Noulakaz

The blog of Avinash, Christina, Anya and Kyan Meetoo.

Archives for August 2006

Mac OS X Internals by Amit Singh

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Today I bought Mac OS X Internals by Amit Singh of kernelthread.com fame.

It’s a massive 1640 pages long book and Amit has been receiving rave reviews for its technical accuracy and readability.

The books covers all aspects of Mac OS X including:

  • The history of Mac OS X
  • The Mach microkernel
  • The BSD, X, Carbon, Cocoa and Java application environments
  • The PowerPC and Intel processors
  • EFI
  • System startup (launchd for instance)
  • Process and memory management
  • IPC
  • The HFS+ file system

Wish me courage :-)

Complete migration towards Mac OS X

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I’ve migrated all my data (including my documents, my photos, my music files and my mails) from my Kubuntu Linux desktop PC to my new Apple MacBook.

Here is a brief recap:

I transferred the data files using Fugu which is a SSH and SCP client.

I copied my photos (all in JPEG format) to a directory and I imported this whole directory in iPhoto. I had to recreate the directory structure I used in digiKam (i.e. by date / by event etc.) manually. It was not too tough because I had renamed all my photos to YYYY-MM-DD-#####.jpg in Linux beforehand.

I had little difficulty transfering my MP3 collection to a directory which I then imported into iTunes… only to discover that some files had not been transferred by Fugu owing to the presence of “funny” characters in their filename (things like ( or french accented characters). For those files, I had to resort to putting them into a ZIP file manually and then transfering this ZIP to the Mac using Fugu. To unzip, I needed to use the -p parameter to unzip (man unzip for more info).

And finally for the emails in Mozilla Thunderbird, I proceeded as follows:

  • Compact the emails in Thunderbird
  • Transfer the Inbox (and Sent) to the Mac using Fugu
  • Drop each onto Eudora Mailbox Cleaner which, as its name indicates, is a fantastic program to convert emails in the Mozilla Thunderbird format to Apple’s Mail format…

Migration done!

I’ve fallen in love with Garageband

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I’ve managed to make my brother’s Roland PC-300 controller keyboard work with my MacBook and I’ve just started using Garageband.

Let me tell you that it is a fantastic piece of software. It’s easy to use and, for me, as feature-packed as Logic Audio (which I was using previously on my PC).

Garageband comes with a fantastic set of Apple Loops which make music creation really painless.

Garageband offers a lot of virtual instruments and is also compatible with third-party Audio Units like the rather excellent Crystal that you can see in the picture above.

I’ll post some tracks hopefully by the end of the week.