When does minimalism go too far? Maybe as a response to how much I travel, or maybe just because I’ve started loosing stuff in my old age, I have been reducing and getting more organized for years. I have endeavored to get rid of all that isn’t necessary and been welcomed by the fact that less truly is more. I buy less clothes, own less crap, I travel with fewer keys, I am less of a gear-head (outside of my lab of course), I ditched racks of systems in my old lab for 2 stacks of Mac Minis and I oddly end up throwing out less as well. And that…
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32-bit System Preferences
Did you know that System Preferences is a 64-bit application? Stands to reason, but one thing I realized recently while working on some code for a System Preference pane is that 32-bit System Preferences cause System Preferences to react differently. You can use 32-bit preference panes but using them prompts you to quit System Preferences, which relaunches into a 32-bit mode. Going back to 64-bit mode also requires a relaunch. This is a great reason for developers to get their code upgraded sooner rather than later as I can’t imagine this compatibility mode will last forever…
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Snow Leopard systemsetup Options
systemsetup is a great little command, for setting date and time, for wake on LAN, etc. But in Mac OS X 10.6, you can also set your kernel boot architecture? Weird, eh? Not as weird as the length of the option… systemsetup -getkernelbootarchitecturesetting Try saying it three times really fast. Now again with a French accent! Anyway, so then you want to set the kernel boot architecture to 32 bit, set it to i386 and if you want to set it to 64 bit, use x86_64 with the -setkernelbootarchitecture option (default is the default value). It edits the com.apple.Boot.plist located at /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.Boot.plist.
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64 bit?
Are you running Snow Leopard at 64 bits? If you run uname -v or uname -m does it say 386 or x64 (or the odd occasional 486 even)? x64 are the only ones running as fully 64 bit, which is mostly the latest Xserve’s. There have been some reports that you can boot holding down the 6 and 4 number keys to get into a 64 bit kernel but I haven’t been able to reproduce this in the various machinery running in my lab yet.