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MCOD – 6.6.10 – Macbook Pro Core i5/Core i7 Battery Fix

Jon Zobrist — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 17:48:36 +0000

If you purchased a new Macbook Pro with a Core i5 or Core i7 (The 15″ or 17″ ones for now) you probably expected the nice battery life they talk about on their site, when I bought this one it said 8-10 hours, but currently it says 8-9 hours for the 15″. Imagine my surprise when I routinely get 3 hours of battery life. Doing a quick Google search finds lots of people with the same complaints. If you dig into this a bit you will learn that these Macbook Pros have two graphics cards, one from NVIDIA that is fast, but power hungry, and one from Intel, that is slow but saves your battery.

The nice thing about this is your computer automatically handles which card to use, giving you the performance you need, and saving battery when it can.

In theory, this is great. In reality it’s a total joke, an EPIC FAIL on Apple’s part. You see, they switch based on which applications are running, guessing they need the graphics based on the libraries they load, it seems. This would be great if it was things like World of Warcraft or Photoshop, but Skype? Evernote? Give me a break!

You can go to power settings and disable automatic switching, however this sets it to ALWAYS use the Nvidia chipset, and gives you permanent short battery life.

In comes donation-ware graphics management tool gfxCardStatus written by Cody Kreiger.

Download the zip file
Unzip and move gfxCardStatus to Applications folder
Run gfxCardStatus, you will see an icon on your menu bar with either an ‘n’ or ‘i’ to indicate when you’re running in Nvidia or Intel graphics mode. Intel will give good battery life (5-6 hours for my core i5 15″), and Nvidia will give 1990′s battery life (3-4 hours on the same core i5 15″).
Click the icon, change to Intel only. Enjoy better battery life!
Set calendar appointment for 1-2 weeks in the future to go back to Cody’s site and donate a dollar or two for his work.

I plan to leave this on Intel only and see how both my battery life and performance is. I don’t play any games on my laptop, so I expect I won’t notice the difference.

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MCOD 5.11.10 – Clear network settings on a Mac in OS X

Jon Zobrist — Tue, 11 May 2010 17:30:00 +0000

I got a new MacBook pro, one of the core i5 ones, and transferred all of my data with time machine restore, which is absolutely awesome, btw. But my ethernet interface never worked! Being the IT guy I need my ethernet interface to work, so I searched online for someone else who had the same problem. Unfortunately, everything I found was simple fixes for simple problems. So I made an appointment with the mac genius hoping they could solve my problem, and they did.

They went to my hard drive->Library->Preferences and deleted the folder there called “SystemConfiguration”
Then rebooted, and viola, a working ethernet interface.

So, what must have happened to break mine, is when I restored my mac with time machine, it confused the network interfaces somewhere. The interface showed up, but always said ‘cable unplugged’. I had tried everything; deleting the interface in the network section of system preferences, configuring the interface with ifconfig in Terminal, creating multiple interfaces, rebooting, different cables, different networks, and different locations. The time machine had restored my network config folder and prevented OS X from correctly seeing the right interface.

The Mac genius said it can also help if you’re having problems staying connected to a wifi network.

Hope this helps!

Update 6/7/2010:

Here is a good article on troubleshooting your Mac OS X wireless networking at osxdaily.com

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LCOD – 4.12.10 – Quick Mysqlreport to e-mail setup

Jon Zobrist — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 00:31:57 +0000

This will be a quick install to setup your server to e-mail you daily mysql reports using the cool mysqlreport application at hackmysql.com

As the user you want to set this up on, run the following commands.

(Note that I touch and then chmod og-rwx the .my.cnf file, since you’re putting your users mysql password in it, creating it and making it unreadable before editing is always a good idea.)

wget http://hackmysql.com/scripts/mysqlreport
chmod uog+x mysqlreport
mkdir bin logs
mv mysqlreport bin/
touch ~/.my.cnf
chmod og-rwx ~/.my.cnf
vi ~/.my.cnf

Now, put in a client section like this in, you can find your sock file with grep sock /etc/my.cnf, or grep sock /etc/mysql/my.cnf

[client]

user="root"

password="password"

socket=/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock

Now, install perl’s DBD::MySQL

Debian/Ubuntu:

sudo su

apt-get install libdbd-mysql-perl

via CPAN/Other Linux/Generic BSD:

perl -MCPAN -e shell

Optional, update CPAN:

install Bundle::CPAN

reload cpan

(If there are errors on following some dependencies exit, and restart your CPAN shell, then start with install Bundle::CPAN)
Install perl DBI

install DBD::mysql
exit

Now, run it to test, you should see a bunch of text output

~/bin/mysqlreport

Now, set it up to run from cron

crontab -e

Add a line like this (this will email to test@example.com a full report nightly at midnight, and put the last nights report in /home/USERNAME/logs/mysqlreport)

0 0 * * * /home/USERNAME/bin/mysqlreport --email test@example.com > /home/USERNAME/logs/mysqlreport.log 2>&1

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LCOD – 5.9.07 – Updating CPAN in Perl

Jon Zobrist — Thu, 10 May 2007 05:35:59 +0000

Perl rocks, it’s easily my favorite programming language. One of the nice things about Perl is the CPAN (Comprehensive Perl Archive Network). Your Linux box has CPAN installed already, and to begin using it you should first update it. To do so run the commands just below. The first time you invoke CPAN it’ll launch the configuration module, just hit enter until it gets into the part about which mirrors you want to use, it’ll have you pick geographic areas first, and then tell you to enter servers by number, separated by spaces. I usually put in about 20 servers, which looks like kinda this

30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10

#invoke perl’s CPAN shell (and first time configuration with)
bash$ perl -MCPAN -e shell
#once configuration is done, update CPAN, and then reload
CPAN> install Bundle::CPAN
CPAN> reload cpan

Now, head on over to CPAN and search for some cool new Perl modules to play with!

A great place to dive into the world of Perl is Perl.org

Also the Perl Monks is a good Perl site, and Use Perl is as well.

Make sure you have a correct build environment setup, on Ubuntu/Debian you need to install the build-essential package (sudo apt-get install build-essential)

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LCOD – 3.12.07 – Speeding up your DNS queries

Jon Zobrist — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 05:16:50 +0000

I did some testing and OpenDNS is fast.

To change to use OpenDNS instead of your own, or worse! your ISP’s crappy, poorly maintained dns server, you can follow the instructions here.

http://opendns.com/start/

The basic info is to put in these 2 IP’s as your dns servers

208.67.222.222
208.67.220.220

On Linux/*BSD you’d put them in your /etc/resolv.conf file like this

nameserver 208.67.222.222
nameserver 208.67.220.220

If you’d like to double whammy your performance run a local cache, I use DJB’s djbdns dnscache in forwarding only mode, as described here.

http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/run-cache-x-home.html

With the above IP’s in the @ file.

Installing DJB’s stuff is cake, you can pretty much cut & paste his instructions found here

http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/install.html

Of course you’ll need Daemontools, and ucspi, install instructions (cut & pasteable) here

http://cr.yp.to/daemontools/install.html
http://cr.yp.to/ucspi-tcp/install.html

If you get compilation errors cuz DJB hasn’t fixed a bug in his code and some systems (lots of recent Linux systems), run these commands.
(run after you’ve extracted the archive, and cd’d into it’s directory, and run for EACH install.) You may get a no such file for the src one on some, but he mixes software locations, so just run em both.

perl -pi -e ‘s/extern int errno\;/\#include /’ *
perl -pi -e ‘s/extern int errno\;/\#include /’ src/*

Enjoy!

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LCOD – 2.18.07 – Simple command line perl substitutions

Jon Zobrist — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 05:15:10 +0000

Ever have a list of things that you want to change all the same? Say you have an image directory and you want to make an html list of all the images in your directory? Perl to the rescue!

first, make a file that lists all the images (we’re using *jpg, but you could do *gif, or *coolimages*, or just * for all files in the dir – note: all files in dir * with a redirect will catch the file you are redirecting to, and it will likely need to be removed)

From the shell / command line, run:

/bin/ls *jpg > ourfiles

Now the fun part! This will take a line like this

picture1.jpg

And make it look like this

From the shell run / command line, run:

perl -pi -e ‘s/^(.*)$/<\/a>/’ ourfiles

The basic pattern of this command is

‘s/SEARCH PATTERN REGEX/REPLACEMENT PATTERN/’

The search pattern is a Regular Expression, and the Replacement Pattern needs to have any special characters escaped (including / $ # @ “) with a \

The Search Pattern we’re using is a simple one ^ for start of line, (.*) for . anything and * any number of times, with paranthesis around it to put it into the perl variable $1, and $ for end of line.

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LCOD – 2.5.07 – Debian package management

Jon Zobrist — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 05:14:05 +0000

This is all over the web, but for some inane reason I can never find it when I need it.

List all packages installed in a Debian system, piped to more for readability

dpkg -l | more

(dpkg dash lower case L pipe more)

Seach installed packages for ones containing the word foobar

dpkg -P /*foobar/*

This info from this site
http://electron.mit.edu/~gsteele/debian/

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LCOD – 10.28.05 – Howto speed up RAID 1 rebuild w/links

Jon Zobrist — Sat, 29 Oct 2005 05:11:10 +0000

This should be in EVERY linux RAID howto

echo -n 500000 > /proc/sys/dev/raid/speed_limit_max

Because it defaults to sooo slow to fix raids.. and you can just turn it up… so lame that it’s not in every howto.

It is in this howto http://togami.com/~warren/guides/remoteraidcrazies/

Which has a few steps I didn’t use, using Gentoo, but was a great walkthrough…

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LCOD – 5.9.05 – mounting cdrom (iso) images transparently

Jon Zobrist — Tue, 10 May 2005 05:07:03 +0000

mount -o loop /path/to/cdimage.iso /mnt/imageX

that’s it, of course you’ll need a kernel with loop support, but most modern linux’s have this built in.

This lets you save a CDR and get faster access to CD media you’ve downloaded. I use this at work to install Oracle from the hard drive remotely instead of having to be on side swapping CDROM’s.

Also, if you have a CD that you’d rather have an iso, here’s how to rip iso’s easy like..

dd if=/dev/cdroms/cdrom0 of=/path/to/cdimage.iso

you may went to grep cdrom /etc/fstab to see what the device is of your cdrom. Also, I’ve had some problems with this failing with copy protected type cdroms, sometimes if you mount it first it works better, sometimes worse.

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LCOD – 5.2.05 – Removing ^M from WINDOWS text files

Jon Zobrist — Tue, 03 May 2005 05:06:10 +0000

You get a file with ^M at the end of every freaking line, and open it up in vi and want to just rip off the last line

This you don’t type ^ you hit CONTROL.

:%s/^V^M//

so you type
:%s/CONTROL-V CONTROL-M//ENTER

ALSO:
You get a file with ^M at the end of every freaking line, and open it up in vi and want to just rip off the last line

This you don’t type ^ you hit CONTROL.

:%s/^V^M//

so you type
:%s/CONTROL-V CONTROL-M//ENTER

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