ZFS: what “the ultimate file system” really means

So, Sun’s ZFS file system is going to be supported in Mac OS X with Snow Leopard coming next year. But if you don’t read Filesystems Weekly, what is it and what does it mean for you?

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The Onion Compares Mac OS X Snow Leopard and Windoze 7

Which OS comes with a pre-loaded Snow Leopard wallpaper image? Can one of the OS’s make me look cool in a coffee shop? Will the radiance and beauty of Apple’s latest OS distract diehard users enough to ignore its failings? The answers to these questions and more were answered by the crack tech team at The Onion this week. Hilarious details after the jump…

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Geek Out Time: DIY Setup For Running Repair Permissions Automatically

Running Repair Permissions Automatically

Repairing permissions in Leopard or Tiger is an important part of keeping a your Mac running smoothly. Doing this on a regular basis will help avoid problems and improve the stability of your Mac. The procedure below will work for Tiger as well as Leopard.

What Repair Permissions Does: Repair Permissions is part of the Disk Utility application that is installed on every Mac and is in the Applications/Utilities folder. Leopard has an internal database that it uses to keep track of the proper permissions for the System files and folders. When you install or uninstall a program, the System permissions might be left in a state that is not correct. It might not cause problems immediately, but later on applications might have trouble saving preferences or updating or just have instability issues.
Now you can startup Disk Utility and select your main system disk and click on the button to run Repair Permissions but you have to remember to do that on a periodic basis. It’s a good idea to run it after you have installed or uninstalled a lot of applications. It also a good idea to run it before and after a Mac OS X Update (i.e. updating from 10.5.5 to 10.5.6)

Built-in Periodic Tasks:
Leopard already runs periodic tasks, daily, weekly, and monthly. The are normally run in the middle of the night, if you leave your Mac running overnight. If you turn off your Mac at night, the tasks still get run, they are just run the first few minutes after you turn your Mac back on.
We are going to take advantage of this built-in feature to run Repair Permissions on a weekly basis. If you don’t install or uninstall applications on a regular basis, you could easily change the procedure below to run Repair Permissions on a monthly basis instead.
We are going to create a one line script that will run Disk Utility and Repair Permissions, The script will also have a special name that will allow Leopard to recognize it automatically. Leopard runs multiple tasks on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis and has these scripts predefined. We DON”T want to change these scripts to include our command line because the predefined script might be over written by a Mac OS X update in the furture and our modifications would be lost.

The Local Boys:
Apple has enabled a way to allow custom tasks to be done right after the predefined tasks are completed. This allows you to create any script and run the commands in that script on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis, just by naming the script appropriately and putting it in the correct folder. To enable the script to run on a daily basis, just make sure the name is daily.local, on a weekly basis, weekly.local and on a monthly basis, monthly.local. The .local extension tells Leopard that this is a custom file for this installation of Leopard.
The file needs to be placed in the /etc directory of the system disk and set with the appropriate permissions to execute.

The Gory or Geeky Details:

This is going to require the use of the Terminal application, so be warned, if you’ve never used Terminal before it’s probably not a good idea to do this yourself.

1. To do this procedure you need to have administration rights on your Mac.
2. Open the Terminal application in the Utilities folder.
3. Enter the following commands:
   • sudo pico /etc/weekly.local
   • enter your login password to allow you to create this file
   • In the pico editor enter the following single line of text.
     diskutil repairpermissions /
   • Press control-x and then the y key to save the file
   • You should now be out of the pico editor and back to your command line prompt. Enter this command.
   • sudo chmod 755 /etc/weekly.local
   • You might have to enter your password again. This command sets the execute permissions for the script.
   • Note: Name the script file monthly.local if you want Repair Permissions done monthly.
4. Quit the Terminal program
5. You are done!

Now Repair Permissions will run on a weekly (or monthly) basis. The output of the script will be saved in the weekly.log or monthly.log file. You can see this log file by running the Console application in the Utility folder. To see the log file make sure you can see the log list by clicking on Show Log List, and then open the LOG FILES list. In this list open the /var/log section. Scroll down and click on weekly.log or monthly.log depending on what you setup. You should be able to see the output of the Repair Permissions command. You will have to wait a week or a month to see the output depending on the date the last tasks were run.

Leave a comment if you find this helpful or have any questions.

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Saving PDF Documents or Receipts by Just Printing

Here’s a great tip on automating the creation of PDF files for anything you want to print. I like to save a copy of receipts of online purchases or transactions. I also like to keep personal and business receipts in separate folders. Your Mac already has this functionality available in the standard Print Dialog box.

The Print Dialog box has a drop down that says PDF, this menu has some ready made workflows that allow you to:

• Save as PDF…
• Save as PostScript…
• Fax PDF…
• Mail PDF
• Save as PDF-X
• Save PDF to iPhoto
• Save PDF to Web Receipts Folder

The last one will take whatever you are printing and create a PDF file and save it in the Web Receipts folder in your Documents folder. Very handy. And you can just use this workflow and stop reading this tip. But I want to show you how to take this idea a little further and create another workflow to give you the option to create the PDFs in another folder, and make sure you don’t over write other PDFs. I’ll also show you a basic on how Automator works so you can create your own Automator workflows for just about anything.

1. Open Automator in Applications.
2. Automator will prompt you to “Select a starting point to open a new workflow:” Choose Custom.
3. On the left pane, open the Library item, if not already open, and select Files & Folders.
4. When this workflow is run it will take the PDF file that is generated and modify the filename. This will ensure that the file created will be unique and not over write an existing file. So the first action we want to do is Rename Finder Items.
5. Scroll down and find the Rename Finder Items action in the list and click and drag it to the empty grey area on the right

   

6. When you add the action a drop down box will appear asking you to add a Copy Finder Items action. Answer Don’t Add because we don’t want to keep the original file.

   

7. We will be the defaults for this action so leave all options as they are. The action will append the current date to the end of the file name. To make it more unique, we will add another action to append the current time.
8. Add another Rename Finder Items action for appending the Time. After adding the action change the Format to Hour Minute to append the current hour and minute to the filename as in the picture below.

   
   

9. The final step is to add the step to tell Automator where to save the file. By default there is already a folder named Web Receipts in your Documents folder in your Home folder.
10. You can use this default folder or you can create a subfolder so you can separate personal and company receipts. Run the Save PDF to Web Receipts Folder flow for saving personal items.

    

11. Click and drag New Folder as the final step. Name is the Folder name you want to use. Where is the location of the folder. For example, Where can be Web Receipts and Name can be Company. This will create the PDF file in the Company subfolder of the Web Receipts folder.
12. Now you need to save the workflow. Since this is probably the first time you have created a PDF workflow, you will need to create the PDF Services folder in your Library folder, if it doesn’t exist. Save the workflow by going to the File menu and selecting Save. Browse to Home/Library and click on New Folder to create a new folder called PDF Services and then save the workflow with a name like, Save PDF to Company Folder.
13. Now try to print something.
14. In the PDF drop down box select Edit Menu

    

15. Click on the + button and browse to the Home/Library/PDF Services folder and select the workflow you just created.
16. Click OK. Now you have added the flow to every print menu in Mac OS X so you can create a PDF from every program. Is that cool or what?
17. There is one catch. Major Mac OS X update, i.e. 10.4 to 10.5, can change the syntax of automator actions enough that the workflow may not work after the update. So test the workflow after a major update. If it doesn’t work, just open the flow again in Automator and select the actions so Automator updates the action. Then re-save the workflow. It should work again.