Quickies

posted on 20110526

The following notes are so brief that that they do not require this introductory sentence.

Allow the Mac to start without a keyboard attached:

System Preferences → Bluetooth → Advanced... → Uncheck the box marked "Open Bluetooth Assistant at startup when no input device is present".

To get/change the creator or type of a file:

Run /Developer/usr/bin/GetFileInfo or /Developer/usr/bin/SetFile.

No audio from some websites

posted on 2010-01-25 14:47:14

Problem: Sometimes I don’t hear any sound from Safari or Firefox while playing content from multimedia websites (e.g., YouTube). Curiously, sites that stream QuickTime files come through just fine; it’s just the embedded video files that don’t produce sound.

Cause: If you work with lots of sound apps (SoundHack, Audacity, etc.), one of them may have inadvertently munged some of the the Mac’s core audio settings.

Fix:

1. Open Audio MIDI Setup (/Applications/Utilities/), then check the Audio Output setting.
2. Change the Audio Output setting to 44100.0 Hz.
3. Quit Audio MIDI Setup.
4. Restart the app (e.g., Firefox).

See the Apple tech article "Mac OS X: No audio from certain multimedia content" for more details.

How to setup virtual hosts

posted on 2008-02-26 22:05:15

The Mac is a great platform for website development. You keep each site that you’re working on in a separate folder in your ~/Sites folder. You edit and debug them locally and then, when everything’s good to go, you just ftp the files up to your live server, or commit your changes to your svn repository. Easy.

But eventually you may want to use server-side includes (SSI) to generate standard headers or footers on your pages. SSI are probably readily available on your webhost’s server, but to get them working on your Mac requires one small step: you have to configure Apache to activate a virtual server for each of your sites. Don’t panic; it’s easy to do.

Let’s say you have a site installed at ~yourname/Sites/project1. And let’s say the site’s pages have a standard footer, which is contained in the file ~yourname/Sites/project1/includes/footer.html. You’d like to be able to put the following SSI line in every file on your site:

<!--#include virtual="/includes/footer.html" -->

Trouble is, the server interprets that path as relative to the DocumentRoot setting in your Apache configuration. On the Mac, the default setting (in /etc/httpd.conf) is

DocumentRoot "/Library/WebServer/Documents"

So when you load a page from the site, the server looks for your footer in /Library/WebServer/Documents/includes/footer.html. Since that’s not where your footer lives, you’ll probably just get this unhelpful error:

[an error occurred while processing this directive]

You could move your includes into /Library/WebServer/Documents, but that’s a supremely bad idea; you’ll soon go crazy keeping track of all your files scattered across the filesystem. Instead, take 2 minutes to do things properly, by setting up a virtual host on your Mac. This will allow you to set the DocumentRoot for each of your web projects. Here’s how:

1. Open Terminal and type: cd /etc/httpd/users. You should see a file in there with a name like yourname.conf where "yourname" is your Mac user name.
2. Type sudo vi yourname.conf and enter your password, if asked.
3. Insert the following lines at the end of the file

   NameVirtualHost 127.0.0.1:80 <VirtualHost project1> ServerName project1 DocumentRoot /Users/yourname/Sites/project1 </VirtualHost>

   (If you have more sites, just add more <VirtualHost> blocks.)

4. Save and quit (type :wq)
5. Restart Apache: sudo apachectl graceful
6. Finally, edit your hosts file (sudo vi /etc/hosts) and insert the following lines at the end:

   127.0.0.1 project1

   (If you have more sites, just add more lines in that format. For example, 127.0.0.1 project2, etc.)

7. Now point your browser to http://project1 and your SSI include files will be correctly displayed.

How to make system files and folders visible

posted on 2007-02-28 21:34:36

By default, the Finder hides root-level directories (/usr, /lib, /etc, etc.,) from dialog boxes, which makes it hard to navigate there. Here’s one trick to make them accessible to the Finder’s — and every app’s — dialog boxes.

1. In the Finder, type "shift command G" ("Go to folder").
2. Type "/usr" (for example) and click "Go".
3. Drag the tiny "usr" icon at the top of the window over to the sidebar.

Voilà! From now on, /usr will always be easily accessible to "open" and "save" dialog boxes in all your apps.

To make every file visible to the Finder — including those that begin with a ".", such as .htaccess or .login — issue the following command at the Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE; killall Finder

To make those ’invisible’ files go away again, do this:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE; killall Finder

I like to be able to turn those invisible files on and off easily, so I have a couple of aliases in my ~/.alias file:

alias dot+ "defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE; killall Finder" alias dot- "defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE; killall Finder"

Or you could use a third-party utility such as TinkerTool.

AppleScript: "Press Run to run this script"

posted on 2007-02-25 21:42:57

If you write your own AppleScripts, you’ve probably seen an alert box pop up with this message when you try to run your script:

Press Run to run this script, Quit to quit.

Fix: When you save the script as an app using "Save as...", look at the save options carefully. Make sure the "Startup screen" checkbox is unchecked before saving.

Works for me.

Firefox mis-renders some TrueType italics

posted on 2007-04-04 21:49:52

Problem: Firefox (2.0.0.3; Mac OS 10.4.9) renders some fonts (Gentium, for example) such that italicized text overwrites the preceding character or two. The result can be an unintelligible mess (shown here in Gentium font):

Safari and IE (Mac) don’t have this problem.

Cause: Firefox seems to have difficulty in rendering TrueType fonts in italic.

Fix: Hunt down and remove any TrueType versions of the offending font in all four of the possible font folders (~/Library/Fonts, /Library/Fonts/, /Network/Library/Fonts/, and /System/Library/Fonts/ — see "Mac OS X: Font Locations and Their Purposes"). Re-install the "font suitcase" version of the font (i.e., drop the font suitcase into one of those four font folders). Restart Firefox.

Windows and buttons have annoying borders

posted on 2007-05-28 21:54:49

Problem:

Cause: You probably accidentally turned on VoiceOver, by hitting cmd-F5.

Fix: cmd-F5 toggles VoiceOver on/off. Failing that, go to System Preferences → Universal Access and turn off VoiceOver.

How to install GD into PHP on Leopard

posted on 2008-10-20 16:23:09

A tutorial for the easiest possible way to install GD into PHP on Leopard: Adding GD library for Mac OS X Leopard.

First, some background... Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) ships with PHP 5.2 installed, but without the useful GD graphics library. Most of the GD installation tutorials I found on the web involve an intimidating series of steps that require downloading a bunch of supporting libraries, compiling them, then re-compiling PHP. Although Kénior’s tutorial Adding GD Library for Mac OS X Leopard seems to have worked for many people, it never quite worked for me; after many careful tries, I kept getting Apache errors (as seen in /var/error/apache2/error_log) that prevented GD from successfully loading:

After much hair-pulling, I finally found that wonderfully simple tutorial. It calls for simply (1) downloading a fresh PHP installation that already has GD compiled-in, and (2) using it to replace the existing PHP folder in /usr/local. I had PHP up and running with GD in about one minute.

What could be simpler?

Common glyphs in ASCII and HTML (sorted by HTML code)

posted on 2001-01-01 17:46:22

Common glyphs in ASCII and HTML (sorted by Mac code)

posted on 2001-01-01 17:59:37

Sources:

• Griswold, Ralph E. and Madge T. Griswold, The Icon Programming Language, 3rd ed. Peer to Peer, 1997, as quoted in » www.cs.arizona.edu/patterns/weaving/webdocs/gre_char.pdf by Ralph Griswold, University of Arizona.
• "Character entity references in HTML 4" (Section 24 of HTML 4.01 Specification: W3C Recommendation), by the World Wide Web Consortium; 1999.12.24; » http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/sgml/entities.html.
• "ASCII Extended Character Set, Macintosh", by Dawn Rorvik, Evergreen State College; 2003.05.20; » http://www.evergreen.edu/biophysics/technotes/program/ascii_ext-mac.htm.