Al Hoang

I was trying to find out information on what particular version of OS X
I was running from the command line. Being a UNIX type person my first
reaction was to try uname

$ uname -a
Darwin hsph.bebear.net 7.9.0 Darwin Kernel Version 7.9.0: Wed Mar 30 20:11:17 PST 2005; root:xnu/xnu-517.12.7.obj~1/RELEASE_PPC Power Macintosh powerpc

That gives me the version of Darwin running which I could check up against the
following link
and guess my version of OS X however I was told a better way…

Use a command called sw_vers. Didn’t even know it existed! But
just to show you how it works:

$ sw_vers
ProductName:    Mac OS X
ProductVersion: 10.3.9
BuildVersion:   7W98

I was also told of another command to get TONS of information from the
command line. system_profiler

$ man system_profiler
…
system_profiler reports on the hardware and software configuration of the
system. It can generate plain text reports or XML reports which can be
opened with SystemProfiler.app

I am extremely impressed and amazed. I think I can sum it up as…
Build it and you can be sure someone will use it for another purpose

What am I talking about? Taking a 3d game engine RPG and deciding it makes a better tool for doing MTV music videos…

Check out more of Zack’s offerings

One of those things I seem to be good at falling over when
geeking out with technology is falling into all those annoying
corner cases where adding two things together means you get
neither working. So in my little world, 1 + 1 = 0. Or
perhaps a more correct way to express that in logical expression
is 1 ^ 1 = 0 (XOR)

Anyways, this rant is about the lauded Adblock
extension for Firefox and the
SqueakLand plugin. AdBlock is great
for cutting down on all those annoying ads you see in your web browsing
experience but I’ve noticed it breaks the following:

• The SqueakLand Plugin
• Google Videos
• Other Streaming Video sites (can’t remember off the top of my head)

The workaround? Disable AdBlock. Needless to say, this is really aggravating.