Mac OS X Boot, Sleep and Wake Time and Date

For several times I wondered what was the exact time my machine booted, woke up or slept. So, I did a little investigation to find out that's actually very simple to get those answers.

Using the Mac OS X Terminal, you can run the following commands:

 
- For System Boot Time, use: systcl -a | grep kern.boottime

You should get results similar to the picture below

- For System Sleep Time, use: sysctl -a | grep sleeptime

You should get results similar to the picture below  

- For System Wake Time, use: sysctl -a | grep waketime

You should get results similar to the picture below

I typically use the "uptime" command (just type uptime on the Mac OS X Terminal) to find out how long my machine has been powered on.

Lastly, you can get a short history of the machine boot using the "last reboot" command (just type last reboot on the Mac OS X Terminal) to get the last three boots of the system.

You can get the same information reviewing system log files but I think opening the terminal and typing a few commands easy enough to get the information you're looking for.

The mysterious behavior of Mac Mail and Yahoo! Mail Plus

If you, like me, uses Mac Mail as your primary email client and you also have an Yahoo! Mail Plus subscription (which gives you IMAP access to your Yahoo Mail account), you may have experienced an intermittent connection behavior where the email client is not able to connect due an invalid password even though you're using the correct one.

I've been reading lots of blog posts and forums reporting the exact same behavior and I was not able to find a concrete answer but the following approach seems to be working for me so far.

So, next time you see that dialog box requesting that you enter your password again to login to Yahoo, go to your web browser of choice and navigate to Yahoo Mail (mail.yahoo.com).

If you are automatically logged into the system then make sure you click on the Sign Out button first.

When you return to the login screen, type your username and password normally but make sure you select the Keep Me Signed In checkbox and then click Sign In. That should solve the problem.

Have fun...

Installing Erlang on Mac OS X Snow Leopard

I'm working with a customer who is using the Kaazing WebSocket Gateway - AMQP Edition with RabbitMQ and while his install was pretty straightforward on Windows 7 I thought the same would be applicable to my case (a Mac user). Well, to summarize the process, it was quite of a challenge to get everything working, not from the complexity perspective but for the number of steps involved in the process to get the environment running starting from the point that RabbitMQ depends on Erlang to run. So, that was the first step... Installing Erlang on Mac OS X

Here are the steps I had to take:

- Download and install Apple Xcode 4.3 from Apple's AppStore (yeah, you read it right!)

- The tricky part here was to enable Command Line Tools which is not selected by default in Xcode. To do that, go to Xcode Preferences --> Downloads --> Components and install Command Line Tools. It's just another 170MB over the already downloaded 1.35GB of Xcode :)

- Download Erlang latest release from http://www.erlang.org/download.html

- Extract the Erlang package (i.e. tar -xvf otp_src_R15B.tar) and navigate into the recently created directory

- Run ./configure

- Run ./make

- Run sudo make install

Hope this help you to get your project going...

Quick Access to Mac Dictionary

Sometimes you want to know the word definition but don't want to navigate to a website to know what it really means. So, here is keyboard shortcut that will help you a lot faster to get what you need.

1) Hover your mouse pointer over the word you wish to be defined (works in Safari, Mail and other Apple apps). I haven't tried in all of them yet.

2) Press control + Apple Command + D. The word will be highlighted and a Dictionary pop up box will show in the screen with the word definition.

3) Click anywhere in the screen to get rid of that pop up box.

There is also another approach to this using a very cool app called Alfred. Alfred is a must-have productivity tool that lets you automate a lot of things. You can also use Alfred to give you the word definition by just calling the Alfred utility (I use control + space bar) and then typing define and the word you want. The word definition should be presented on the screen for you.

Alfred has so many functions (no need to say that I'm a big Alfred fan already) but that would be a topic for another post.

How to Show Hidden Files in Finder

Just found this great tip on David Valeri's blog (http://davidvaleri.wordpress.com/2010/12/23/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-os-x-for-java-development/#more-118). If you ever wonder how to show hidden files in Mac OS X Finder here is the procedure to enable it:

Open a new Terminal (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal) window and type:

defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE

and to disable it:

defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE

Don't forget to restart Finder after you enable/disable this setting.

How to Speed Up Mouse Tracking on Mac OS X

Sometimes I feel that my mouse tracking is not fast enough but when I check its settings on System Preferences it's already set to the maximum possible speed. Here is a very simple (and fast) solution to that problem.

Open Terminal.app (/Applications/Terminal)

Enter the following command:

defaults read -g com.apple.mouse.scaling

That should return the current speed of your mouse tracking as an integer. Mine was 5 and I want to update it to 10. Here is how I did it...

To change the speed of your mouse tracking you can simply run the following command:

defaults write -g com.apple.mouse.scaling your_mouse_speed

where your_mouse_speed is the speed you want to set to your mouse tracking.

Then you'll have to Log Out or restart your Mac to see the changes take effect.

UPDATE: As reported by the reader Squished Spider, if you update your settings using the approach above and perform any changes to the Mouse settings using Mac OS System Preferences later then the system will override everything you did and it will revert them back to the slow mouse behavior even though you've set it to the maximum speed.

How to re-enable Mac Mail plugins after Mac OS X upgrade

I just upgraded my machine to Mac OS X (10.6.7) and unfortunately the plugins I have installed with Mac Mail stopped working one more time. I'm a big fan of GrowlMail, TruePreview and LetterBox and have been using them for a long time.
If you search on the Internet, you're going to find tons of references to this issue that affects Mac Mail plugins when you update your Mac. I haven't written that procedure on my notes and kept googling it every time I faced such situation. Well, I came across a very well written note that I think it's worth mentioning about how to fix that issue and decided to share it

How to re-enable Mac Mail plugins after updates

I hope you find it useful as well.