You probably have used homebrew. Haven't you? In the last step of the reinstallation the installer moves / checks files in /usr/local. If you have a lot of files over there (for example because you used homebrew), this takes forever.

Do not abort the installation. Press cmd+L to see …

During last terms compiler design course I learned x86 assembly "the hard way"... Here's some stuff that I "found out" while developing x86 assembly on OSX 10.10.

Read this first

I'm writing this post a couple of months after the course. I did not lookup the instructions and I'm …

Starting with Yosemite Apple finally stopped shipping Java 6 with OSX. It's recommended to install the latest Java version directly from Oracle. Unfortunately IntelliJ IDEA needs Java 6 (!) to start. Here is the recommended way to run IntelliJ IDEA with Java 8.

# first, install IntelliJ to /Applications
mkdir ~/Library/Preferences …

I decided to switch back to Gmail/Inbox by Gmail. Copying thousands of mails in Thunderbird is a pain and after a couple of unsuccessful tries I started to search a better working alternative. mutt to the rescue!

# login to your old imap account:
mutt -f imaps://username@oldmailserver/INBOX …

Boost 1.56.0 which is currently installed by homebrew is broken. Just try to compile the following C++ program. It will fail.

#include <boost/graph/adjacency_matrix.hpp>

int main() {
}

Here are the steps to manually install Boost 1.55:

• Download Boost 1.55 here
• Extract the source and cd …

Even on OSX you should not be working with an admin account. Here are the steps to make homebrew usable for non admin users.

Assumptions

I assume brew has already been installed by an administrator and it's login is admin. Change admin below to the name of your admin account …

Problem: brew fails with "configure: error: C compiler cannot create executables"

==> Upgrading 1 outdated package, with result:
python3 3.4.2_1
==> Upgrading python3
==> Downloading https://www.python.org/ftp/python/3.4.2/Python-3.4.2.tar.xz
Already downloaded: /Library/Caches/Homebrew/python3-3.4.2.tar.xz
==> ./configure --prefix …