Tag: OS X

Reinstalling Snow Leopard

To satisfy my own curiosity, I reinstalled OS X Snow Leopard today.
It took about 48m to install the OS. I excluded all printer drivers, foreign language fonts, and translations.
You can’t trust the estimated time to completion. It started by reporting only 17m. After 17m, it changed to 18m, at which point I quit watching. Returning later, it reported 5m remaining, and after 1m reported completion.
One reason for a faster installation, too, is that the installation media is not verified as it was in Leopard.
This was on a 2.0GHz Core2Duo Mini.

Examining the Objective-C runtime information stored in Mach-O files

class-dump
This is a command-line utility for examining the Objective-C runtime information stored in Mach-O files. It generates declarations for the classes, categories and protocols. This is the same information provided by using ‘otool -ov’, but presented as normal Objective-C declarations, so it is much more compact and readable.
Why use class-dump?
It’s a great tool for the curious. You can look at the design of closed source applications, frameworks, and bundles. Watch the interfaces evolve between releases. Experiment with private frameworks, or see what private goodies are hiding in the AppKit. Learn about the plugin API lurking in Mail.app.

Manually Empting Leopard's Trash

OS X refused to let me empty the trash as it contained TimeMachine’s Backups.backupdb directory. It simply complained that there were BootX files present. The trash could not be emptied with an option-empty, either.
I found this solution to work fine; which involved rm -rf’ing the .Trash dir in my home directory (which was unnecessary) and more importantly doing the same in the Trashes/<my uid> dir on the external drive in which that trash had lived.