Monthly Archives: March 2012

Mac OS X keyboard shortcuts

  By Sarang Baheti | 31 March, 2012 - 11:31 PM |
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Apple has a page listing dozens of standard keyboard shortcuts you can use at start-up, with the Finder, and with many applications. If you’re a keyboard person, rather than a mouse person, you may find some shortcuts here that you didn’t know. At a minimum, it’s worth bookmarking this page to have a list of keys to press at startup, if you need to change boot disks, boot in Safe mode or boot from an optical disc (if your Mac still supports that).

Some of the most common keyboard shortcuts are:

Action Shortcut
Open a new window or document Command(⌘)-N
Copy the selected item Command (⌘)-C
Cut (delete) the selected item Command (⌘)-X
Paste an item Command (⌘)-V
Open the selected file, folder, or app Command (⌘)-O
Quit an app Command (⌘)-Q
Move the selected item to the Trash Command (⌘)-Delete
Find text or other items Command (⌘)-F
Minimize a window into the Dock Command (⌘)-M
Open a shortcut (contextual) menu for an item Control-click the item
Switch to the previous app Command (⌘)-Tab
Copy an item Option-drag the item
Open your home folder Shift-Command (⌘)-H
Close all open windows Option-click the close button

Dan Rodney has also composed a friendlier list here

Lion’s Resume feature

  By Sarang Baheti | 27 March, 2012 - 10:57 PM |
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Amongst various features of Mac OS X Lion the one that I find very helpful is Resume feature. It’s hibernate on steriods. Along with OS it will cache the state of your applications as well. On next reboot you will be welcomed back as if you never shut down you Mac!

Resume is the default behaviour on Mac, you can choose to opt out permanently or for a particular session:

Select whether you want to resume when you restart

Unfortunately you can even control which applications you want to participate in this resume process, however here is the setting to turn off/on Resume feature in OS X Lion:

Enabling/Disabling Resume on Mac OS X Lion

Lion’s Resume feature will even save “Untitled” and unsaved documents, and they will show up again when you restart.

Holey Optochip First to Transfer One Trillion Bits of Information per Second Using the Power of Light

  By Sarang Baheti | 20 March, 2012 - 1:10 PM |
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Holey Optochip

IBM scientists reported on a prototype optical chipset, dubbed “Holey Optochip”, that is the first parallel optical transceiver to transfer one trillion bits – one terabit – of information per second, the equivalent of downloading 500 high definition movies. The report was presented at the Optical Fiber Communication Conference in Los Angeles.

With the ability to move information at blazing speeds – eight times faster than parallel optical components available today – the breakthrough could transform how data is accessed, shared and used for a new era of communications, computing and entertainment. The raw speed of one transceiver is equivalent to the bandwidth consumed by 100,000 users at today’s typical 10 Mb/s high-speed internet access. Or, it would take just around an hour to transfer the entire U.S. Library of Congress web archive through the transceiver.

Continue Reading at Source

The Heterogeneous Programming Jungle

  By Sarang Baheti | 20 March, 2012 - 1:01 PM |
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Very informative article about Heterogeneous Programming by Michael Wolfe, Compiler Engineer, The Portland Group, Inc.

The heterogeneous systems of interest to HPC use an attached coprocessor or accelerator that is optimized for certain types of computation. These devices typically exhibit internal parallelism, and execute asynchronously and concurrently with the host processor. Programming a heterogeneous system is then even more complex than “traditional” parallel programming (if any parallel programming can be called traditional), because in addition to the complexity of parallel programming on the attached device, the program must manage the concurrent activities between the host and device, and manage data locality between the host and device.

Source

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