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
Computers & Technology
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
Getting a new Windows system up and running with Ninite
I have installed Windows quite a few times over this past year, from setting up different operating systems on my home lab server and installing Microsoft’s newest operating system, Windows 8. You’d think that I would have spent hours downloading all the installers for Chrome, Flash, VLC, Notepad++, PuTTY, 7-Zip, and all the other common programs I use and having to click “Next” buttons a million times. Well fortunately there’s a better solution. I came across Ninite a while ago, and it has saved me a ton of time installing the basic programs I use on Windows. With Ninite, you just need to pick the programs you want from Continue Reading
When frames are too many
I was digging around my backups and came across this mockup of a site my friend and I worked on ten years ago, but never published. This was when Microsoft FrontPage was still around, frames were OK, and <blink>, <marquee> and animated GIFs were the rage, and when the whole world used Internet Explorer. I guess it didn’t occur to us back then that nine frames were eight frames too many. Oh, have times changed 🙂 Today, HTML framesets are rarely used. Server-side scripting such as PHP is used to replicate common code across multiple pages. Client-side alternatives such as CSS Continue Reading