Leopard

Performance of Aperture 2 vs Aperture 3 on Leopard

It seems that either Aperture 3 has been seriously geared towards Snow Leopard or it's just generally slower than the previous version. I've found that Aperture 2 (v2.1.4) is two to three times faster to work with on my Leopard (v10.5.8) than Aperture 3 (v3.0.3). Sad

My frist crash/freeze with the MacBook Pro

Unfortunately I just had a unpleasant experience: my Mac crashed/froze while I was watching a movie in VLC player. In the middle of the screen the following message appeared (indicating a kernel panic): "You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button." (And the same message appeared in French, German and in a language that I suppose was Japanese. See attached image.)

NoobProof - an IPFW frontend for noobs

NoobProof is a complement to WaterRoof (a professional IPFW frontend), but aimed at "noobs". Smiling
I decided to link to it, because I love its icon. Laughing out loud


How to spoof the MAC address in Leopard

I've googled quite a bit and did not find an answer to the problem. You'll get a lot of hits on the subject though and most people tell it cannot be done. In Tiger the following one liner worked like a charm:
ifconfig en0 ether AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF
But in Leopard not anymore. Or at least not for the wired (Ethernet) network adapter. The above method still works for the Wi-Fi interface though, but that's not much of a solace to most of us.
The solution is quite easy to guess and pretty easy to do: simply replace the network driver of Leopard with the one of Tiger. Smiling

Using Python's IDLE with the preinstalled Python 2.5.x of Leopard

This short post describes how to keep Leopard's built-in Python distribution and install IDLE on top of it.
The three steps to follow are:
  1. Install only PythonApplications-2.5.pkg from the official Python for Mac DMG (it's in Contents / Packages / MacPython.mpkg)
  2. Create a symlink:
    cd /Library/Frameworks
    sudo ln -s /System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/ Python.framework
  3. Erase "/Applications/MacPython 2.5/Python Launcher.app" and "/Applications/MacPython 2.5/Build Applet.app"

DTrace in Mac OS X 10.5.x

DTrace is a modern tracing framework developed by Sun and now ported to Mac OS X and included in Leopard. The vast potential of DTrace can be exploited through a simple scripting language named "D". There's a very good tutorial on "Exploring Leopard with DTrace", a DTraceToolkit containing a bunch of advanced DTrace scripts and DTrace Scripts, a site dedicated to such scripts. DTrace is a huge leap forward in system profiling and performance analysis, and once you've dived into the subject, you'll find out how much more you can do with it. Smiling

How to get a list of configured services on Mac OS X 10.5.x

There's a command called service in /sbin. The manpage will tell you that it can list all available services on the system and using the --test-if-configured-on option you can test whether a service is currently enabled or not.

How to change the background image of the login screen

Approximately 7 out of 10 articles will tell you to overwrite the image file that the OS uses as the login screen background by default. Of course this is not the correct way to go since this image is in the /System subtree (/System/Library/CoreServices/DefaultDesktop.jpg to be precise) and theoretically a system update could write back the original image. Instead set the proper system preference to point to the image of your choice:
defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow DesktopPicture "/Library/Desktop Pictures/Jaguar Aqua Blue.jpg"

To revert back to the default behaviour you've to delete this preference since it was not there originally at all:
defaults delete /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow DesktopPicture

First glitch in Leopard

It's a very small bug and not that much annoying, but still ... Smiling If you set in "System Preferences" / "Energy Saver" that the display should be put to sleep after some time of inactivity, then it happens quite frequently that waking the display from sleep mode triggers Exposé's All Windows effect. To be precise, I used to press one of the Ctrl buttons since they used not to do anything in themselves, but are still capable to waking up the Mac.

Exploring Leopard with DTrace

This article gives you a short introduction in using DTrace. Thanks to airwin for the link.

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