have a confession to make: I have not always been a Mac person. For the period of time between the retirement of System 9 and Panther (yes, it took Apple showing a real commitment to Unix for me to give them a shot again), I abandoned our fine operating system for greener pastures, well, green screen at least. Work drove me into Windows (as it has for about 90% of the workers out there) but my real outlet was anything Linux, BSD or Solaris-related. There was nary a distro that did not cross my hard drive (virtual or otherwise) and I was very happy programming, scripting and living life on the command line, with an occasional, lingering trip into X11 when necessary. OS X changed all that, since Apple managed to make Unix look very good while keeping all of the real power that lies beneath the GUI.Now, one may be able to argue the aesthetics of Leopard (hey, Panic should be happy, it took Leopard to finally drive me into purchasing CandyBar), but none can dispute the gems that await those who dare to invoke the Terminal, and I’ll be taking the opportunity over some of the coming posts to dwell on the nuggets that bear a deeper look. For those that are not as comfortable with the more textual side of their systems, I’ll be making these trips as painless as possible (you may not need to delve into the Utilities folder to find the Terminal icon at all). The first stop is a little utility called opensnoop. Leopard ships with something called DTrace that gives developers and administrators the ability to take a peek at what all running code is doing in a flexible and dynamic way. Giving DTrace the coverage it deserves is beyond a simple blog post, but there are some smaller utilities - like opensnoop - that take advantage of the power of DTrace, but on a more targeted scale which are worthy of a minor exposition.The main purpose of the opensnoop utility is to provide a report of file opens as they occur. Curious as to what really happens when Safari opens a web page? Want to see what files are accessed from that latest program you downloaded? You can find the answers with opensnoop.

There’s been days of rumors about the MacBook Air, Apple’s big announcement at MacWorld in San Francisco on Tuesday. But we just heard from the show floor, where NewTeeVee editor Liz is representing the GigaOM crew, that not only is Apple claiming that MacBook Air is the world’s thinnest laptop, but it’s decidedly greener, too (except for that non-user-replaceable battery). Liz liveblogs from the show floor that the MacBook Air’s earth-friendly qualities are: * it has a fully recyclable aluminum case * it’s Apple’s first display that is mercury-free, with arsenic-free glass * the Apple circuit boards are BFR-free and PVC-free * and it has 50 percent less packaging than the MacBook Not huge leaps, but solid incremental steps, given Apple has been criticized by groups like GreenPeace for being lax on the eco aspects of its hardware. The green moves are part of Steve Job’s pledge, announced last May, to change the company’s policies with regards to eliminating certain toxic chemicals and enhancing recycling. In that post, Jobs said Apple planned to introduce in 2007 its first displays using arsenic-free glass, but I guess January 2008 is better late than never. By the end of 2008, Apple says it plans to completely eliminate the use of PVC and BFRs in its products. There you go, readers, it costs $1,800, is shipping in two weeks, and can help placate your green guilt.