The Mark Bao Weblog.

Recently, I’ve been experiencing a high CPU usage by the process syslogd in Mac OS X 10.5.2 Leopard, coupled with strange Console.app behavior. If you’re experiencing this as well, give this a shot and see if it works (at your own risk.)

FIrst, you should check if this is a problem on your system, which is usually caused by large asl.db files. Open Terminal.app (Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app) and enter the following:

du -hs /var/log/asl.db

and hit enter. If it shows that your asl.db file is pretty huge (mine was 80MB) you’ll want to run this fix. If it isn’t, a rampant syslogd is probably not due to the asl.db file, but instead some application doing a lot of logging. Open Console and look if there’s any applications that are logging a lot, like if you see “ — last message repeated 500 times —”, that’s probably what is causing syslogd to own a lot of CPU.

If asl.db is huge, do the following. You’ll first have to enable a root user to your system. Then, go to Terminal, and enter the following (enter one by one, and hit enter afterwards):

sudo launchctl stop com.apple.syslogd
sudo mv /var/log/asl.db /var/log/aslold.db
sudo touch /var/log/asl.db
sudo launchctl start com.apple.syslogd

You will be asked to enter the root password on the first command, while subsequent commands will automatically be authenticated as root.

Once you do this, the syslogd process should restart, but the CPU it uses should be next to nothing. Hope this helped.

Mozilla Labs has released an extension originally authored by Chris Beard that allows for very simple browser customization. Namely, it allows you to choose from different styles to apply to your browser, which essentially replaces the chrome background. It also works in all themes, or should. See below for example.

click to expand

But don’t take my word for it, for I am a terrible screenshotter, here’s one from Chris Beard’s blog:

Why they decided to take this as an official Mozilla Labs is not too clear to me, however they cite the following pillars of the project which is pulled verbatim from their site, viz.:

• themes today are too hard to find, install and use
• graphic designers should be able to style the browser without having to code
• Browsers can be more than just desktop software, they can include online components
• people just want their computer to be a little more fun and personal

All good points, but unless it gains a lot more more options for skinning the theme, it’s not going to be very useful for the end user. In addition, I’m not sure why it’s taken in as a Mozilla Labs project and not stay an extension, but guessed it was due to the developer of the app being an employee of Mozilla.

Edit: Looks like one interesting piece is that the active persona can be changed through the DOM via Javascript (or at least that’s what it sounds like.) Also interesting is

I can also imagine that we could use this to build some sort of badge or icon art that people could put on their blogs or Web pages that indicates their current Persona, and if people click on it they can switch to it.

Join us for the Facebook Developer Garage Boston on January 17, 2008! Discuss the Facebook Platform, web dev, monetization and investing, and more here with other Facebook Developers and enthusiasts. There will be people from Facebook here as well.

If you’re a regular to the Facebook Developer Boston events, you’ll know that this is the fourth Facebook event in Boston, and there hasn’t been one in a few months. Let’s make this the best Facebook Developer event yet!

A big thanks to our sponsors, Molecular and Facebook.

Molecular is setting up at the Facebook Developer Garage as one of the meetings of a course for a web development competition at MIT. They are taking suggestions for relevant courses for the beginning stages of Facebook development at the event.

The event will be crowdsourced; your suggestions and presentations will go into the event. Let us know of any suggestions you want, or presentations you want to make. Email fbgarage[at]boston.avecora.com.

The event will be free and open to the public. See the event page and RSVP on Facebook, Going, or Upcoming. Event venue TBD - will announce on the main event page.

Auxiom has been down down for… longer than I can remember.
So where have I been?

First of all, an explanation. StevenBao.com and Auxiom.com were taken down by the host Hosting Department for “sending spam.” Very strange, and uh, frankly, that sounds like a load of BS to me. A normal host, suspecting spam being sent from a server, would temporarily suspend the account. However, being the, uh, special host that they are, HD decided to delete all of my data (files, MySQL, mail, etc.) and notify me after the fact. Nice work.

In their ToS they have a clause that describes that they will have weekly backups available. Seeing that my backups were all pretty old, I asked for one — only to be presented with that with the deactivation of my account, backups were gone also.

Uhh…

I didn’t know what exactly to do, so I picked up a temporary host with a friend, and now I’m here, trying to recover whatever parts of my blog was picked up by the Wayback Machine or Feedburner. (edit: not Feedburner anymore.)

I’m also trying to find where my original theme is as well.