10 posts tagged “mac os x”
As someone who must constantly battle with myself to maintain focus on my work, it highly annoys me to have lots of applications open when I am only actually working in two or three. I wish that there was a way to say "Keep this application open but mute it and hide it from the tab switcher until I care about it again".
- iTunes which downloads podcasts periodically, some of which (due to the publisher's ignorance — NPR Hourly news I'm looking at you) will be missed if iTunes doesn't catch them before the next comes out.
- NetNewsWire which downloads RSS feeds, some of which have the same problem as the above for the exact same reason.
- Colloquy (IRC client) which I use periodically throughout the day by reading back over the log since my last check and responding. If you're not in channel, you have no log to catch up on and respond to. This is an example of an app that I sometimes want to be completely silent and other times to alert me when my name is written in channel (i.e. someone beckoning me)
- Billings.app which keeps track of the time I spend working on client projects. While I'm technically using this, I only interact with it periodically when I switch tasks, start or stop working.
- Skitch which I use to take screenshots. While I could just open this when I need it, that's a lot more keystrokes than just Command-5
- Desktop Folder X which adds nifty and important features to the open/save dialogs in Mac OS X
- Hardware Growler which posts notifications via Growl for hardware status changes (i.e. internet connectivity, disk issues, peripheral connections, etc.
- Last.fm which scrobbles anything you're listening to in iTunes to Last.fm
- MenuCalendarClock iCal which replaces the dock date and time with a much more useful version
- QuickSilver which, while being indispensible, is never, EVER accessed via the task switcher.
- The Finder which I don't need or use since I use PathFinder but which is opened every now and then by applications which are poorly coded and circumvent the standard API call which PathFinder intercepts. The worst way is the only way to kill the finder again is to stop and restart PathFinder.
As an Apple Mail user who has an infinite number of email aliases which all feed into the same box and some of which I use to reply to mail, using Apple Mail has always been slightly annoying. If I wanted to reply to emails with a particular email address, I had to set up a separate account with dummy POP credentials (since these are aliases and not mailbox accounts) and using the same SMTP credentials as my actual mailbox account. This provides me a dropdown in my composition window with all of the reply-from addresses but also creates a bunch of cruft in the form of extra unused mailboxes (e.g. Inbox, Trash, Sent, Drafts, etc)
Just today, I found out I was doing it wrong!
I'm not sure whether this feature is newish or has just always been poorly documented but all you have to do is add your email aliases (comma-separated) to the "Email Address" field in your main account! See the Apple KB article aliases in Mail" "Using email for details.
So easy. So cruft-free. So badly documented...
I've become much more pragmatic in the last year or so when it comes to trying out the latest and greatest apps. That's mostly because I have a setup that works well for me and it would take something big to make me want to take time to learn a new app or a new habitual workflow.
Of course, when both Allan Odgaard and John Gruber link to the same one with glowing reviews, that's when I sit up and listen. In fact, ExpanDrive is the app I've been waiting for. And waiting for. And waiting for.[*]
ExpanDrive (and its Windows counterpart) allows you to very simply mount a remote filesystem over SSH as if it were just another drive on your Mac. What's more, it apparently does so with blazing speed when compared to MacFUSE et al. I can confirm this at least insofar as I've tested.
Now, I can easily move crap around my various webservers and edit remote files and entire directory hierarchies effortlessly from TextMate. I can mount my mini (not as painful as it sounds) making it simpler to share an iTunes library. I can even set things up so I can access my FireWire hard drives while on the road.
This is the future I've been waiting for. Minus, of course, the jetpack that's been back-ordered all my life...
[*] - MacFuse had promise but the installation, cautions of latency and my pragmatism kept me away until they refined it. Ironically, at least some of the MacFUSE underpinnings are used in ExpanDrive but the latter adds some caching elves and other magical creatures to make up the speed difference.
This is just a little hint for anyone who, like me, ran into this problem. If you are trying to compile mod_fcgid 2.2 for Apache 2.x on Mac OS X and are getting errors like this on load of a fastgi script:
[Wed Jan 16 15:18:49 2008] [error] (13)Permission denied: mod_fcgid: couldn't bind unix domain socket /opt/local/apache2/run/mod_fcgid/10597.34
[Wed Jan 16 15:18:49 2008] [warn] (13)Permission denied: mod_fcgid: spawn process /Users/jay/Sites/tdi.local/bnn/cgi/mt/mt.fcgi error
The fix is to change the SocketPath configuration directive from the default (which is usually something like run/mod_fcgid) to /tmp/fcgid_sock/.
I'm not sure why, but the socket can't be written to under the Apache run directory despite having the correct permissions but under tmp it works great. Chalk one up for the "computers are run by evil little magical elves" camp.
So today, at 9am, I started the migration from my highly customized and infinitely tricked out developer machine (a n outmatched1st gen Mac Book Pro) to my brand new shiny 2.6GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Macbook Pro with 4GB of RAM and twice the disk space. Given what I was going to, I figured, this shouldn't be too hard, right?
Wrong...
For starters, the Migration assistant leads me right into a 4 hour transfer process with nary a warning nor a way to abort. Not cool. So I spent the morning doing what work I could on my Mac Mini and iPhone[1] while also reading up on my soon-to-be new operating system. Oh did I fail to mention that I was not only migrating to a new computer but also upgrading to a new operating system? Yes, I deserve everything I got...
Once it was done, it was quite evident how much more I had to do. The console was spinning like top, my four GB of RAM being quickly eaten up, finder and other application crashes, etc etc etc... One by one, I tackled the problems: vicious launch daemon issues, filesystem permission issues, user/group ownership issues, conflicts between my custom LAMP setup and the one shipped with Leopard, apps which weren't updated for Leopard, FastCGI dying like a fish in the desert, on and on and on....
Finally, though, like the marathoner cutting through the tape at the finishing line, I stabilized the patient!
So, fourteen hours later, this screenshot makes me very, very happy...
This, however, is a little less than optimal...
[1] - Apple whore, go ahead and say it...
Those of you who are into that sort of thing probably already knew about (and love) the Subversion bundle for TextMate[1]. I've been using it for ages and its truly wonderful in terms of productivity and seamless integration. However, the one thing that always bothered me is that there are some times when I just want to check the Subversion status of a particular directory or perhaps check in a single file without opening up the whole thing in TextMate. Usually, I switch to iTerm, and "svn stat PATH" (or whatever) right from there.
But no more...
I just now found out that PathFinder (which is also one of those "change the way you work" apps that I use and love) has SVN integration built right in! All you have to do is navigate to a directory that is under svn control, hit Control-Command-S and voilá!
Holy CRAP that's awesome... One less reason to go to Terminal and, it seems, to develop a Subversion GUI client for the Mac...
[1] - If you do development on Mac OS X and aren't already using either TextMate or Subversion or both, get thee to Google now. It will change the way you work permanently and for the better.
This is one of the best, most comprehensive list of software, tips and tricks I've seen on a single web page which is geared towards development on Mac OS X. If you're a Mac-based gearhead, it's worth a read. You'll certainly pick up at least one or two new gems...
If you're a Perl hacker on Max OS X, you probably find yourself referring to POD docs quite a bit. I usually use TextMate for viewing POD of the current module I'm looking at, (Command-control-p) but TextMate's pod2html viewer only allows one document at a time, This is often about 5 or 6 too few. The "perldoc" command has sort of a similar issue unless you want to have a large number of terminal windows open.
So if you fall into that category, you'll want to get pod2pdf and its associated libraries. Unpack and install it[1]. Then, add the following little useful function to your .bash_profile or some script that is executed upon login.
# Convert, cache and open POD docs in Preview.app
podview() {
# Customize the path to your POD PDF directory
POD=~/Documents/PODmodule="$@"
moduledir=`echo $module | sed -E 's/[:\/]+/_/g' \
| sed -E 's/^[\._]+//g' \
| sed -E 's/\.p[lm]$//g'`
if [ ! -e "$POD" ]; then
mkdir $POD
fi
if [ ! -e "$POD/$moduledir.pdf" ]; thenperldoc -T -u $module > $POD/$moduledir
pod2pdf $POD/$moduledir; rm $POD/$moduledir
fi
open -a Preview "$POD/$moduledir.pdf"
}
After that, all you have to do is type "podview Some::Perl::Module" and it will be automatically opened in Preview as a PDF. In addition, the PDF is cached in ~/Documents/POD (by default) to speed up the process or loading it or even finding it with, say, QuickSilver?
[1] - Don't forget the actual pod2pdf wrapper script which is also included in the distribution but not installed via make install. Put it somewhere in your path.
For those of you who use TextMate, here's an awesome little AppleScript that you can put in your Finder window toolbar which will open the current folder in TextMate in directory browsing mode. Save the source as a .scpt file and open it in ScriptEditor. Save it as a run-only application and drag that app to your Finder toolbar.
I <heart> TextMate... Can't. Wait. For. TextMate. 2.0! I can't imagine how it could get any better...
Yesterday was my first day of my revived consulting career. It started well enough.
- Woke up early to a pot of coffee and a nice breakfast.
- Walked Stella for an hour and a half.
- Finished my one remaining task for Six Apart
- Jumped into transferring my data off of my work computer that 6A was nice enough to let me keep for a few days for this purpose.
- Had a meeting with a prospective client and ate yummy Baja fish tacos.
- Walked Stella for another hour.
- Continued transferring data off to the new computer
- Did a major software update to bring the new computer up to speed.
And that's where my day went to hell.... After the Software Update, the computer wouldn't boot. Instead it stopped on the Apple screen with the little throbber going mezmerizingly and maddenly around in it's little circle. It wouldn't let me boot into Safe mode. I followed the Apple guidelines in their knowledge base for such an issue but none resolved the problem. Verbose startup told me that two different messages were being thrown into the system.log"
/System/Library/CoreServices/loginwindow.app/Contents/MacOS/loginwindow: Login Window Application Started
launchd: getty repeating too quickly on port /dev/console, sleeping
So I booted into single-user mode and spent the next four hours trying different things all to no avail. Now, I consider myself a pretty advanced Mac OS X issue and I couldn't get the damn thing to work. What would Joe Blow do?
Well, Joe Blow is probably using Windows, so I took a page out of their playbook and reinstalled the OS. After that, I performed the Software Update again and, voilá, all was well.
All in all, I spent the entire afternoon and most of the night fixing my new computer. That, my friends, is wrong. However, today all is well and the first thing I did was to create a full backup disk image. Not doing that again. Oh no...
Today, I'll be installing the Developer Tool s which will not only also need an update but which have also given me kernel panics in the past. Treading cautiously...
On the bright side, with the computer down or inaccessible for so long while updating/resintalling, I was able to clean the house and cook a good meal for Jenn. Yay for working at home!
