Avinash Meetoo: Blog

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

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written by avinash

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!

Popularity: 1% [?]

written by avinash

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.

Popularity: 2% [?]

written by avinash