BrT

Musings about technology and other neat stuff

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Service Scrubber, Safari and keychains

December 6th, 2007 · Comments

I love Service Scrubber, which allows me to clean up the Services menu so that it’s actually useful. But I discovered that it does not interact well with the new code signing feature in Leopard, because it modifies Safari’s Info.plist file to disable services. Once this happens, the system will refuse Safari access to keychains [...]

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Real separators for the Mac OS X Leopard dock (howto)

November 21st, 2007 · Comments

In examining the strings inside the Dock binary in Leopard, I found a way to add real separators to the dock, instead of adding dummy applications with empty or decorative icons, as commonly done.

This works only in Leopard (OSX 10.5):

Run the following commands from the Terminal: defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-apps -array-add ‘{ [...]

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Showing and hiding the desktop in Gnome

July 23rd, 2007 · Comments

Gnome has a button that you can add to a panel to show/hide the desktop, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to bind that action to a key. Today I learned about the wmctrl program, which can perform many window-manager operations, so I put together this simple script which toggles the “show the desktop” state:

#!/bin/bash # Toggle the [...]

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Installing Ruby + Rails on an old Mac

July 22nd, 2007 · Comments

In setting up Ruby and Ruby on Rails in my (aging) 1GHz PowerBook, I decided to use Dan Benjamin’s excellent instructions, but I deviated from them in a few places to reduce compilation time and to fix some other problems, so I thought I’d document what I did in case it helps anyone else. So [...]

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How to match multi-line regular expressions in Emacs Lisp

March 27th, 2007 · Comments

I was trying to fix the Emacs Template Toolkit mode file so that it correctly highlights multi-line directives. I could not find how to tell Emacs to make “.” match also a newline, but I found that the negative clause [^...] will match anything that is not specified, including newlines. So by using it with [...]

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How to create a network interface in Solaris

March 15th, 2007 · Comments

I did a test install of Belenix, another OpenSolaris distribution. On booting the system, the network interface was nowhere to be seen. To create it, you have to use the ifconfig “plumb” command, like this:

ifconfig e1000g0 plumb

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Network configuration in Solaris

December 1st, 2006 · Comments

I have been playing with Nexenta GNU/OpenSolaris to get familiarized with dtrace. This document is a good explanation of how to configure the system with a fixed IP address: docs.sun.com: System Administration Guide: IP Services

I would add the following: if the system is currently configured to use DHCP, you also have to remove the corresponding [...]

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How to fix Skype 2.0.0.6 crash on Mac OSX

November 7th, 2006 · Comments

I had been unsuccessful in running the latest version of Skype on my Mac - it would crash on startup. I finally found the solution in one of the comments on Skype’s versiontracker.com entry: add Skype.app to Application Enhancer’s “Master exclude” list. I did this, and now Skype works fine!

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Geek to Live: Consolidate Firefox’s chrome: Some interesting techniques to maximize screen space in Firefox. Comments




Run xscreensaver GL hacks only on one xinerama screen

October 22nd, 2006 · Comments

I recently managed (accidentally, just by upgrading X.org) to get accelerated graphics working on my T43p Thinkpad running Gentoo. So now I get all the nice Xscreensaver GL hacks running at full speed - with one little problem: I have my system configured for dual-head mode (internal screen and external monitor) using MergedFB, with both [...]

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