Montag, 18. November 2013

Chrome and high CPU load on MacOSX

I'm using an old 2008 Macbook at home as my couch-computer, and found Chrome using 100% CPU time and again.

Killing the process that produced the load (remember, chrome is multi-threaded) the gmail tab crashed. My old Mac makes a lot of noise being so strained, so I went looking.

And found this.

Basically, some bug in the changing wallpapers of gmail triggered this. I changed my wallpaper back to a basic theme (mahogany) and now the CPU idles, fan stays off, all is good in this world.

Dienstag, 12. November 2013

Remove Dashboard

Every mac user knows dashboard. 

'Isn't that the stupid nearly empty page with the weather on top that comes up when I switch workspaces the wrong way round?' 

Yes avatar of all annoying users, it is. 

'Disable it!'

No, it can not be done. 

...

Mavericks: But it can!

On the shell:
'defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean true'

Restart & done! 

'Thank you, now make my battery last 20 hours!' 

Donnerstag, 7. November 2013

Kerberos Auth broken AGAIN (and works again)!

Long time no post, but with Mavericks, new challenges arise.

Obviously two users installed it even before I got a chance to read what had changed - Apple's gotta love the adoption rate (Mavericks being free and all). But it went fine, nothing big broke.

Our kerberos enabled Mercurial broke because the installer empties the whole python 2.7 site-packages folder (why ever! I belive this will produce lots of 'fun' for admins), but that was easily fixed and only hampered the devs (which now use git anyway).

The other fallout was the breaking of the Authentification Server Whitelist of Chrome. So none of our internal Web pages were accessible over chrome, forcing users to use the shiny new Safari. This happend before. And I fixed it before. And I fixed it again. =)

Interestingly, I just needed to reverse the changes made the last time it broke, namely reintegrating MCX setting into the main user group. It seems MCX inheritance over groups is now broken.

Huzza Apple, once again your own enterprise features are the least tested features!
Why not be consequent and kick out this token open directory once and for all? At least I would be finally forced to migrate to Active Directory and could stop wondering if this other, MS flavoured pain would be nicer than the bleak, dead landscape of mac server with its layers of broken bones of cats past, yellowed documentation printed on papyrus and fading ghosts of forgotten visions.