Several times I’ve downloaded an app and had OS X ask me the following every time I opened it: “TheAppName is an application downloaded from the Internet. Are you sure you want to open it? The first time, well, okay, but everytime? The trick is to remove the com.apple.quarantine extended attribute from the application’s directory.… Read More: Unquarantining Apps in OS X »
This morning I had a strange problem where sound stopped working on my MacBook Pro running 10.6. The speaker icon in the menu bar was grayed out and the image brought up when pressing the volume up and down controls indicated that sound was muted. Bringing up the Sound control panel in System Preferences didn’t… Read More: OS X Sound Won’t Unmute »
I just updated an old post on using Python with MySQL on OS X. The good news is that you don’t need to create an extra directory of symbolic links anymore. The not really bad news is that you have to be careful about 32-bit versus 64-bit. Ideally, you’ll first upgrade to a 64-bit version… Read More: MySQL, Python and Snow Leopard »
I helped my brother set up his HP MediaSmart Server tonight. It runs on Windows Home Server, and allegedly the initial install has to be done from another machine running Windows. Since he didn’t have Windows installed anywhere, I used a Windows XP virtual machine that I had running on VMWare Fusion on my MacBook… Read More: Setting up HP MediaSmart Server from a Windows VM »
After using the built-in self upgrade feature of Eclipse to go from 3.4 to 3.4.1, I was no longer able to launch Eclipse. Instead of the happy Ganymede splash screen, I got a poorly formatted dialog saying “The Eclipse executable launcher was unable to locate its companion shared library.” I discovered that the problem was… Read More: Eclipse 3.4.1 Launch Problem on OS X »
Now, if that name doesn’t make a product just sell itself, I don’t know what would. Anyway, I bought a D-Link DNS-323 NAS from a friend who I trust to do all the necessary research. He bought it, but because he is really picky and it didn’t do exactly what he wanted, he built up… Read More: D-Link DNS-323 NAS »
Not realizing there was a surfeit of newline characters in a largish mysqldump file I was analyzing, I tried to open it in TextMate. After a few minutes of listening to the hard drive in my Mac thrash away, I had to kill TextMate. One obvious solution was to split it into multiple lines, but… Read More: Adding Newlines with sed »
It was more work than it should have been, but you can get access to a MySQL database from Python on OS X 10.5 by following the instructions at this blog post. If you’re using Pydev in Eclipse, be sure /Library/Python/2.5/site-packages is in the System PYTHONPATH. Bring up the Preferences dialog, open Pydev in the… Read More: MySQL Support from Python on OS X »
Two engineers (Eric, a.k.a., Narf, and Jesús, a.k.a., Blanka) with whom I work at Voxify won a prize of nearly $14,000 from contributors at OnMac.net for being the first people to publicly get Windows XP running on an Intel-based Macintosh. I was kind of surprised when the Mac showed up in Jesus’s office a few… Read More: Voxify Engineers Run Windows on Intel iMac »
When I bought my wife a Titanium PowerBook nearly two years ago, I knew in advance that WiFi range was a significant drawback. The Apple Airport card sits below the keyboard and the Titanium shell acts entirely too much like a Faraday cage. After suffering through some Linksys-induced misery, I bought a NetGear wireless router.… Read More: Better PowerBook WiFi »