I used the app to regain about 90GB of space I'd filled with old system emulator images that I had completely forgotten about today. It's well worth the download if you have a jre installed that will allow you to run the program.

Very handy. Very cross-platform. The only negative I can find is that you can't delete files within the application.

The only Windows tool that I know of that even comes close is Steffen Gerlach's Scanner.

email: Josh Fuller | tag: /technology/computing/software | permanent link | Share on Facebook

Tue, 01 Apr 2008

Wireshark 1.0

I've just downloaded and installed the new experimental Wireshark Version 1.0 build for OS X Intel from wireshark.askapache.com.

I can't seem to read the RTF I'm supposed to read before installing on Leopard because it is empty in the dmg I downloaded from askapache.

I just dragged Wireshark into /Applications and tried to run the file. An xterm window popped up and nothing much else happened.

There are a lot of command line tools in the DMG that have to be installed along with the *.app so the experiment would pretty much be a flop if not for the 1.0.0pre1 build with a readme that actually works.

The file should read:

Quick Setup

Drag the Wireshark icon to /Applications.
Drag the contents of the Utilities/Command Line folder to /bin, /usr/local/bin, /opt/wireshark/bin or any other location that makes sense (preferably one that's in your PATH).
You will probably need to adjust the permissions of /dev/bpf* in order to capture. You can do this by hand or by installing the ChmodBPF startup item.

Details

This disk contains the following:

The Wireshark application, which can be placed anywhere on your system. It requires X11.
The Utilities/Command Line folder, which contains links to Wireshark's command line utilities. These can be placed anywhere on your system, but they must all be in the same directory. If you placed Wireshark in a folder other than /Applications, you'll have to set WIRESHARKAPPDIR in order for these to work.
The Utilties/Startup folder, which contains the ChmodBPF startup item from the libpcap distribution. This can be used to set the permissions of /dev/bpf* when your system starts up. See Utilties/Startup/.macosx for more details.
This file.

After making the required installation "hacks" to get ChmodBPF working I tried to start Wireshark from the /Applications directory a few times to no avail and then started it from the command line no problem.

It looks like in this version for the moment the only easy way to start Wireshark is to use terminal.app.

There may be either some path issues related to running outside of the console or perhaps WIRESHARKAPPDIR really does need to be set.

At any rate, it doesn't really look like Wireshark 1.0 is ready for primetime on OS X Intel yet unless you are comfortable with the command line.

email: Josh Fuller | tag: /technology/computing/software | permanent link | Share on Facebook

Mon, 18 Feb 2008

Jave - a java GUI-based ASCII editor

I ran across a wonderful java based ASCII editor yesterday called Java Ascii Versatile Editor.

The program vastly simplifies 7-bit ASCII drawings by allowing you to edit them in a graphical environment.

It's sort of like Gimp for text. It makes it very easy to draw completely portable network diagrams that can be viewed with zero proprietary software installed.

I'm a firm believer that if you're not able to write your documentation from a console using only vi, emacs, nano (or dos edit) then you probably shouldn't be writing documentation in the first place.

Some people like fancy photos. Jave allows me to serve them a "big cup of STFU."

DISCLAIMER: I use nano for the most part because I am lazy when it comes to learning shortcuts. I am, however, becoming a VI convert more and more every day .

email: Josh Fuller | tag: /technology/computing/software | permanent link | Share on Facebook

JDarkroom

I've recently started to use JDarkroom for all my markdown editing tasks. It's really nice to have a cross-platform text editor that feels like editing in a console with no distractions.

email: Josh Fuller | tag: /technology/computing/software | permanent link | Share on Facebook