Friday Apple Fun

It's the weekend, and it's Friday the 13th (depending on when you read this), so have some fun making your Mac windows unusable and buying copyrighted (and copy-protected!) silence from iTunes Music Store. Read on for details. Crazy Window Effects ZackSchil writes "Open a terminal window and type on the prompt: killall Dock. Don't press return. Position a large window behind the terminal window, then shift-click on the large window's minimize button (so it goes slowly). While still holding shift, quickly hit the return key to execute the command and kill the Dock (it comes back right away). As soon as the dock's process is killed, the window will cease minimizing, leaving you with a working, draggable, active window halfway through the warping animation! While the system is at a loss how to translate mouse clicks to the window, you can still move bits that haven't changed location too much. After having some fun, just press Command-M to get the window all the way into the Dock and click to get it out again."

I had a similar experience with iChat the other day: I somehow caught a chat so the window was transparent. And more fun: open System Preferences, click on Network, and before it loads, move the window; when Network opens, the whole window moves back to where it was when you first clicked on it (this isn't new, but it annoys me).

Paying for (Copy-Protected) Silence wayneh writes "As the Apple Turns turned out a great story about several silent tracks available via the iTunes Music Store. They are all subject to the same digital copy protection as tracks with actual sound and at least one has a thirty second preview. Interestingly, a number of them are listed as explicit and have alternate clean versions available as well. Next time you need a few minutes of quiet time, consider purchasing it from Apple."

Comments

Re:new feature?

[SkunkPussy]

> it says 1726 bytes in body next to where it says read more. I haven't seen that feature before.

OK, its there in the previous ask slashdot and the previous book review. I must be new around here.

Gentoo CFLAGS

[MarcQuadra]

Ahh, CFLAGS. I did a lot of hitting the GCC manual and diffing binaries to see what worked best. I've been hooked on Gentoo for two years, and was building packages from .srpms for years before that.

I've got an Athlon-XP, functionally equivalent to your CPUs, and I use:

"-O2 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer -march=athlon-xp -mfpmath=sse"

I know, you're thinking I must be nuts, but I've found that -O2 is FASTER and SMALLER than -O3 in MANY instances, especially when your CPU has decent L1/2/3 caches (mine's a barton, so 640K total). Also, the -msse -mmmx options are INTRINSIC to the -march=athlon-xp switch, so there's no good done by explicitly enabling them.

The -mfpmath=sse option tells GCC to use sse for all floating point math, instead of the i387 emulator on the chip. I'm actually not sure if it helps that much since almost nothing I do is FP-intensive. My guess is that it really boosts apps that do 'big math'.

Other advantages to my conservative CFLAGS are:

It's easier to manage multiple machines when there's less to change in the flags, all I have to do is change the -march= option to build for a Pentium3, 4, or C3.

I KNOW that when something doesn't work or my system pukes that it's not my CFLAGS, it's something -I DID-. My bug reports are worth a lot more than some kid with 30 flags. And I can safely run more cutting-edge stuff than most, because more flags = more issues to work out before 'stable'.

Compiling is significantly faster, -O2 and -O3 are the SAME THING except -O3 adds -funroll-loops, which takes a lot of work on the compiler-end, and can actually SLOW DOWN code that would execute faster if it could all fit in the cache (which a lot can't when it's been 'unrolled').

I find that the real beauty of Gentoo is portage as a package manager, and the 'build from scratch' capability. Granted, setting my own CFLAGS is what brought me to Gentoo in the first place, but after about a year of tearing my hair out as a CFLAGS junkie, I decided to just cut my losses and build stable, working systems. Life's been much better since then.

Portage Overlay

[MarcQuadra]

Hmm. I've had good luck with portdir_overlay, but I've moved mine from /usr/portage/... to /usr/portage-overlay, so it's not INSIDE the tree. also, after you edit your custom .ebuild, you may have to 'touch -acm' it. that's what the problem probably is, the access date on the portage copy is newer, so portage tries to use that instead of your custom copy.