Mac Geekery

Ever get that lovely “overlapped extent allocation” or “missing extent” error when checking your drive in Disk Utility? Notice how it never gets repaired when you repair the disk? There’s a reason: it’s technically irreparable.

The extents that the error is referring to are the file fragments on your drive. There’s a special catalog file called the extents B-tree (this is also sometimes referred to as the extents or extents overflow file) that holds all of the information on which files have which fragments on the disk. Each fragment is an extent. When you have a missing extent then you have a record that states that there are a certain number of extents for a file, but the known extents are too few for that file. There's more »

Would you believe I forgot my password? Yeah, didn’t think so.

MacGeekery isn’t dead, it’s just, sadly, not a priority of mine at the moment. The day job is taking up increasingly more of my time and my wife and I are expecting our first child in the next couple of weeks (which means I’ve been playing proto-daddy for the past nine months). In short: I ran out of time.

I haven’t run out of information, though. I’ve had to make Mac OS X do a fair share of crazy stuff in the past year or so that I need to write up and document (which is, actually, how I started this site many years ago). Hopefully life will work with me rather than against me here.

If you have something you’d like to contribute, we’d love to have it and put it up. Remember that if you have an AdSense code that you get a portion of the ad shows for anything you post on your account that’s accepted (add your code in your profile page). So it’s not just to keep the site going, it’s a nice way to get some additional hits on your account as well.

I do expect well-written pieces, though. I’ve rejected quite a few for being too short, too obvious, or too poorly-written to really fit in here. Read some back tips and see if you can get a feel for it.

Meanwhile, I’ll be shooting for one tip a week. I can’t promise unique tips (I’ve been out of it for almost a year) but I can promise a unique write-up and perspective. There's more »

CUPS is the name of the service that handles printing in Mac OS X 10.3 to 10.5. It has a lot of features that aren’t really pushed in the GUI in Mac OS X, but users are able to get at those features by using the special administrative interface at http://localhost:631/.

One of those features is classes. A class, in this context, is a group of printers that can be made to look as if it were one printer. This is great in lab settings where you have half a dozen printers of the same type as you can add them all to a class on a print server and have everyone print to that queue. Then whichever printer is free (or round-robin) will print the job. There's more »

I needed to change many iBooks from having a Preferred Network (and wanting to keep looking for that network) to automatically joining any open network and not giving a preference to that certain network.

I found that the two preference files involved were:

• /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.airport.preferences.plist
• /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/preferences.plist

I also found that the computer name is kept in preferences.plist, so copying these two files out to all the iBooks would have resulted in a same-name-game fiasco. Soooo, my solution was to:

1. Copy /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.airport.preferences.plist out to all the iBooks using Apple Remote Desktop.
2. Issue the following UNIX command as root also using Apple Remote Desktop: sed -i.backup -e ‘s/Ranked/Automatic/’ /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/preferences.plist

This command will search through the preferences.plist file for the word Ranked and replace it with the word Automatic.

If you move the Leopard dock to the side of the screen you get a dock with a gray background rather than the glassy surface. If you want that dock on the bottom of the screen as well, simply run the following:

defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES
killall Dock

This sets a hidden default on the Dock and then forces it to restart.

There are a plethora of hacks to change the translucent menu bar in 10.5. While I doubt the sanity of the UI designers at Apple with this release of the operating system, it is relatively easy to change this behavior without installing third party hacks. There's more »

I went to the GUI feedback session at WWDC last year and in the midst of all the yelling and screaming over the new dock and menu bar there was one guy with a wholly different mission: be able to turn off tooltips. His complaint (a valid one, I feel) is that every time he wants to sit and think about what’s on-screen, a little yellow box comes up where the mouse is, and there’s no real “safe spot” for the mouse that doesn’t do this in most applications.

So, I present a little tip I discovered shortly afterwards and appear to have not written up. I dedicate this to Tooltip Guy, wherever he is.

defaults write -g NSInitialToolTipDelay 99999

You now have 99.999 seconds to think at a given time. Replace -g with the ID of any application to change it in that application.

I was at WWDC this last year and went to a lot of sessions that were interesting, but didn’t really grab me and tell me that I absolutely had to learn the technology and use it. It was all interesting, of course, but … eh.

Then I went to a session on using Xray (now Instruments) and DTrace to debug things. Yes, things. It’s not just for developers and their programs, but also for sysadmins and their systems. After I saw what it could do, well, let’s just say I had a domain name registered and a site up before the next session (I love Drupal). That site is DTrace Scripts. There's more »

NetInfo is dead. It’s gone. It’s a part of the past. It’s like that ghost of a bad dream you have in the morning where you can’t quite remember why you’re shaken, but you just remember that you were and that it was horrible.

Leopard ate NetInfo.

In its place is a new native Directory Services store based on folders and XML property list files. Yep, a replacement for flat files that uses … flat files. Kind of. There's more »