• Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Programming

    opendiff

    There is a little tool in OS X called opendiff. This command can be used to bring up a quick and dirty graphical view of changes in a file. For example, if you run opendiff followed by two file names, you’ll see what’s different in the two files and what’s the same: opendiff test test1 The result then looks as follows. Note that in the above screenshot, a and b are in white lines and the others are grey, as those are consistent in the two files and the c has been removed and replaced with the four lines on the left. In larger files, this is pretty useful as…

  • Mac OS X

    Every Mac Comes With Tetris, Pong, Snake, and A Weird Version Of Solitaire

    Emacs (not eMacs) is an open source project, bundled with every version of OS X. And it can’t be altered. I wrote about the Cookies recipe that Richard Stallman bundled with Emacs long ago. He also has some somewhat sexist dating tips and a bunch of other weird rantings that he bundled in there. But perhaps the best contribution is the games that Emacs comes with. These include doctor, dunnet (which would have been a great MMPORG), pong, snake, solitaire, tetris and the ever-so-popular gomoku. These games are located in the /usr/share/emacs/22.1/lisp/play directory. But you don’t access the games directly. Instead, you use the emacs command. To get started, fire…

  • Mac OS X

    Advanced Features of the Mac OS X Calculator

    The Calculator application in Mac OS X is pretty handy beyond the basic 10-key functions that most people use.  As with many things from Apple you can make things much more complicated than the easy to use, basic screens that Apple provides.  For example, did you know that Calculator can perform binary, hexadecimal, ASCII and Unicode conversions?  To do so, click on the View menu and select Programmer (or use Command-3 to open the view.  You can also stop carrying around that old TI-85 you’ve been using for years (to some degree) to calculate those random tangents from time to time. One of the best parts of Calculator is that…