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Musings about technology and other neat stuff

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Controlling notifications in iCal

December 11th, 2007 · No Comments

One of the very annoying things in iCal (both in MacOSX 10.4 and 10.5) is that accept/decline notifications for meeting invitations are always sent to the sender of the invitation. This can be very annoying in some cases (for example, when a company-wide invitation for a talk is sent, the sender does not really care [...]

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Logitech Control Center disables Growl notifications

December 10th, 2007 · 7 Comments

Small annoyance: if you are using the 2.4 version of the Logitech Control Center , Growl notifications no longer appear. The solution is to remove /Library/InputManagers/LCC Scroll Enhancer Loader, log out and back in.

[From cocoaforge - A Festivus for the Rest of Us » View topic - Notification doesn't appear]

Update: this also has [...]

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Disable dock icon for java programs in Mac OSX (howto)

December 7th, 2007 · 1 Comment

If you run a java program in OSX that uses the AWT library, by default the system shows a generic Java dock icon for it, even if the program does not have a GUI (e.g. it’s just using the library for image manipulation). To avoid showing the spurious dock icon, you have to set the [...]

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Service Scrubber, Safari and keychains

December 6th, 2007 · 1 Comment

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 · 29 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 ‘{ “tile-type” = “spacer-tile”; }’
killall [...]

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Showing and hiding the desktop in Gnome

July 23rd, 2007 · No 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:
[...]

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Installing Ruby + Rails on an old Mac

July 22nd, 2007 · Comments Off

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 · 5 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 · No 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 · No 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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