Terminal.app disappears - Charlessoft to the rescue

I just noticed that the Terminal.app disappeared from my OS x Leopard installation! Oh No! And this just as I was switching backup solution! (Damn). I googled, and found reports that claim that doing "something funny" like accidentally dragging Terminal out of the dock can cause it not only to be removed from the dock, but from Utilities as well ! HORROR !!

Well, I don't want to restore my entire machine - some 100 GB of stuff, and wondered if there was a way to select just Terminal.app from the installation CDs. And it turns out there is a free/shareware called Pacifist from Charlessoft that can pick individual files from .pkg files. Decided to give it a try.

I downloaded and installed the Pacifist package without problems, and started it up. It asks for a 20$ donation/fee to get rid of the nag that otherwise appears each time it is started, which I will donate if it helps me fix my problems ;)

There is an option in Pacifist to open Apple install disks which I used. After inserting install disk 1 and 2 a couple of times, a browser appeared with all of the packages. Used search to locate Terminal, a right click over the package said "Install to Default Location..." which I did, and it restored Terminal.app. The app data was apparently intact, because all my previously used locations where remembered.

Thanks Charlessoft, a check for 20$ is in the mail :)

Blush - I found the missing Terminal - it was a tiny icon on the desktop hidden behind the dock! f this is not what Pacifist did when it installed the new copy then I must have managed to drag it out of the dock and dropped it there, causing it to disappear. Searching for it did not help though...

NTFS on Mac OSx using Mac Fuse and NTFS 3G

When I switched over to using a Mac it was because my PC had crashed. Two of the disks survived though, and now I wanted to mount them on my mac to salvage some documents, and use of of the disks as a backup disk for my mac book pro.

I got an IceBox to mount the drive, and hooked it up using USB. This worked like a charm, and I could access my documents. But hey - the NTFS driver on Leopard does not support write! My idea was to first clean out all the garbage from the disk and then copy it to my Mac (the disk is larger than the internal one). Crap!

Googled and found the cure - use Mac Fuse, an umbrella for plugging in support for various file system types, and NTFS-3g, a driver for Mac Fuse that support both reading and writing.

I found this blog-post how to do this.

First download and install Mac Fuse, then download a NTFS-3G as instructed in this blog-post.

Again everything worked fine - Except - it failed to mount one of the partitions on my disk because apparently I did not shut down the NTFS properly before installing NTFS-3G (merde).

This was a bit tricky to fix. An error message appears with instructions, but they are not accurate. Basically what is needed is a mount with "-o force" to make it clear the "unclean shutdown".

Googled, and found the answer in this forum. To get rid of the problem you need to do two things:

Create the directory where the drive is to be mounted by opening a Terminal window and typing:

mkdir -p /Volumes/C-DRIVE

Where C-DIRVE is the name of the volume, and then forcing it to be mounted by typing (all on one line):

sudo /usr/local/bin/ntfs-3g /dev/disk1s1 /Volumes/C-DRIVE
-olocale=en_US.UTF-8,force,auto_xattr,defer_auth,defer_permissions,volname="C-DRIVE"

Where C-DRIVE is the name of the volume. and "/dev/disk1s1" is the device name as shown in the error message displayed by NTFS-3G.

In my case this produced an error, as apparently /Volumes/C-DRIVE was already inside an ntfs-3g mounted partition (there are two partitions on my drive), but it did at least tell me that it cleared the Log File.

After this, it worked find to just eject the drives, and plug in the USB cable - no need to run the commands again. But I guess they will come in handy when there is an unclean shutdown sometime in the future....

Got my iPhone 3G - Love it, but why the US number format?

Absolutely love the iPhone 3G - the design and user interface is amazing. Syncing it with contacts from p900 worked like a charm, downloaded my entire music library, it synced email, and did everything on its own! The entire process went very smooth.

But what did they do with phone number formatting?!! It has US style formatting even though the international setting is Swedish. It is almost impossible to decipher the numbers - did I enter the correct number or not?

08 123 45 67 becomes 081 345 567 (sigh).

Telia's iPhone 3G pages says nothing about support - but refers to apple's pages. Apple on the other hand, refers to Telia for repair. I guess the packaging for Sweden is done by Apple - so this must be their problem. I reported this as "a bug" on apple's feedback pages.... wonder what will happen next...

Love everything about the device except:

• US phone number formatting of Swedish numbers
• Why does it take so damned long to sync when I just synced 5 minutes ago and nothing has changed in contacts (syncing contacts takes for ever - or at least that is what iTunes says...)?
• Would like to see the photos of my contacts in the Favourites list
• Battery life is a bit short...

Migrating from Sony Ericsson P900 to iPhone 3G

My iPhone 16G Black finally arrived after first having received two 8 GB iPhones (could it be because some idiot thought that two 8GB iPhones = one 16GB?).

Anyway, before jumping into all the fun with the iPhone, I needed to sync my old faithful Sony Ericsson P900. I did not really want to install the Sony Ericsson software for this, and I was very pleased when I found that Mac OS x Leopard ISync supports the device!

First hurdle - when scanning for devices in iSync having marked that I wanted to scan for "phones" produced no result, but scanning for "Any" worked, and the mac and p900 started talking ok.

iSync installs an iSync agent on the phone, and first attempt failed, because instructions where not 100% clear. You are supposed to "open" the message to install it - not just accept it with "ok". After a second install it worked ok.

Starting iSync - it quickly gets to 33% done receiving changes from P900, but then it is stuck there for a long time (several minutes), and I thought something was wrong, googled for possible solutions, and while reading some articles, iSync popped up a report with what it wanted to sync!

Worked just fine, and it even got the images for the contacts. Neat.

Heading out to pick up my iPhone... I hope I am going to be happy with it - I really liked the way the P900 was manageable with just one hand using the the wheel on the side.

Testing Publishing using Ecto offline publishing tool

This is a test of using the Ecto offline publishing tool. I found it quite tedious to write longer articles using the blogger web interface.

So here is a small test:

Dependency Icon

Dependent Icon

And a larger screen short of Buckminster showing embedded OPML and the new Component Outline View.

Works quite well.

OS X man pages GUI

Found a useful man page user interface for OS X called ManOpen - you find it here:  http://www.clindberg.org/projects/ManOpen.html

How to get a WMV video on to a DVD on the Mac

This was really giving me problems at first. I installed Flip4Mac (free edition) to be able to play WMV files using the QuickTime Player that came with Leopard - and it worked just fine. Trying to import the WMW file into iDVD however caused iDVD to hang (perpetual multicoloured rotating ball).  I then upgraded my QuickTime to a QuickTimePro to enable being able to convert the video to QuickTime mov format. This worked as a charm, and it was possible to use this file in the iDVD project.  Only flaw is that there is big letters telling everyone that the video was converted with the free edition of Flip4Mac.  sigh So, I spent an additional 29 USD to get rid of it, and I could now create the iDVD project. I am sure there is some free version somewhere, but I was in a hurry. If anyone has any info about free versions to perform the same conversion I would be glad to hear from you.

Oh man... Thunderbird and Lightning - not an ideal combination either....

Hm, this really sucks. Thunderbird 2.0.0.12 and Lightning 0.7 and GCalDeamon isn't exactly ideal. In the couple of hours I have tried it, Thunderbird managed to list one mail item twice while missing another item in the same inbox (IMAP). When deleting the double entry, the hidden email disappeared! The multiple tags features does not work. When leaving the mailbox (for any other view), only one of the tags remain (maybe this caused the earlier problem). Lightning, and GCalDeamon seems to have different views of the correct time in my timezone - DST screwup somewhere perhaps? An email viewed in Thunderbird that contained an .ICS attachment had no functionality associated - when clicking it, nohing at all happened. (This really sucks). I am actually better of with a functioning iCal which is integrated with Leopard mail, and having a read only view of my google calendar (and going to google online for editing). Crap. I was hoping for Thunderbird and Lightning + google to provide one set up for mail, usenet news, rss, and calendar.

Working Calendar setup on OS X leopard

After much searching and looking at alternatives, I gave up trying to integrate Leopard iCal with Google Calendar. It worked fine to just read the data, but not update the calendar. Maybe a few releases away then google may support CalDav, or someone interested enough in the combination may come up with a solution... There is a GCalDeamon http://gcaldaemon.sourceforge.net/usage12.html written in java that works well with google calendar, but the Leopard version of iCal uses a different format than the Tiger version, so this particular combination does not work :(. So, I switched to Thunderbird and Lightning (Sunbird) instead, and there it was quite straight forward to install and integrate with google. You have to enter some UNIX commands when doing so, but it is quite simple. Happy for now, but the configuration to also suport offline use is a bit more complicated, and something I will continue working on... Now I also have to figure out how to start the GCalDeamon as part of the OS x start up. (I am sure that is easy, but I have not done this before)

Just found a much better version of Open Office for Mac that runs nativly (i.e. does not require X11). You find NeoOffice here http://www.neooffice.org Tip, you need to move OpenOffice to the Trash to get file associations to pick NeoOffice. I guess  Open Office can be reinstalled if you don't like NeoOffice.

Installing pgAdminIII for OS X was also easy even if the right windows did not pop up automatically - I had to go look for the pgadmin "disk" in the finder.  The pgAdminIII is available from http://www.postgresql.org/

Continued setting up the environment on my mac. Time to get a database - Installing postgreSQL was quite simple once I found this ready made installer for OS X at http://www.entropy.ch/software/macosx/postgresql/  The instructions worked just fine.

The blogger dashboard widget has some quirks. Try typing a lot of text - it expands nicely, but the text starts to go off screen after a while - and WTF! There is no scoll - so you can't get to the "save as draft" and "publish post" buttons at the bottom... Guess it is intended for shorter messages only....

Calendar I was very happy when I found out that there was a way to synchronize the iCal with google calendar - finally a good solution with calendar + sync I though. After spending hours on downloading, configuring and trying to figure out what was wrong, I realize that the sync software dow not work on Leopard because of a change in the file format of iCal (it is now in a database). Bummer! Ended up at least showing the google calendar, in iCal, but have not decided what to do yet for the final solution. Skype No problems, only issue being that the version lags behind skype for windows. Calculator I am used to having a hex/bin calculator and also scientific functions Found several calculators for the dashboard, and settled on two different - Calculate 1.1.0 that handles scientific calculations and support variables (neat) in a rolling window, and Hex Calculator Widget version 1.5. (There are plenty of semi useless calculators in the dashboard widget listing at apple btw).

I have just converted from Windows to Mac! Having lots of fun setting up my laptop with cool gadgets and useful software. Thought I share the experience as I go along. Firtst, I installed the Blogger dashboard gadget and this is the first post that I have made using this cool tool. Really conventient! Mail Had no problems connecting to my various mail accounts. Worked like a charm. Had some confiuration to do to make the mail client behave like a wanted. Chat Now this was problematic. I have chat accounts in AIM, ICQ, YM, GoogleTalk, and Skype and also want to chat on IRC. Now tell me which client I should use? Turns out that iChat does google talk, jabber, and the mac specific chat only. I spent quite some time figuring out if Jabber was useful. Jabber acts as a gateway and supports multiple protocols. The setting up is a bit messy (a different client (like psi) is needed to connect to jabber servers to configure subscriptions, and I never got it to work with iChat. Then I read somewhere, that iChat perhaps is not the best Jabber client, and to fully make use of Jabber other clients were suggested. Duh ! The reason for setting up jabber was that I really wanted to try to use the software that comes with the mac as much as possible. Ended up doing the following instead: - downloaded Adium with covers all the different types of chat except IRC which is kind of funny as Adium provides support via IRC :) Anyway, Adium recomended Coloquy as an IRC client. - Downloaded and set up Coloquy - which works very well after some intitial problems with connecting with my nick name (I was already logged in from another computer and this caused some trouble).

After >10 years with java - I learned something new

Today I badly wished for the keyword "goto" in java to have an implementation - deeply nested if/then/else in loops and I wanted to break out of several levels at once. What I found was something I have not seen in use anywhere - the possibility to break out of a labeled block! So, if you, like me have not read chapter 14 of the Java Language Specification - here is a quick tip!

everything:
{
    // do something
    break everything;
}

breaks out of the block. This is true for loops as well! And with loops it is also possible to address which loop to continue.

outer:
for(int i = 0; i < someLimit; i++)
    for(j = 0; j < someLimit;j++)
           break outer;

breaks the outer loop

outer:
for(int i = 0; i < someLimit; i++)
    for(j = 0; j < someLimit;j++)
           continue outer;
continues the outer loop.