Users and login

Use the root superuser

sudo su -

Alter login variables (such as $PATH, $EDITOR)

nano ~/.profile

Other available shells

• /bin/ksh
• /bin/tcsh
• /bin/csh
• /bin/zsh

Files management

Output the contents of a file

cat /some/thing

Get 20 lines from the end of a file

tail -n 20 /some/thing

Get the first 20 lines of a file

head -n 20 /some/thing

Create an empty file

touch /some/thing

Redirect the output of a command to a file (overwrites)

command > /some/thing

Redirect the output of a command to a file (appends)

command >> /some/thing

Append the timestamp to a file

touch /backups/backup_`date +%s`.txt

Change to the last directory you were in

cd /var
cd /etc
cd - # will take you to /var

List file size in human-readable units

ls -lh /dir/or/file

Available editors

• /usr/bin/vi
• /usr/bin/vim
• /usr/bin/nano

Applications and processes

Run a process in the background

command &

List running processes

ps ax

The first column will be the PID

Kill a process by pid

kill -9

Kill a process or processes by name (e.g: the Dock)

killall Dock

Open an application (Mac-only)

open /Applications/iTunes.app/

cd /tmp
wget http://www.lua.org/ftp/lua-5.1.4.tar.gz

Extract and compile:

tar -xzvf lua-5.1.4.tar.gz
cd lua-5.1.4
make macosx

Test and install (if test goes through)

make test
sudo make install

And you’re done!

If you hate the default icons as much as I did, you’ll be relieved. I took chris.ivarson beautiful Gmail icons and adapted them for the OS X Leopard toolbar.

Click here to download the replacement icons, and read the INSTALL file for instructions (downloaded [downloadcounter(gmail-notifier-0.1.zip)] times).

As a happy Overflow user, I was pleased to see Stunt Software was also into the invoicing / time tracking applications business.

I tried a number of online alternatives to solve this problem, none of which satisfied me (including the popular Harvest and TickSpot). The simplicity and beauty of On the Job is just what you’d expect for an application that will be assisting you on a daily basis with your work, without getting in your way.

A summary of the changes:

• White, centered title instead of the yellow one
• Less cluttered bottom part: a single button, more writing real estate
• Retweeting feature and icon. Maybe the button of the user webpage should go too, so that only Reply and Retweet stay, which are message actions.
• Search feature. Upon pressing Command + F, the message input goes away and is replaced by search.

I’ll review the key new features of Safari 4 next.

Better browsing screen real state

They probably got the hint for this idea from Google Chrome. But I doubt Chrome for Mac can come with a half as nifty implementation. Each tab has a handle to regroup them into new windows, and the default behavior of dragging them is moving the window, which is nice.

No more about:blank for new tabs

This feature is called Top Sites.

Again, another feature that Chrome already has, although Firefox was playing with the idea before.

What sets Safari 4 apart is the implementation and style. It’s easy to trigger it whenever you like by clicking and the screenshots display takes up all the window space. The rounded display of the windows also helps you find the one you’re looking for more easily, definitely a nice optical trick.

Even better for us web developers

If you have used Webkit nightly you know what I’m talking about. Safari 4 includes the revamped developer tools that more or less offer what Firebug offers.

The CSS inspector now works exactly like Firebug’s. It displays all the declarations related to a particular element style, crossing out those that are overridden by another declaration. Hovering the element tags in the inspector adds a blue shade to the rendered element, a feature I’ve been long missing. It also seems to differentiate padding or margins in the shade.

The live DOM HTML element editing is much niftier than Firebug’s. It does syntax highlighting, and you just have to double click what you want to edit, and only a particular section will be selected. If you just want to edit an attribute, you can do that. The same applies for the node content.

What is the inspector still missing? A boxed representation of the element with the element, borders, padding and margins width, and a better location for the “Inspect Element” icon, which I use all the time. Highlighting of the element when an attribute or its content is altered, which is a very useful Firebug feature.

The conclusion

The performance has also been enhanced, which you can tell immediately. The Javascript engine is one of fastest out there, and it overall works excellently for a beta.

While it really doesn’t have any truly innovative features, I insist that Safari succeeds at integrating what it was missing with astounding elegance. That applies for the Dev tools, the new tab bar, the tab page placeholder, the history search, and much more.

Maybe Safari can now become both my development and browsing platform.

defaults write com.apple.Safari TargetedClicksCreateTabs -bool true

Via: p@rrish blog

If you’re an OS X user and a web developer, you know how difficult things can get to test your websites or scripts on Windows browsers. Some of the alternatives you might be familiar with are:

• Installing Windows XP and Parallels
• Installing Windows XP and VMWare Fusion
• Installing Darwine and IES4OSX

Each of them has its disadvantages. The first two involve purchasing software (and the OS, if you don’t have it), and the third can turn out to be slow, crash or provide a different browsing experience.

After watching the screencast by Jeff Couturier I finally achieved the cross-browser, cross-platform testing Nirvana. Here’s how

1. Install an IE8 Beta Windows XP VPC with VirtualBox (IE8). Follow the instructions here. Unlike the original article, we only set up one virtual machine for all our testing needs. You can use The Unarchiver in place of 7zip.
   
2. Install MultipleIE (IE3, IE4, IE5, IE5.5 and IE6)
3. For IE7, use IE8 Tools > Compatibility View option
4. Install Safari or Google Chrome (Webkit)
5. Install Firefox (Gecko)