Tonight, I was finally fed up with my Terminal window taking nearly 10 seconds to show the initial prompt. I regularly use Terminal to SSH into other computers and to commit and pull code changes in git repositories. The delay was annoying so I looked for help. Luckily, other people on the Internet have noticed the same issue so it wasn’t hard to find a solution. The first one I came across was on this blog post on OSXDaily. Initially, I was a little skeptical of log files having anything to do with the Terminal startup time, but other Google Continue Reading
Dennis
I am currently a software developer at A Thinking Ape Entertainment Ltd. I graduated from the University of British Columbia with a B.Sc. degree in Computer Science with the Software Engineering Option. I primarily speak Python and C# these days, but in the past I've also done Objective-C, Java and PHP.
Outside of work, I'm a volunteer on the youth ministry team at St. Francis Xavier Catholic Church, and also on the Canadian Ski Patrol team at Mount Seymour. I'm also an avid transit enthusiast/photographer.
My “Swiss Army” USB Flash Drive
Several months ago, I added a new item to my keychain: a 32GB USB memory stick. This blog post is about what I did to make the most of this little device so that it would be able to: Support file transfers among operating systems (primarily Mac OS X, and Windows) Support files larger than 4GB Be bootable for rescue purposes (using Hiren’s Boot CD)
USB Controller Passthrough with VMWare ESXi 5.1
Earlier last year I built myself a VMWare ESXi whitebox computer. VMWare ESXi is a light operating system which allows multiple virtual computers (referred to as virtual machines or VM) to be run inside of one computer (called the host) at the same time. For example, I usually have three VMs running on my box including a FreeNAS file server, Ubuntu, and Windows 8. One of the features of ESXi (and other hypervisors) is that you can pass through physical devices such as a video card and USB devices into the VMs. That way, you could interact with one of Continue Reading
New Xcelsior buses hit Vancouver streets
It has been quite a while since we’ve received new buses, especially a new model, here in Metro Vancouver. This past Monday, the newest buses of the fleet, New Flyer Xcelsior XDE60s, commenced revenue service on the #49. West Vancouver also has some Xcelsiors, but they are the 40 foot diesel versions as shown on the right. They have been in service since January. According to New Flyer, Xcelsiors boast several advantages such as better fuel economy, streamlined design, and a better experience for both the driver and passengers. These new buses look a lot sleeker than their predecessors, however Continue Reading
Debugging NSNotifications on iOS
For iOS developers, this is a really cool technique. Sometimes you want to see all the NSNotifications that get posted in your app, whether it is for debugging, or to see the timing of where listeners can be hooked in. Using breakpoints in Xcode will allow us to inspect the notifications. Follow this procedure to set it up: In Xcode, open the breakpoints panel on the left sidebar. Click the + icon at the bottom left of the panel. Select “Add Symbolic Breakpoint…“ Enter the following details: Symbol: -[NSNotificationCenterpostNotificationName:object:userInfo:] Click Add Action and enter the following details: Debugger Command: po Continue Reading