BSD VM

I'm reasonably familiar with the virtual memory systems on classic UNIX, Solaris and current Linux.  However, now that I'm even more a Mac user and (back) in the BSD world, I find myself trying to recall the specific details of memory states, active, inactive, free, wired.

Here's a good reference.  It's not the most lucid discussion but it's accurate.

Chapter 7.  Virtual Memory System, from the FreeBSD Architecture Handbook, The FreeBSD Documentation Project at freebsd.org.

RFC 3331 and Bash

I've mentioned ISO 8601 here.  As of yesterday, I've started aliasing the shell date(1) command to issue an ISO 8601, RFC 3339 format with the day of the week prepended.

Here's how date(1) normally looks.

Tue Mar 30 06:09:20 EDT 2010

With the bash alias

alias date="date '+%a %Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S %z'"

The output looks like this…

Tue 2010-03-30 06:06:37 -0400

As you can probably tell, date and time stamps are a big deal with me.

Actually this mostly comes into play inside Emacs where I constantly use macros that insert date and time stamps.

Sadly, the latter format is one character longer than the other style.  The two-digit month is one byte shorter than the three-character abbreviation.  However, the time zone indicator -0400 is two longer than the three-character time zone abbreviation.  Ah well, the cost or progress.

Zile

I just learned about Zile, which is a mini-Emacs.  It has most of the editing functionality (including multiple buffers) and works great as an editor to install on servers when you don't want to put full GNU Emacs on there.

I'm still not sure what is missing, but basically I think nearly everything is missing except basic file editing.  For example, not Text editing modes (e.g., HTML, Python) are not there.

Also, a key combination I use frequently to scroll down a page I'm reading, C-u C-v, which by default scrolls down four lines, in Zile will page down four times.  As a slight consolation, C-l will still center the line the cursor is on.

Still, for me as a 22-year Emacs user, this makes a perfect replacement for vi when you need to edit /etc/hosts or quick, little file edits like that.

NFS on Mac OS X

These look like helpful tips from James Gosling regarding NFS on Mac OS X, and changes in Snow Leopard (sigh).

UNIX Dictionary

Alas, /usr/dict/words is no longer generally available on UNIX (or at least Linux) systems! However, I found this copy on-line FWIW.

/usr/dict/words