Norwinter Studios

Us over at WireLoad have released a new Mac app. It is called Quiet and it’s a focus app.

Quiet has already become indispensable in my own work day because of what I think is its most handy feature: it marks me as busy in Skype and Adium and hides the otherwise ever distracting Growl messages I get. New email, new chat messages, new tweets. I don’t know about everyone else, but to me these things are incredibly distracting when I’m trying to crack a difficult programming or design problem.

Sure, I could quit all the communication apps. But then I miss out on stuff I might need to respond to. With Quiet, I can easily work for a while, then take a break and check the communication apps, and then immediately dive back into another work session. If I’m feeling antsy a work session might just be 10 minutes. If I really have to get into it I’ll stay in Quiet mode for an hour at a time (after which some people are guaranteed to be screaming for attention when I finally come out, but they’ll deal with it!).

Learn more about Quiet on its homepage.

I just discovered this handy command in OS X: pbcopy. It lets you pipe the output of a command right into the clipboard (or the ‘pasteboard’) so you can paste it into some non terminal application next. A convenient way to avoid having to scroll up and select the text in the terminal by hand.

Example:

cat myfile.txt | pbcopy

Today I saw a strange SWT bug which I couldn’t find much on when I searched for it online. In Mac OS X with a Table widget, sometimes pressing the Home or End keys on the keyboard would make the scrollbar move without the content actually moving. So for instance maybe you were scrolled towards the bottom and hit the Home key to get to the top: the bug would make you still see the same table rows even that the blue scrollbar marker would hop to the top. Even weirder, if you scrolled with the mouse wheel after that the scrollbar would snap right back to where you started and scroll like if you had never hit Home to begin with.

The solution was to add an SWT.KeyDown listener on the table and intercept any Home or End keyboard events. Set e.doit = false, then use table.setTopIndex() to change the viewing position in the table by hand. E.g. just reimplement the Home and End keys in your own code.

This worked fine for me.

Just a couple of quick notes.

• Use ‘entropy-php’ to install the php module to run with Apache on your mac.
• Rename /usr/bin/php to /usr/bin/php4 (This is important.)
• Rename /usr/bin/pear to /usr/bin/pear13 (Even more important.)
• Create a symbolic link so that the php5 pear can be used: ln /usr/local/php5/bin/pear /usr/bin/pear (Most important.)

If you don’t follow the last two steps you will get all kinds of funny errors with pear. Pear upgrade will refuse to upgrade you to pear 1.4 because it claims it’s missing pear 1.3 (which is funny because if pear isn’t installed, how can pear say anything? And why do you need an old version of pear to get a new version of pear?).

The most likely message you’ll see if you don’t do the last two steps is:

“Command ‘pear.symfony-project.com’ is not valid, try ‘pear help’”

when you try to add the Symfony channel.

From there on you can just proceed with the normal symfony installation stuff.

pear channel-discover pear.symfony-project.com
pear install symfony/symfony

All done.

I experienced this problem today. I bought a first generation MacBook (13″ 2.0 GHz Core Duo) for my brother. It came with 1GB of memory, but after playing around with a couple of programs I realized that was a little bit short. I was running a Windows XP in Parallels, and at the same time I had a Word document open, and a couple of browser windows. The machine almost came to a stop. Not that strange since Windows XP alone was using a couple of hundred MB of memory – maybe 400 MB. And Word running in Rosetta is a beast.

Anyhow, so I had 2GB of memory in my MacBook Pro and decided to swap a memory stick from the MacBook Pro with a stick from the MacBook. Then both machines would have 1.5 GB.

When you take out the battery pack from the MacBook you’ll find a little rail which you need to remove to get to the memory banks. Three tiny screws hold it in place, and it’s shaped like an L sort of. Here’s the thing: once I was done and I had put the memory in (marveling over the engineering making it possible to get to the memory hidden inside of the computer with the help of two cute little levers), I was unable to get the battery pack back in.

It just wouldn’t seem to fit anymore. When I tried to push the battery in it insisted on going towards the center of the computer instead of fitting snuggly. Anyhow to make a long story short it turns out I hadn’t put the L shaped rail back in place correctly. On the short leg of the L there is a little piece which needs to go into a little hole in the side of the battery compartment. Apparently I had missed that hole but since the L rail is made out of flexible metal it just bent a little and I didn’t realize it was put in wrong.

Solution was to use a little screwdriver to guide the little piece on the short leg into the little hole in the compartment wall. Then the battery fit great again and everything was A-ok.

Just writing this down to save people some time should you happen to come by this by place by Google or something.

Here’s an observation about creating large disk images in OS X on the Mac using Disk Utility: it won’t work on FAT32 systems and the error message will be very strange.

Basically I created a 110 GB sparse disk image on an external harddrive and put a few GB of data on it. In the middle of copying data to it the disk image started to fail though, and in fact the whole image became corrupted and was unmountable.

The problem is that the external harddrive came factory formated for FAT32 which has a max file size of 4GB. So when the sparse image grew beyond that it broke.

Similarily if you try to create a normal disk image (not sparse) with a size greater than 4GB, you’ll get an error message. On my MacBook Pro running OS X 10.4.6 the error was ‘illegal seek’.

The solution was just to reformat the drive using the Mac’s own file system HFS+ which has a ridiculously large max file size (thousands of terabytes). After that you can go crazy with creating large disk images.