Recently I’ve had a bother with the Mac firewall asking me if I want it to accept incomming network connections every time I open a particular application.

The appropriate setting can be found under:

System Preferences : Personal > Security > Firewall

I have mine configured to “Set access for specific services and applications” which normally asks me if I want to allow an application to accept incoming connections the first time I run it and that’s normally the end of it. The trouble comes when you try and update certain applications using Software Update. I’m not exactly sure what causes the problem but for some reason with specific applications the firewall then proceeds to ask you, each time, if you would like it to accept incoming network connections. This you can imagine is superlatively tedious.

The answer though is to just delete the application from you applications folder and reinstall it. The first time you open the freshly installed application it will ask the question and then bug you no more. Then all you have to worry about is not updating it via software update again.

If you’ve ever used the great GNU Image Manipulation Program, GIMP, on a Mac then you’ll no doubt have been frustrated with the way X11 seems to handle window focus. Fortunately there is a solution and its just a couple of simple terminal commands away…

When selecting tools from their dialog in GIMP on your Mac then you are required to click once to give that window focus and again to actually select the tool you require. The same two clicks are required again to actually use your tool.  You can either imagine or know first hand how annoying this becomes and its a shame for such a great piece of software to be blighted by this issue so lets fix it.

Firstly you’ll want to open your terminal (who could live without it… mine’s almost always open!). Then you want to enter either of the following commands depending on whether you’ve got XQuartz updates (and if you’re not sure just do both sets).

Read the rest of this entry »

Ctrl + D

Ctrl + U

I’ve been working on some sites locally on my Mac but by default the files are stored in a directory in the individuals user account called Sites and the address you’ve got to type into your browser is http://localhost/~username/etc… this annoyed me because I didn’t want to have to type the tilde character in the address and also that I had to have the files showing in a subdirectories of my user. I couldn’t be doing with it, I wanted to have addresses like ‘http://localhost/subdomain/’ and the solution of course is to use symbolic links.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve recently registered for accesss to the NHS’s dictionary of medicines and devices (dm+d). This was primarily to see what format the data was stored in and then to see if there was a way of utilising it in a cool webapp.

I downloaded the current release (its updated weekly) and unpacked the 5MB archive to reveal some XML and related files. Some of the files are huge (up to 32MB each and ~70MB in total) and there was no way a traditional program was going to mannage. I tried a few in fact and they all devastated my 2GB RAM and were generally unusable.

Time for a command line solution… VIM the open source text editor. Its extremely powerful and customisable but using it takes a little getting used to. VIM was able to open with only a slight delay and navigate these huge files. The next problem for me was being able to read them.

In theory it shouldn’t matter what indenting there is in an XML file as it doesn’t contain any data but I find its a lot easier to read the files if they’re ‘cleanly’ indented. I began wondering how I was going to solve the problem and thought of a few ideas… a script (PERL, PHP, shell, other…) but none of those came to fruition. After some searching I came across libxml.

You can download and compile from source if you wish but I decided to download a pre-built version from explain.com it was pretty good and another page I came across on entropy.ch explained how to use it within Vim to indent my files super quick.

Here’s what you do…

• To format type this sequence
  • :%!xmllint –format -
• Or mark the area visually and then type
  • !xmllint –format -

I’ve been doing some work involving an application that needs to query databases on separate servers however one of the servers will only accept mysql connections locally so the way round it is to forward connections from a port on one system to a port on a remote system. That way the connection to the remote database will appear as though it originated locally and be accepted.

To set up a tunneled connection you issue the following command on any client:

ssh -fNg -L 3307:127.0.0.1:3306 myuser@remotehost.com

The first command tells ssh to log in to remotehost.com as myuser, go into the background (-f) and not execute any remote command (-N), and set up port-forwarding (-L localport:localhost:remoteport ). In this case, we forward port 3307 on localhost to port 3306 on remotehost.com.

I’ve set up SMS Server Tools on my Mac Mini so that I can send text messages from my PC and I thought someone might be able to use the Applescript I’ve created or even suggest a better way of doing things.

If you’re not familiar with SMS Server Tools it’s a really great utility for sending text messages from your PC (I use the term generically) it works on (almost?) all UNIXs and Windows too. It works by having folders which it monitors for text message files and then sending them via the phone. It was very easy to set up just download the source, make, make install, edit the config file and away you go.

Read the rest of this entry »

A while ago I had an old Nokia N-95 plugged into a Gentoo box and I was using SMS Server Tools to send myself text message alerts. I got rid of that sim and so stopped using it. The phone has been sat in a drawer since then along with a couple of others.

I recently decided I wanted to set it all up again, this time on my Mac Mini. I was trying out different phones and settings but I couldn’t get the N95 or an old Motorola V series phone to do anything even after plugging them both in! Read the rest of this entry »

You may or may not know that Windows and Unix end lines in text files differently. Windows uses both a line feed and carriage return characters whereas Unix uses only the line feed character. This can be annoying if you’re working with documents on both systems interchangeably and you need to preserve a lot of indentation . One example for me is xml files I like writing them in a plain text editor because I cannot find an xml editor I get on with.

The solution is to use PERL:

• To convert Unix style line endings to Windows style
  • perl -p -e ’s/\n/\r\n/’ < unixfile.txt > winfile.txt
• To Convert Windows style line endings to Unix style
  • perl -p -e ’s/\r$//’ < winfile.txt > unixfile.txt

The use of single quotation marks in both command lines is important because it prevents the shell from trying to evaluate anything inside.

That’s it. A simple way to quicky convert line endings letting you get on with the job.