Some tools just keep amazing me. They are flexible, stable, small – basically, they just work. One of these tools is 7-Zip.
It does a lot more than just creating 7zip archives: it is able to create and open almost any package type I’ve run across so far. And it even reads .iso image files.
Thanks a lot for this marvelous tool – it’s a joy to use and a definitive must-have! 
You are new to *nix and/or you need a concise overview of your new toys’ command line tools? Then don’t miss the Unix Toolbox!
Whether you are looking for a handy summary to carry around, or a help to get started quickly – this is what you are looking for.
NetBeans 6.7 has just been released, and I am really curious about it. Installation worked like a charm, but the app failed when being launched in the Finder.
I tried “open /Applications/NetBeans/NetBeans\ 6.7.app/” in the Terminal, but all I got was “LSOpenFromURLSpec() failed with error …”.
Luckily there’s this blog with a decent solution:
1. open Terminal.app and log in as root (sudo -s)
2. enter this:
# cp -p /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.5.0/Home/bin/java /tmp/java_original_binary
# lipo /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.5.0/Home/bin/java -remove x86_64 -output /tmp/java
# cat /tmp/java > /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.5.0/Home/bin/java
NOTE: you need root powers for this hack – don’t try this if you don’t understand the code. If it fails you are on your own…
Feel free to launch NetBeans now
I just noticed one nifty feature of my MacBook Pro: “automatic” deep sleep.
When you close the lid of your MB(P) and the white light on the front begins to flash slowly, it has suspended. As soon as you open it, it will wake up and fetch its session data from ram. That takes just a few seconds, and then you are good to go.
But what happens if the Mac loses power while suspended? All data stored in ram would be lost, and a normal reboot would be required. So a “suspend to disk” seems to be a better choice – but a wake-up would be pretty much slower.
Mac OS X is pretty clever: it seems to go for “suspend to ram” by default, but persists your session to disk as well. So you get a fallback (“wake from disk”) whenever the Mac has been suspended, but “wake from ram” failed.
I really like PuTTY – it might not be the perfect terminal emulator, but it does its job quite well. But sometimes you need to fumble around a bit to find the perfect settings for yet another server.
However, I found these default settings with quite useful:
Window -> Appearance -> Font: Courier New or Lucida Console
Window -> Translation -> Character Set: UTF-8
Window ->Translation -> Line Drawing: Use Unicode Line drawing code points
