Ivan's blog

Let's say you want to delete a backup from an external drive you don't need anymore. This backup will be millions of files if it includes all the system files. If you want to delete such large amount of files using the Finder's Empty Trash command it may take you hours.

A simple trick in Terminal will reduce the time by 40% to empty your trash significantly. Carefully enter this command:
sudo rm -r

Now click and drag the folder you want to delete to the end of the line. This operation will insert the correct path. It will look something like this:
sudo rm -r /Volumes/Backup_Disk/Backups

Press enter and you will be asked for your admin password. Now just wait for the command to complete.

This method is not just faster, but it also runs in the background so you can use Finder normally.

If for whatever reason you need a list of files within a certain directory in text format you can do so using the ls Terminal command.

Just open Terminal, navigate to the required directory and then enter one of these commands to save the information to the directory.txt file:

Only the files within the directory: ls > directory.txt
Lists all subdirectories recursively: ls -R > directory.txt
Sorts by time of last modification: ls -t > directory.txt

For more options check this page.

Ballmer this is for you! :)

Check out these Design Lion Grand Prix winning call-for-entry posters for the annual Nike Basketball League Competition in Hong Kong.

The creative team Mccann Hong Kong literally translated the spirit of competition onto the posters. 350 posters were handmade by the players. Images of the top 10 players, each representing a unique skill were turned into printing templates. Then they were invited to a silkscreen workshop to print their image on top of each other. The posters became their battlefield. The random cross-printing became their battles. And the printing process became our message.

According to Google speed is everything. I personally agree. I can't stand slow sites. Speed is probably the second most important thing for me after content.

Here is a list of tips from Google on how you can improve your site's speed:

1. CSS: Using every declaration just once
2. How gzip compression works
3. HTTP caching
4. Improving website performance with Page Speed
5. Minimizing browser reflow
6. Optimizing JavaScript code
7. Optimizing web graphics
8. PHP performance tips
9. Prefetching resources
10. Properly including stylesheets and scripts
11. Reducing the file size of HTML documents
12. UI messaging and perceived latency

Drupal, the CMS engine behind creativebits uses many of these techniques successfully to speed up pages. It compresses the CSS files and it can pack several files into one single CSS file. It can cache pages so there are less php and mysql requests.

On Ads of the World because of the huge traffic we had to use http caching on top of Drupal's built in features as well.

I'm sure you knows how to make screen shoots in OS X: press the Apple-Shift-4 (Cmd-Shift-4) key combo to select just a part of the screen.

However, you may not know that once you started dragging the cursor to select a rectangle you can press Space to move the starting point of the selection.

Also you can press shift to fix the horizontal or vertical dimensions and only resize the selection to one direction.

Notice that while you move your cursor the starting point or dimensions of screenshoot are shown in pixels.

If you're experiencing issues with your iPhone 3.0 software update because the Apple servers are overloaded try this:

1. Click Update in iTunes.
2. Wait till you get the message "Expanding package" with a progress bar.
3. Disconnect your internet (Turn Airport off or simply take the Ethernet cable out).
4. Wait for the update to complete.
5. Reconnect internet.

Have fun with your new iPhone OS!

Twitter is one of the most important channels for informing the world about what is happening in Iran. The #iranelection tag has been the trending topic for over 3 days now with hundreds of messages every minute. Twitter even delayed their critical maintenance update on request from the US government just to let people tweet without interruption.

Today the new browser of Opera is finally unveiled. It features a new technology called Opera Unite, which extends what we are able to do online. Nothing radical, but if adopted on mass scale it would certainly be a game changer. Just like P2P was to file sharing or Skype was to telecom. Opera 10 allows you to share websites, files, notes and introduces a framework for even more.

With IE8 finally becoming a modern browser, Firefox 4 including more web services, Chrome soon available on all platforms and Opera 10 the browser war is ON.