal window (by running the “Terminal” Application)
2. Copy/paste the following command: (all on one line)

   Code:

   /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain user

3. Click on the Finder icon and relaunch the Finder (or log out and log in again)

Your ‘Open width” menu will now be all clean… and will start to fill up again as you run/install apps that register themselves there…

LiveHTTPHeaders is a FireFox extension that lets you look at all HTTP headers for all requests issued by the browser.

I am updating and resurfacing this post today since -- after a long while of being mildly maintained -- this fine plugin seems to have effective backing again. Version 0.17 works on FireFox 9.x.

Even in the days of FireBug, LiveHTTPHeaders is still an irreplaceable tool in a web developer's toolkit. As a matter of fact, LiveHTTPHeaders is the best way to track chains of redirects, which FireBug doesn't display right, as it will often clear the "Net" tab from one request to the next.

The header tracking window can be opened through Tools > Live HTTP Header. It will then capture all requests and display HTTP headers being sent as well as headers being received. Note that it is possible to stop capture at any time so the display stops scrolling. It is also possible to filter out specific requests (for example images) with a regular expression (regexp).

The extension also extends the Page Info windows with a Headers tab, which is useful if you just want to see the headers for the current page.

Finally, it's also possible to edit requests and replay them again, modified. At this time this is still in beta though, and Tamper Data may be a better extension for that purpose.