[Mac] pbcopy == Brilliant

For Mac users only (as far as I know):

cat filename | pbcopy

This bit of magic, as I just discovered, will copy the contents of the cat-ed file to the clipboard, for easy pasting wherever you need to paste it.

Macs. Rule.

[OT] Out of the Mouths of Babes...

I promise I'm not going to turn into one of those bloggers who turns his blog into a blog about blogging every precious blogging word that comes out of his three-year-old son's mouth. But I'm submitting this to the Interbits in the hopes that some day when I'm old and grey and he's graduating from high school I'll be to retrieve it and *really* get some peoples' eyes rolling.

So we're celebrating Mother's Day and my wife gets to the card that "he" gave her. It's got a Winnie the Pooh theme, with a typical "you're the best mommy ever" verse. Inside is a picture of Kanga (also a mommy) giving Roo (also a little boy) an affectionate hug. So Angela points to the picture and says, "Look, Alex, it's me and you!". And he looks at her with his eyes wide, then he looks at the picture again, and says in a tone that implies that he's a little concerned about how she's not keeping current with her medication, "Yeeeaaahhhh........and we've turned into kangaroos!"

The Java Process That Ate My MacBook Pro

Gotta love the Phenomenal Cosmic Power of virtual memory (the next-to-last column in the following ActivityMonitor screen capture):

Debugging a Remote Java VM with Eclipse

I (heart) the internet. Why? Well, among other reasons, I ran across this blog post today, which totally saved me a good several hours of frustration and swearing whilst tracking down a thorny problem.

You see, at my day job, I help to develop this webapp that points to a number of Java VMs, running in various combinations of in-Eclipse/not-in-Eclipse. The not-in-Eclipse bits are not run in Eclipse for a reason (read: "I don't care to jump through the hoops necessary to force them to."); however, lamentably, sometimes I get to (read: "have no choice but to") debug those bits too. And so, on the advice of the aforementioned blog post, I added these options to my startup scripts for the to-be-remotely-debugged VMs:

-Xdebug -Xrunjdwp:transport=dt_socket,address=8001,server=y,suspend=n

did some Eclipse magic ('Run | Open Debug Dialog... | (right-click) Remote Java Application | New | (fill in the details)') to point my debugger at the appropriate host and port, and I was off to the races.

The moral of the story: some days you just can get rid of a bomb.

(Author's Note: Bonus points to any commenters who can identify that seriously obscure reference!)