Chris Miller » Mac OS X

LittleIpsum

Chris — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 14:38:01 +0000

LittleIpsum by Dustin Senos is a handy little tool for anyone doing design or programming work who’s constantly in need of some lorem ipsum to pad out visuals.

I usually use lipsum.com which has a decent background on Lorem Ipsum as well as a configurable generator.

LittleIpsum on the other hand is a nifty little Mac OS X menu bar app that allows you to quickly grab a couple of words, sentences or paragraphs of lorem ipsum.

Clicking on the menu drops out a quite straightforward interface which you roll over to select the appropriate length of text you want. Once you’ve made your selection the text is then copied to your clipboard so you can paste it wherever you’d like.

Selecting a range of lengths of Lorem Ipsum from the menu bar icon.

If you’re sticking together some HTML templates, LittleIpsum is handy for that too, just Ctrl+Click the menubar icon and the text copied to your clipboard will be wrapped in a p tag.

Handy little thing,
- Chris

Using On The Job 3 with Dropbox

Chris — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 08:32:43 +0000

I recently grabbed myself an 11″ Macbook Air as I was in dire need of a laptop to use when away from home. The main attraction that I’d be able to work on any freelance projects when I have downtime regardless of where I am.

I use a brilliant piece of software called On The Job 3 to track time spent on jobs as well as generating and managing invoices. On The Job stores all your client and job data locally rather than in the cloud and doesn’t provide any means to sync data between multiple machines. This provides a bit of a connundrum — how do I keep an in-sync repository of my timings and invoices across the multiple machines I potentially use for my work?

The obvious choice is to use Dropbox to keep the relevant application data in sync across multiple machines. As there’s no way to specify to On The Job where to look for the data we instead need to move the data store into a shared repository in Dropbox then create a link to this data from where the original used to live.

All application data for On The Job is located at:

~/Library/Application Support/On The Job 3/

Shared Application Data in Dropbox

The first thing we need to do is create a folder for all the shared application data to be stored in, I’ve aptly named mine “Shared Application Data“. Then we move the On The Job application data from its default location to our new shared folder.

By default the folder which contains all the application data, ~/Library/, is initially hidden from the Finder. To get round this we can open the relevant folders via the Terminal application, running the following command will open the folder containing the application data:

open ~/Library/Application\ Support/

From here you can move the folder named “On The Job 3” to your newly created Dropbox folder, at this point you should take a backup of your On The Job application data folder just in case anything goes wrong.

We’ve essentially now reset On The Job back to its default settings as it wont be able to locate any of the data you’ve accrued through past use. In order for On The Job to function properly with the appropriate data we need to create a link in the application support folder to our data in the Dropbox folder.

On The Job 3 data shared via Dropbox

Creating a link via the Finder doesn’t suffice for this, we must create a symbolic link via the Terminal using the following command:

ln -s “~/Dropbox/Shared Application Data/On The Job 3/” “~/Library/Application Data/On The Job 3/”

This step must be repeated for each machine you intend to use On The Job on. If the ~/Library/Application Data/On The Job 3/ folder exists it should be removed, or perhaps renamed, before creating the symbolic link. Once the link is in place and all data files have been synced via Dropbox you should be able to open On The Job and see all of your clients, jobs and invoices just as you left them.

On The Job Working

Any changes made on one linked machine will cause the files in the dropbox to be synced to each of the other machines, mirroring any modifications you have made. It’s worth noting that Stunt Software recommend using Dropbox in order to sync your data across multiple machines and that they offer no support if anything goes wrong. As always it’s worth taking regular snapshots of your On The Job data from Dropbox ideally using Time Machine to keep regular incremental backups.

Have fun,
- Chris

Sequel Pro: Manage MySQL Databases under Mac OS X

Chris — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 12:27:41 +0000

I do a lot of web development; it’s my full time job, my hobby and a means to potentially earn some money on the side. I need a set of good tools in order to make aspects of the work easier or I’d spend my entire life at odds with what I do. A good Database Management System (DBMS) tool is one such tool since database management and manipulation plays such a large part of developing any content managed website, especially for quick modifications, testing and deployment.

MySQL is my DB of choice, due to working mainly on LAMP architecture systems. The best tool by far I’ve found for managing MySQL databases under Mac OS X is Sequel Pro (previously CocoaMySQL).

Sequel Pro interface showing the table editor view

Sequel Pro is a very streamlined and powerful program for database management, it provides the facility to add, modify and remove entire databases; supports various import and export formats for singular tables, entire databases or selected query results; allowing modification of table properties as well as inline SQL querying.

Before finding Sequel Pro I was a full-time user of PHPMyAdmin, a system which I continue to use in some instances. Sequel Pro essentially provides a desktop solution that is very similar to PHPMyAdmin, anyone who has experience using PHPMyAdmin should have no problems to adjusting to using Sequel Pro in its stead.

Annotated Sequel Pro

The image above is an annotated view of the Sequel Pro interface, the main portions of the interface that I use day-to-day are highlighted and numbered, each of the numbered areas correspond to:

Database Selector

A basic drop-down list where you can select a database to work with or add a new database.
Table Selector

The list of tables in the currently selected database. If the number of tables is large enough a filter field appears at the top of this list allowing you to filter the tables based upon their names. Below the list of tables is a small section with meta-data on the currently selected table, under this is the controls for the database tables. From here we can add, remove, duplicate and truncate tables with ease (with conformation on the obviously destructive actions).
Field Viewer/Editor

This portion of the interface is controlled by whichever view is selected from the icons appearing in the application toolbar.
Keys Viewer/Editor

This area allows you to manage keys and indexes of the table you’re viewing. The +/- toggle at the bottom left allows you to add and remove keys/indexes.
Structure View (shown)

Changes the view to the structure view as shown and detailed above.
Table Contents View

Switches to the table contents view.
SQL Query Editor

Switches to the SQL query editor view.

Another of the real selling points for Sequel Pro for me is the ability to easily import and export data. From the File > Export menu you can export data in various formats, CSV and XML being the most useful.

⌘+⇧+I invokes the import dialog which allows you to select an SQL dump or CSV of values to import into the selected database. The SQL import will obviously just run the query and update the various tables as required, the CSV import on the other hand allows you to select the table and marry rows in the CSV file to those in the table you wish to import to.

Table Structure

As detailed above the table structure view allows you to define the structure of the tables in the database and to set up the indexing and keys for the fields.

A nice touch available here is the ability to reorder pre-existing fields by dragging and dropping them in the relevant places and the ability to duplicate fields rather than have to re-enter details for virtually identical fields.

Table Contents

From there you can add, modify, duplicate and delete rows in the table, all of which you’d really expect from the table contents view.

Again, like the table structure view, you can duplicate entries to save re-entering similar data. Inserting NULL values is as simple as hitting ^+⇧+N. Copying rows as INSERT statements is a big plus (^+⌥+⌘+C) and useful when copying singular entries between a development and live database, rather than dumping the data from a custom query.

SQL Query

This view allows you to enter queries and run them against the database. The editor itself has autocompletion and some niceties like smart quoting of field names.

The power here comes from the ability to store previously used queries and access recent queries via a query history. Any of the generated result sets can be exported in the previously mentioned formats for easy data filtering and export.

In summary

It’s a bloody useful tool and a must for anyone working with MySQL databases under Mac OS X. It’s not a silver-bullet solution of course; it doesn’t do much more than PHPMyAdmin and the things it does can be replicated in PHPMyAdmin with relative ease; but then it can’t be a bad thing to have lying about, especially since it’s free!

You can download a copy of Sequel Pro from their website.
Developed by mjmedia.

Go have a play with Sequel Pro now,
- Chris

Batch renaming files in Mac OS X

Chris — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 20:02:12 +0000

The Finder is brilliant. It does exactly what it says on the tin. You can zoom around your filesystem and find things with relative ease; copy, cut, paste and move files. It does it all, but it lacks any batch renaming to help any of us who have the laborious task of renaming dozens, or worse, hundreds of files.

That’s where NameChanger comes in. NameChanger is a piece of free software from MRR Software. Basically it allows you to rename large batches of files with some simple pattern matching.

Changing the names of some videos

It’s all pretty simple really:

drag the target files into the application window
select the type of name matching you require from: replace first, replace last, replace all, replace wildcard, append, prepend, sequencing and date-stamping
enter your criteria, above I’ve replaced the first occurrence of ‘.’ with ‘ - ’
hit the ‘Rename’ button and you’re done

Grab a copy

Here’s the blurb

NameChanger
Rename a list of files quickly and easily.
See how the names will change as you type.

Good bit of software. Simple, free, intuitive; all in all, a keeper.
- Chris

Adding non-Apple format movies to iTunes

Chris — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 19:46:53 +0000

I’ve been having a bit of trouble adding some movies to my iTunes library this evening – in that I’d have to convert a movie to a .mov file in order to import it at all.

A few google searches away and I’d found the answer to all my problems. If you have the Apple development tools installed (and are obviously on a Mac), you can simply change the file meta-data of the movies via the terminal in order to allow you to import them. It’s very simple to do:
SetFile -t "MooV" movie.avi

Via: AVI to iTunes on MacRumors Forums

I did, however, have to change the iTunes settings so that it didn’t take it’s own copy of the files when importing them. I have a separate Movies folder for a reason thank-you-very-much iTunes.
- Chris

R.I.P. PB

Chris — Mon, 19 May 2008 22:46:23 +0000

As per my previous post, I’m getting a new machine. This is due however, to some unfortunate news: my PowerBook is dead!

The first Mac I ever owned, a PowerBook G4 which has served me very well over the past 5 or 6 years, is pretty much blitzed. My PowerBook and I visited Matt in Edinburgh on Saturday to see if we could revive it to it’s previous glory. We managed to pull all the stuff I needed from the hard disk, but that was all the good fortune we had.

It turns out the hard disk was suffering from a S.M.A.R.T. failure and locked up Matt’s computer when mounted as a target drive. We eventually managed to format the drive via Matt’s old PowerBook and everything looked good, but alas it was not to be – we received kernel panics when trying to install Mac OS X on the drive.

So it looks as if I’ll have to fork out for a replacement hard disk, which isn’t too big a deal at about Â£50 for 100Gb which would suit me. Until I manage to get one and install it my PowerBook is out of service.

/me salutes PowerBook, when my copy of the Necronomicon arrives I will bring you back!
- Chris

Mac Pro

Chris — Sun, 18 May 2008 18:30:37 +0000

I’ve recently ordered a new Mac, a Mac Pro to be precise. It is currently en route to my gleeful embrace from Apple.

The specs are as follows:

Processors: Two 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
RAM: 2GB 800MHz DDR2 RAM
Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT 512MB GDDR3
HDD: 500GB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s
Optical: Two 16x SuperDrives
Connectivity: AirPort Extreme Card (Wi-Fi) & Bluetooth
Peripherals: Apple Wireless Mighty Mouse & Apple Wireless Keyboard

It should arrive later in the week, I can’t wait to get my hands on it!
- Chris

iPhone – Masturabatory pleasure for Mac enthusiasts

Chris — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 01:31:43 +0000

Well it had to happen some time, and eventually it has. Apple have released initial details at their Keynote of the new iPhone which will be a combination of the video/photo iPod and a mobile phone.

The overview given on the Apple site looks very nice. The device itself, if it works as detailed, will allow all control to take place with the use of your fingers – there’s no stylus in sight. Other fine looking features are the text message displays which look like an iChat conversation showing previous text messages you’ve recieved from the same contact; and self-reorientation of the screen – switching between either portrait or landscape based upon how the device is held.

It’s obvious to me that someone has dropped a large weight onto a PDA, Mac Book, mobile phone and an iPod and that this device is the result. It looks nice and it seems to be brimming with features. Let’s hope they make it and soon. Where can I preorder one?
- Chris

Using LaTeX under Mac OS X

Chris — Sat, 05 Nov 2005 03:18:33 +0000

The course I’m doing at University involves quite a lot of work writing documents, usually at least 2 a week, which I prefer to do using LaTeX. The problem being that although LaTeX produces nice documents, it’s a bit of a pain to write in as most of the stuff has to be done by hand via a text editor. Not anymore!

I used to do all my LaTeX writing under Windows XP, using a program called WinEdt with the MiKTeX version of LaTeX.

Since changing to Mac OS for writing LaTeX I’ve been looking around for some good tools for managing and writing anything I have to and here’s what I’ve found:

TeXShop

Good, free tool for editing and typesetting LaTeX documents. Comes complete with BibTeX integration as well as a lot of useful templates and shortcuts (a very nice feature is an automatically updating .pdf viewer), the inclusion of syntax highlighting and auto completion is very useful. I’ve been using this for the past few months and have found no flaws in it.

Here’s some speel of the site:

TeXShop is a TeX previewer for Mac OS X, written in Cocoa. Since pdf is a native file format on OS X, TeXShop uses “pdftex” and “pdflatex” rather than “tex” and “latex” to typeset; these programs in the standard teTeX distribution of TeX produce pdf output instead of dvi output.

TeXShop uses TeXLive and teTeX, standard distributions of Tex programs for Unix machines. The distributions include tex, latex, dvips, tex fonts, cyrillic fonts, and virtually all other programs and supporting files commonly used in the TeX world. These distributions are maintained for the Mac by Gerben Wierda, and available below.

The latest TeXShop release requires System 10.4 (Tiger). Users with systems 10.2 or 10.3 should use TeXShop 1.40, also available on this site. Users with systems 10.0 and 10.1 should use TeXShop 1.19, available here.

TeXShop is distributed under the GPL public license, and thus free.

Here’s the links to:

the developer site, and
download page

I’d recommend trying it out if you’re likely to be writing any serious documentation.

BibDesk

Another really useful tool which I’ve found for academic use. It’s basically a BibTeX organiser with a lot of addons.

As well as allowing you to add, edit and organise BibTeX entries it allows you to:

locally link papers or articles,
self-organises these linked articles if you wish (much like the iTunes music folder will if you ask it to),
URL linking of articles,
drag and drop LaTeX citation code for entry into .tex documents (in a variety of formats, i.e. \cite{Miller:2005}, \citet{Miller:2005}, …),
auto cite key generation from BibTeX entry (based upon a user specified pattern},
searching of BibTeX entries,
import and export of the BibTeX file in a variety of formats (XML, RSS and Atom included among others), and
previewing specific or ranges of entries as they would appear in a LaTeX document.

This is the kind of tool I’ve been looking for ages for, not only does it hold the details of the articles for referencing in reviews/papers, it holds and organises the articles themselves. This tool has made using BibTeX with LaTeX a hell of a lot easier for me, I’d highly recommend this to anyone who is ever going to keep a record of the papers that he/she has read.

The definition of BibDesk on this site is given as:

BibDesk is a graphical BibTeX-bibliography manager for Mac OS X. BibDesk is designed to help organize and use bibliographic databases in BibTeX .bib format. In addition to manual typing, BibDesk lets you drag & drop or cut & paste .bib files into the bibliographic database and automatically opens files downloaded from PubMed. BibDesk also keeps track of electronic copies of literature on your computer and allows for searching your database through several keys.

BibDesk integrates well with TeX for creating citations and bibliographies. This integration includes a Citation search completion service, and drag & drop (cut & paste) support for adding citations to TeX files.

Here’s the links to:

the developer site, and
download page

So not only can you generate nice looking, transferrable documents; but you can do so on a good OS with some great tools, making the LaTeX experience (not the rubbery kind!) much more stress free and enjoyable for all!
- Chris

Locational Context Change

Chris — Tue, 06 Sep 2005 19:29:11 +0000

I travel into and back from University every day and am thus constantly changing the networking settings on my PowerBook due to the different networks I’m using at home, university (VPN stylee) and having to switch wireless networking off for the train journeys (saving battery).

What I would like is some sort of system wide change dependant upon the network location I’m in.

For example, when in a networked area I always run a few widgets to pull things off the web, like flickrframe and a wikipedia widget. What would be nice is when I switch to a non networked location, these widgets would disappear off my dashboard until I get back onto a network.

Another issue I have is with Safari, whenever I launch it I am always taken to this site, which is fair enough if I’m on a network. But wouldn’t it be better to take me to a different location when there’s no network available (such as http://localhost), I do a lot of work on the train and it annoys the hell out of me when I launch Safari to be presented with a page telling me I’m not connected to the Internet – no shit, that’s why I changed the location in the first place!

I’m sure they’re are other arguments for and against doing this, but it would be nice to have something available to do it for you.
- Chris

Smell, Fringe, Mac

Chris — Fri, 12 Aug 2005 14:04:16 +0000

Nothing much has been happening of late, other than working. The job at the University is going well and I have managed to bring the application up to a standard where we can start running the evaluations, they’ll probably start next week.

We’ve just this minute got a delivery of the Vortex (smell) cubes that we ordered at the start of the week, from daleair.com. This means that we are more or less set up to start people on their olfactory adventures! If anyone will be around in Glasgow next week and in around 3-4 weeks time, drop me an e-mail and I’ll get you to do the experiment (you need digital photos ~500ish).

Everything else is going fine, I’m heading off to Edinburgh for the Fringe tomorrow with Gary and Derek, it should be reminiscent of last years trip, but this time with hopefully more busses!

got my PowerBook upgraded yesterday, a gigabyte of RAM added, bringing it up to 1,536 Mb of RAM altogether. It fucking flies now!

So I’ll probably have some more photos to post soon enough and probably a few stupid stories to go with them. Until then,
- Chris

GrabPhotos

Chris — Tue, 26 Jul 2005 09:42:46 +0000

GrabPhotos is a Mac OS X (10.4+) automator workflow which will allow you to download all the images displayed on a Safari page, or all the images linked from a Safari page, directly to your desktop.

The .dmg for the program is available by clicking the icon below:

Download GrabPhotos

Any questions or greviances can be directed to chris@chris-miller.org. Enjoy,
- Chris

PhotoArchive

Chris — Fri, 22 Jul 2005 01:25:59 +0000

PhotoArchive is a Mac OS X (10.4+) automator workflow which will allow you to select a group of photos and have them archived to your desktop as photos.zip