@womworldnokia, please send me to sxsxi from Nater Kane on Vimeo.

Typically I ignore game/toy Facebook apps that burdon my friends with inane wall posts. Typically their business models hook into some sort of affiliate marketing scheme, and for the most part, these apps are just pollution.

Friend FAQ is exactly like this, though for some reason I still decided to click through and check it out. Finding out who “said” what about you, however, does require you to spend ‘points’. This is something that I do not plan on doing.

Some of what my friends “said” did however make me smile, and many of the answers were very nice, so I thought I’d share.

• Is Nater Kane fun to be around? Yes
• Would you travel the world with Nater Kane? No
• Do you think that Nater Kane lets the “yellow mellow”? Yes
• Is Nater Kane fun to be around? Yes
• Do you think that Nater Kane will do anything to get what they want? No
• Do you think that Nater Kane can do 20 pushups? Yes
• Would Nater Kane ever dress up in a mascot outfit and run around? Yes
• Do you think that Nater Kane knows what a fist pound is? Yes
• Do you think that Nater Kane grinds their teeth while sleeping? Yes
• Do you think that Nater Kane has ever used steroids? No
• Do you think that Nater Kane has ever given money to a homeless person? Yes
• Do you think that Nater Kane is a freak? No
• Do you think Nater Kane parties too much? No
• Do you think your first impression of Nater Kane was right? Yes
• Do you think that Nater Kane is mean? No
• Do you think that Nater Kane can eat more than 3 Big Macs at a time? No
• Would you travel the world with Nater Kane? Yes
• Do you think Nater Kane has ever pulled an all-nighter? Yes
• Find out who answered for 50 coins!Do you think that Nater Kane is a slacker? No
• Do you think that Nater Kane looks good in a bathing suit? No
• Do you think Nater Kane is a spaz? Yes
• Do you think that Nater Kane has showered today? Yes
• Do you think that Nater Kane ‘plays with themselves’? No
• Does Nater Kane have a nice butt? Yes
• Do you think that Nater Kane watches the TV show “24″? Yes
• Have you ever had a crush on Nater Kane? Yes
• Do you think that Nater Kane has ever fooled around at work? Yes
• Do you think that Nater Kane has game? Yes
• Do you think that Nater Kane is cuter than Brad Pitt? Yes
• Do you think that Nater Kane puts ‘hoes’ before ‘bros’? No
• Do you think that Nater Kane has ever played strip poker? Yes
• Do you think that Nater Kane knows what a fist pound is? No
• Do you think that Nater Kane is selfish? No
• Do you think that Nater Kane likes blue eyes? Yes
• Is Nater Kane fun to be around? Yes
• Do you think that Nater Kane voted for Obama? Yes
• Do you think that Nater Kane has a funny looking nose? No

This is book number two for Coda. NOM is currently working on a project built with Kohana, a framework originally based on CodeIgniter.

Their marketing copy reads something like this:

Kohana is a PHP 5 FRAMEWORK that uses the MODEL VIEW CONTROLLER architectural pattern. It aims to be SECURE, LIGHTWEIGHT, and EASY to use.

This book cover is much simpler than the one i produced for Subversion here. I quickly came to realize that there’s no point at all in spending the time to make such a complicated image.

Book Title: Kohana
URL: http://docs.kohanaphp.com/
Simple cover: KohanaBook.png
Use for Mode: PHP-HTML
Search URL: http://docs.kohanaphp.com/?do=search&id=*

I was just reading through Adding more Coda Books, and thought that if you were going to add Subversion’s documentation to Coda, it deserved an okay looking cover. I also thought that linking to the nightly documentation wouldn’t be a bad idea either.

For SVN 1.6 nightlies

Book Title: Subversion 1.6
URL: http://svnbook.red-bean.com/nightly/en/svn-book.html
Simple cover: http://www.naterkane.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/SubversionBook.png
Use for Mode: None
Search URL: http://www.google.com/search?q=site:svnbook.red-bean.com%20*%20

For SVN 1.5

Book Title: Subversion 1.5
URL: http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.5/svn-book.html
Simple cover: http://www.naterkane.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/SubversionBook-1.5.png
Use for Mode: None
Search URL: http://www.google.com/search?q=site:svnbook.red-bean.com%20*%20

I’ve been having some issues with a particular App consuming a serious amount of processing lately, and it’s really been driving me nuts. having 7/8th of your total processing on a macbookpro (2.6 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo w/ 3 GB ram) will make it run really hot. After seeing that my cpu temp was hovering at around 170 degrees, and the cpu fans maxed out at 6000 rpm, I opened Activity Monitor and saw this: (note: the App that’s eating so much CPU is not shown to protect the guilty)

So I posted a message on twitter to see if there’s anyone who follows me who might be able to suggest a solution.

Then just a short 2 minutes later, Ryan Barr (@ryanbarr) came through and pointed me in the right direction.

cputhrottle is a small OS X command-line utility designed to limit the CPU usage of a process to which it attaches.

I found that even though I have a utility installed to increase the fan speed when CPU temperature increases, sometimes I would run jobs that maxed out the CPU for long periods — and this caused my MacBook to get extremely hot. Within the space of a couple minutes, the temperature displayed had jumped by over 40 degrees Fahrenheit.

The utility takes a process ID (pid) and a percentage amount to limit. For example:

sudo ./cputhrottle 328 25

Running this command would limit process 328 to a maximum of 25% CPU usage.

Note that cputhrottle needs to be run with root privileges to be able to attach to the process to control. I recommend doing this via the sudo command.

Source code is below, as well as a pre-compiled binary (OS X 10.5.1, Intel). If there is any interest in a PPC version I would be willing to cross-compile one. The program requires that Boost 1.33.1 be installed to compile. Run make all to build cputhrottle and a test program.

The source hopefully will be interesting to those looking into how to manipulate processes in Mac OS via mach system calls. The code is a subset of code I was working on to create a simple debugger as an alternative to gdb. Obviously, this project was much simpler and ultimately more useful.

cputhrottle makes use of the task_info, task_suspend, and task_resume calls. task_info and task_threads are used to collect CPU usage statistics on the process, and the program then suspends/resumes the attached process appropriately until the CPU usage has stabilized. Any errors occurring are assumed to be a result of the attached process exiting, and result in cputhrottle also exiting. Control-C is intercepted, and the attached process allowed to resume gracefully before cputhrottle exits.

Source: cputhrottle.tar.gz

Binary: cputhrottle.gz

Note: Thanks to Nikolaj Schumacher for pointing out a race condition whereby a thread being sampled could have ceased to exist after having been enumerated as existing within the process. Specifically, he noticed this while throttling Handbrake, which creates/kills threads in rapid succession. I have applied his patch and the new sources and binary reflect his changes. I tested the fix and cputhrottle behaved as before (for my test case).

Contact email: nolanw, followed by an underbar and then the word “commerce” at willnolan dot com

http://www.willnolan.com/cputhrottle/cputhrottle.html.