OSX

Recently there was a critical vulnerability in git announced affecting many git users including myself on OSX.

After downloading and installing the latest version of git and entering in Terminal
git −−version
I was presented with the incorrect version number. Checking where it had been installed with
which git
displayed the original
/usr/bin/git
instead of the newly installed version at
/usr/local/git/bin
To resolve this I added the correct path (to my bash profile)
export PATH="/usr/local/git/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/sbin:$PATH"
and now which git correctly returned the new path and bumped the version
git version 2.0.1

How to setup some quick shortcuts to toggle visibility of hidden files in Finder

• In Terminal type: sudo nano ~/.bash_profile
• Append to the file the following: alias showFiles=’defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles YES; killall Finder /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app’
• In a new line type: alias hideFiles=’defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles NO; killall Finder /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app’
• Save the file
• To make the aliases available in Terminal type: source ~/.bash_profile

Now you have two additional commands: showFiles and hideFiles to make things easier.

Firefox had been running really slowly lately and as I am an awful hoarder of tabs closing the application took forever. I’d heard that since version 3 there was a sql lite table that according to Google could do with vacuuming – whatever that meant.

The SQLite database uses flat files for local storage and I wondered how big and bloated they had become over time. It turned out to be much worse than I expected. To view I typed the following into a command terminal
find ~/Library/Application\ Support/Firefox/Profiles -type f -name '*.sqlite' -exec ls -arlth {} \;
My .places file was 40 megabytes which certainly wasn’t helping speed at all. The following command took care of the necessary housekeeping
find ~/Library/Application\ Support/Firefox/Profiles -type f -name '*.sqlite' -exec sqlite3 {} VACUUM \;
find ~/Library/Application\ Support/Firefox/Profiles -type f -name '*.sqlite' -exec sqlite3 {} REINDEX \;