Author Archives: Michael Richmond
Tape? Does anyone care about tape anymore?
Various friends and colleagues have been amused, occasionally stunned, but more often incredulous when I tell them that I am working on a project based on data tape. The commonly ventured opinion is that I should maybe think about working … Continue reading
# reboot
I have planned to move my blog to a hosting service for a while now. The administration overhead of self-hosting ended up taking up time that could be better spent writing. An unexpected change to my DSL service took my … Continue reading
Problems with the OS X 10.5.5 update and X11
After upgrading to OS X 10.5.5 I ran into an issue with X11 refusing to start. I first noticed this issue as a problem with ssh hanging while trying to establish a connection. When I dug into this problem I … Continue reading
Embedding a command line tool within a Cocoa application
I’m developing in XCode and have manged to import the source code for the command line tool as say command_line.c. What do I need to do to have this file built as a command line tool that is embedded in the main Cocoa application? Continue reading
Undoing Undo!
Consistency in the user interface is a vital part of making applications easy to use. Arguably, UI consistency is a significant factor in the oft-repeated ease-of-use provided by MacOS and now OS X. Certainly Apple pushed their User Interface Design … Continue reading
Papers for OS X… tame those random .pdf piles
During the course of my Masters and PhD work I accumulated a veritable mountain of papers… articles ordered from library research services, photocopied papers tossed on my desk by my advisor, and the occasional seminal paper that I stumbled across … Continue reading
Apple’s new sales feature
Time was when purchasing an Apple computer was a pleasant experience. You went into your local Apple Store and browsed around. Maybe you did this a few times, poking at all the shiny machines on display. Eventually, one one of … Continue reading
When RAID-edition doesn’t mean “will work in a RAID”
At work last year I built out a home-grown RAID solution to support my current project. RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks. RAID technology has been around since the 1970s and provides both a way to use multiple … Continue reading