$ du -sh

For example, on my MacBook Pro when I execute this command in my home directory, I get something like so:

danbookpro:~ daniel$ du -sh
 53G    .

Very good then. Carry on.

Update

If you’re looking for a real good time, give this a try (thanks Nick):

du -chs ~/*

This will give you a list of each file/directory and the amount of disk space used by each. In my case something like this:

danbookpro:~ daniel$ du -chs ~/*
 58M    /Users/daniel/Bin
853M    /Users/daniel/Desktop
1.3G    /Users/daniel/Documents
1.1M    /Users/daniel/Droplets
 10G    /Users/daniel/Library
 25M    /Users/daniel/Movies
7.2G    /Users/daniel/Music
 26G    /Users/daniel/Pictures
1.5G    /Users/daniel/Public
112K    /Users/daniel/Sites
6.2G    /Users/daniel/Work
 53G    total
danbookpro:~ daniel$ 

I went out and picked up a new MacBook Pro yesterday, after the display issue on my wife’s iMac got so bad that finally the machine has become unusable. We’re gonna do a little swap – she’ll take my MacBook, I get the MBP, and the iMac is going to get thrown off a bridge or something.

What I wanted to comment about here is Apple’s Migration Assistant – which absolutely and undisputedly rocks my little world.

After pondering the long hours I was in for getting all my apps reinstalled, settings, passwords, serial numbers for apps, bla bla bla up and copied and running onto the new Mac – Nick pointed me to the Migration Assistant (which I’m not sure I even really knew about) and off I went. Plugged in my male-to-male FireWire cable into both machines, and booted the MacBook into Target Disk Mode (hold down ‘T’ while powering up until the FireWire symbol displays on the screen). The Migration Assistant asked me what users I wanted, if I wanted the Applications as well, and blammo. I went into the hot tub for a while, and when I got back I had my user, files, documents, library, settings, applications und alles.

So far there are only two apps that didn’t come over seamlessly, and those would be Parallels and Mozy (which, if you haven’t tried, is the best backup software I’ve ever laid my hands on), both of which I needed to reinstall, but after a bit of fiddling are working fine again. All told this thing saved me hours, and I’m sure I’ll use it again on my next Mac purchase.

...Or at least the ones I download immediately on a new OS X install.

Sorry, no nice summaries, no time, just a Del.icio.us link.

I’ve used IRC on and off for the past, um, 10 years or so. I’ve had a Mac for the past 5. For the life of me, I had not been able to find an IRC client for the Mac that didn’t completely and utterly suck. That is, until now.

Enter Colloquy – the sweetest, loveliest, most wonderful IRC client for the Mac that I have ever seen. Maybe the sweetest IRC client I’ve ever seen anywhere.

Now if only #van.rb and #singapore.rb weren’t all tombstone and tumbleweed like ;)

Did I mention it’s free?

Apparently at least a few people think that the iPhone will be a hit:

Ticker	Company	Phone
AAPL	Apple	iPhone
RIMM	Research In Motion	Blackberry
PALM	Palm	Treo

I first saw a screenshot similar to this on a Flickr photo stream belonging to Dave Shea (a fellow Vancouverite, I might add). I jumped over to Google Finance to take a peak myself, and the picture says a thousand words. It’ll be interesting to see how things progress over the next 6 months, but in the mean-time I’ll admit I’m salivating over the pretty iPhone.

Lots of questions seem to be going around, especially with regards to Java support, and I found an interesting quote from Mr. Jobs hisself, surrounding Java support for the iPhone:

Java’s not worth building in. Nobody uses Java anymore. It’s this big heavyweight ball and chain.
-Steve Jobs

I found this quote via David Pogue’s Blog which was in turn a quote from an interview that John Markoff had with His Steveness.

I’m not sure if Steve has jumped on the Rails bandwagon (yah, that was supposed to be funny), or if he just has a hate on for Java in general. It’s also worth noting that up to date Java support on Mac OS X seems to be a bit lacking as well. In order to run Java 5, Mac OS X 10.4 was required, and now it’s sounding like in order to run Java 6, a mandatory update to Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) will be required as well.

As odd as it sounds, when you’re playing bachelor for the weekend while your wifey is chillaxing in Indonesia, you find a lot of strange things to do to amuse yourself.

I’ve talked before about a neat little piece that someone discovered over on the Strongspace forums about getting Subversion repositories working over there. I’ve been using this method a lot lately, and typing all the commands gets tedious. The long and the short of it is that you need to create the repository locally first, and then copy it up to your Strongspace account before you can do the checkout over svn+ssh.

As I was writing this little piece, I figured I might as well also say something about how I really love the Vibrant Ink TextMate theme that I originally discovered while reading Chu Yeow’s blog

Quite nice I think. And droplets you ask? Well, I was going through the NLMA (Neat Little Mac Apps podcast) history – and came across Photodrop – which looks incredibly useful. That triggered in my brain some memory that Transmit was actually supposed to do droplets in the latest version, and sure enough it does. So now I have a nice little Transmit droplet that lets me upload files (like this ruby app and the image above) with simple drag and drop onto this droplet mini-app thinger.

As for this ruby Strongspace Subversion app, you can grab it here

Usage is dead easy:

ruby svn.rb [strongspace_username] [repository_name]

You’ll be prompted with your password a couple times. Make sure you’re aware of what this app actually does before you run it – or you could find yourself short some files!

1. Create a new repository in your current working directory with the name [repository_name] provided as a parameter to the app
2. Copy the created repository to your Strongspace account
3. rm -Rf the local repository it just created
4. Checkout the new repository via svn+ssh.

Last week I was booking ferry tickets for my wife to head off to Bintan for a weekend away. I happily provided my credit card information and sent it off, and after the transaction redirected – I got hit up with this (click image for a larger version):

You’re seeing it correctly – it looks like the SQL parameters that are going to be inserted into the database after I click on the wonderful “Continue” button that FireFox has presented me with. Frightening.

Also last week, I upgraded iTerm to the latest version (0.9.3) – and the first time I kicked it up I got this piece of joy:

I hope that clicking “Yes” was the right thing to do.

UPDATE: 1-Feb-2008 – This has changed as of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard

For pre-Mac OS X 10.5, open a terminal and run:

sudo lookupd -flushcache

For Mac OS X 10.5:

sudo dscacheutil -flushcache

That should do it. You’ll need to type in your administrator password.