Syslogd Overwhelming Your Computer?
If your Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) system is unexpectedly sluggish, logging might be the culprit. Run Activity Monitor (Applications/Utilities/ folder), and click the CPU column twice to get it to show most to least activity. If syslogd is at the top of the list, there's a fix. Syslogd tracks informational messages produced by software and writes them to the asl.db, a file in your Unix /var/log/ directory. It's a known problem that syslogd can run amok. There's a fix: deleting the asl.db file.
Launch Terminal (from the same Utilities folder), and enter these commands exactly as written, entering your administrative password when prompted:
sudo launchctl stop com.apple.syslogd
sudo rm /var/log/asl.db
sudo launchctl start com.apple.syslogd
Your system should settle down to normal. For more information, follow the link.
Written by
Glenn Fleishman
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Western Civilisation Offers Style Master 2.0
Western Civilisation Offers Style Master 2.0 -- For webmasters who write their own HTML, Western Civilisation has long been the source of the best instruction and information on the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) protocol, as well as the best utility for editing it, Style Master (see "Precision Web Pages with Style Master" in TidBITS-501). Now Style Master has been updated to 2.0. You can open a new style sheet from a template, and Western Civilisation supplies several sample templates. Color coding and find-and-replace have been added to the editor, and Western Civilisation also added support for external editors such as BBEdit, so you can alternate between an overall text-based view and Style Master's own view of individual statements and properties. The browser support information has been updated to include Netscape 6 and Opera 5 (but not, alas, iCab or OmniWeb). There is improved support for comments, @media rules, relative linking, and even CSS3MP (the mobile wireless standard). Style Master 2.0 also claims to parse an existing document that uses the old deprecated "presentational" and "structural" HTML (such as FONT tags and attributes like ALIGN and BGCOLOR) and generate a CSS stylesheet from it; in my testing, though, this feature wasn't robust enough to be useful. Style Master requires Mac OS 8 or higher and 5 MB of RAM on a PowerPC-based Mac. It costs $30, or $50 for the Pro version which includes CSS2 support. A 31-day trial version is available. [MAN]
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Special thanks this week to John & Nichola Collins, Chris Williams,
John K. Lilley, and Honeymoons By Sunset for their generous support!