The Author – Bart Busschots
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Sep
2
At Last – Windows Apps on my Mac WITHOUT WINDOWS
Filed Under Computers & Tech on September 2, 2006 | 14 Comments
Yesterday, Codeweavers released a public beta of CrossOver Mac. This software lets you run Windows programs on Intel Macs without rebooting, without running a virtual machine, and best of all, without installing Windows at all. I've been waiting for this since the switch to Intel, to me this is the Holly Grail! I don't consider BootCamp to be a proper solution, you have to buy Windows and you have to reboot to change OS. Parallels is a step in the right direction, but you still have to buy Windows and you have a large overhead because you have to run two OSes at the same time. CrossOver on the other hand utilises WINE technology to allow Windows Apps run straight on OS X. Your Windows Apps even share your regular file system and home directory. This means you have one file system, the OS X one, so your files are all in the one place and your Windows Apps are subject to OS X's security restrictions. The minute I read the news report on this I downloaded the beta and installed it. This is a quick review of my first impressions.
[tags]OS X, Windows, WINE, CrossOver[/tags] Read more
Aug
19
Image Magick on an Intel Mac
Filed Under System Administration, Photography, Computers & Tech on August 19, 2006 | 2 Comments
I'm a huge fan of ImageMagick . I think it's great but I'm constantly and continuously disappointed by their lack of proper support for the Mac. It took them ages to get a binary release out for the Mac at all and even now, a year after the announcement of the Intel Macs and after Apple have compltely stopped selling PPC Macs the only binary release available for the Mac on the image Magic site is still for PPC. You can of course get the source and build it yourself but that's a bit of a mine-field because of the amount of libraries that you need first if you're to end up with a useful ImageMagick install. In the past I've wasted a lot of time and effort getting ImageMagick compiled properly on OS X. When I had to install it on an Intel Mac for the first time today I nearly cried when I saw that there was no binary release! However, my prayers were answered when I cam across this blog entry. I still had to build the lot myself but this took all the pain out of it!
[tags]ImageMagick, Intel Mac[/tags]
Jun
8
PostgreSQL on the Mac
Filed Under Computers & Tech, System Administration on June 8, 2006 | Leave a Comment
Having recently discussed running MySQL on the Mac I’d now like to tackle PostgreSQL. I’m sorry to say things are not quite as rosy just yet. PostgreSQL don’t provide us with a binary distribution for the Mac nor do they provide a nice Panel for the System Preferences App. There are also less choices when it comes to GUIs for manipulating and designing your database but there are still options and things are still a lot better than they could be. Read more
May
21
On Second Thoughts – iWeb Sucks
Filed Under Computers & Tech on May 21, 2006 | 10 Comments
When I first reviewed iLife 6 in my article about creating my first podcast I was a little hard on iWeb but gave it a generally OK review. Turns out I was a little hasty! After a few more weeks of use I’ve come to the conclusion that it sucks! Yes, the interface is very nice and yes you can easily make a podcast by dragging and dropping but it still sucks because everything goes most terribly pear-shaped the moment you go to publish your web page. To see what I mean have a look at the site for the IFAS podcast which I’ve been using as a test case for iWeb: www.minds.nuim.ie/~ifas/podcast.
You might say my sample page looks alright on the surface, because it does. But, now try to highlight some text. Oops, you can’t because it isn’t in fact text but an image. Everything is in fact an image. All text everywhere. WTF! That’s not web design, it’s desktop publishing! The result is not so much a web page as a poster or flyer for printing! So much for getting indexed by search engines …. oh well, it’s not as if you publish stuff on the web for people to find and read is it …. oh wait …. bugger!
Things go even more pear-shaped when publishing though. If you remember last time I told you that you could only publish directly to the web if you had a .Mac account (which I don’t because I don’t need one). This means that you have to publish to a folder on your local machine each time you want to update the site. You might not think that’s too bad. You’d think you just publish it and then use a good SFT client like Transmit 3 to sync with the server so you only upload changed files. Well you’d be in for a nasty shock. Each time you re-publish the site everything gets re-generated so your sync will result in ALL files being uploaded again. This is inconvenient when your podcast has two episodes, positively annoying when it has three (like mine now does) and simply impossible when it has 10, 20, 30 or more.
Conclusion
The simple truth is that iWeb is totally impractical and un-usable in the long term. Nice Try Apple but absolutely no cigar this time. Version 2 had better be a major major improvement!
May
15
MySQL on the Mac
Filed Under System Administration, Computers & Tech on May 15, 2006 | 2 Comments
MySQL on the Mac has come a long way in the last few years. MySQL now release binaries for the Mac and those binaries are contained in a nice OS X package and even contain a preferences pane for the System Preferences App to allow you to easily control your MySQL server. I installed the latest version on my machine in work today and it is fair to call the installation process painless. You just click next a few times and enter your password once or twice. Because of this I have no problem saying that the server end of things with MySQL is now sorted on the Mac, but what about client GUIs? In this article I’ll be describing three free MysQL GUIs that I found and tested. All my tests were carried out with the latest stable binary release of the MySQL server for OS X (5.0.21) on a G5 PowerMac.
CocoaMySQL
The first GUI I came across was CocoaMySQL and I have to say I was far from impressed. Although the interface is nice in it’s simplicity the app simply does not play nice with the latest versions of MySQL server and hangs and does funny things so until the app starts to work correctly with modern servers the simplicity of it’s interface is irrelevant. After failing to create a table I un-installed this program.
MySQL Administrator
MySQL Administrator is released by the MySQL people so I considered this app to have great promise. The first thing I noticed is that it gives you an awful lot of
information about your MySQL server and also lets you control the server
and edit it’s config very well. However, when it came to creating tables I
was horribly disappointed.
I tried a simple test to create a table with two columns, an auto
incrementing integer called ‘id’ that is the primary key and then a
column called ‘name’ that is a varchar. The interface let me
prepare it all beautifully but the moment I clicked ‘Apply’ I got an
SQL error. I tried repeatedly but no matter what I did with the GUI I
could not get this simple table created. The GUI shows you the SQL it’s
about to execute and lets you edit it so I did eventually get the table created by manually editing the SQL being sent. I did experiment on a bit
and found that if you don’t use auto increments the interface does work
but since I use them a lot I just got fed up with this application. My
disappointment was magnified even more when I realised that there is no
way to enter data with this app either.
I had very high hopes
that this app would turn out to be my on-stop-shop for everything I
want to do with MySQL but it simply isn’t. The fact that it’s obviously
still buggy as hell and that you can’t use it to insert data means that
I really have no use for this app.
YourSQL
YourSQL is another nice simple front end for MySQL. I tested the latest stable version (1.7.2). This is very much a program for people who are familiar with MySQL and know the various datatypes etc.. This program will only make sense to people who know what they are doing but for those people it will save a lot of time. It uses a Finder style column-based interface for navigating servers, databases and tables which works really well if you have a lot of databases to manage. This is a good app for speeding up simple DBA tasks if you know what you are doing. The app is small and fast and hence I actually really like it.
I spent a few hours using this app today to build a fairly complex database and I have to say I found it a joy to use. It was easy to add a database, to add and edit tables and to view, search and insert data. To me that is what a MySQL GUI should do so this app gets 9 out of 10. Why not 10 out of 10? Well it didn’t do one thing, it didn’t give me an easy way to set up foreign keys. However, the interface makes it very easy to run SQL queries directly so if you want to add a foreign key to a table you can do so yourself quite easily in this way.
Below is a screen shot I took while I was experimenting today.
Conclusions
Although the actual MySQL server is now very easy to set up and control on the Mac there is still a shortage of good GUIs out there. ATM there is only one that I would recomend over the classic phpMyAdmin route and that is YourSQL.
May
10
Automator – Lives up to the Hype
Filed Under Computers & Tech on May 10, 2006 | Leave a Comment
When OSX came out there were three new features that Steve ranted on about. The first was Spotlight, which I use a lot and really like, the second was Dashboard, which a quick scan of the articles in the Mac section of my blog will clearly show I like a lot, and the final one was Automator, which I’ve really neglected. I never even bothered to play with it properly until today! But, better late than never and since I had a free hour and some backups I wanted to automate I figured I’d give the classic rsync shell script approach a miss this time and see what Automator could do for me.
Introduction
In case you’re not familiar with Automator the idea behind it is that you can write scripts to automate repetitive tasks or tasks that you do a lot but without typing or seeing a single line of code. For the full Apple hype have a look at the Automator page on the Apple Site.
So, the question is, does Automator live up to the hype? Well IMO it does. It did take me a few minutes to get into the swing of things and I have to say I’d probably never have figured it out without looking at the sample workflows but once I got into it it was dead easy. You just drag and drop in the actions you need in the position you need them and then tinker with the options on each action until you have what you need. Something I found really helpful was that you can create complex workflows by chaining together simple ones. I initially started by trying to write one killer workflow that would deal with all elements of my backup but I soon realise I would be much better off breaking the task up and then creating the killer workflow by adding together all my small workflows.
My Experimental Workflow
I wanted to back up to a SAMBA share that is not that big so I was only interested in backing up important stuff. To me important stuff meant:
- My email
- My FireFox bookmarks
- My Work Documents
So, I started by creating a simple workflow to archive my Thunderbird folder to my desktop, move it to a folder on the share and then re-name it with the current date. Then I used that as a base for creating similar flows for my FireFox settings and my documents. Finally I tied all this together with a flow that did the following:
- Connected to the samba share
- Ran the three backup flows
- Ejected the samba share
Within 30 minutes of starting to play with Automator for the first time I had the above done, tested and working. I can now very easily and very quickly backup my important stuff to my samba share.
Below are some screenshots of some of my workflows to give you an idea of what the interface is like.
(above) The workflow for backing up my email.
(below) The workflow that ties all my small workflows together
Not Perfect
However, there are a few things that annoyed me, firstly, Automator crashed once when it had just finished saving a workflow. I’m not accustomed to Apple programs crashing so that worried me a bit but it only happened once and since then I’ve been poking around with automator for hours with no more crashes. The other thing is that I can’t get the action for disconnecting from the share to work. I’m not sure if the problem is with Automator or with OS X’s samba. Mind you samba support on Tiger has been flaky to say the least so it doesn’t really surprise me that Automator has some issues with it. The important thing is that it can connect to the share which it does without problems.
Conclusions
Automator delivers on it’s promise of letting you do powerful things all within a simple drag and drop interface. The range of actions available is simply phenomenal ranging from simple sysadmin tasks like moving and copying files or running shell scripts to automatically burning backups to CD and automatically processing entire folders of images. Automator also integrates with just about every Apple program so you can automate more tasks than I could possibly describe here. To get some idea of how many actions there are have a look at the screenshot of the action browser pane below. Yes, it crashed on me once but I’m still very happy with it and will be using it a lot.
May
3
Dashboard Widgets for Web Monkeys
Filed Under Software Development, Computers & Tech on May 3, 2006 | Leave a Comment
Following on from my recent post on Dashboard Widgets for Techies, this post previews some nice dashboard widgets for Web Developers.
Regular Expressions
We’ll start with what I consider to be the most powerful widget, the regular expression widget. Regardless of what web language you end up using and what you are doing the chances are that you will need to validate user-input and that you will need to use regular expressions to do it. There are a number of Widgets for testing regular expressions out there but of all the ones I’ve tried the RegexToolbox was by far the best. It allows you to set up a list of test cases and then match an RE off them and it tells you what it matches as well as all the matches within bracketed groups. It also allows you to test substitutions.
Technical References
It’s often handy to have the full spec for things at your fingertips and the Dashboard is about as ‘at your fingertips’ as things get so it makes sense to have some API specs in Widget form.
I know I hate PHP but I still have to use it quite a bit and I know a lot of other people do too so a PHP reference widget is still very useful. There are quite a few different ones but the one I found to be the best is this one: www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/developer/phpfunctionreference.html.
Another somewhat useful widget is the Tags – CSS widget. It sounds great and gives you a nice interface for searching for what CSS attributes there are but sadly if doesn’t give you the possible values for those attributes which is very annoying. A similarly disappointing widget is Tags – HTML.
Colour Tools
Easy access to the web-safe colour pallet is something that sounds very useful and hence you’d think there would be a very good widget for it but you’d be wrong. There are indeed many colour widgets but no very good ones. Color Safe is the best of a bad lot but it’s not perfect. I’m quite tempted to write my own Widget for this though.
Apr
27
Windows Remote Desktop Client for OS X
Filed Under Computers & Tech on April 27, 2006 | Leave a Comment
I unfortunately need to run one Windows application at work (Remedy for managing user-support calls) so I need some form of access to Windows from my Mac. Dual boot is just not an option, I need remedy running in one Window and everything else I need to actually solve the users’ problems in other windows all at the same time. There is a very old Windows machine in my office that is just used for Remedy so in theory I could move over to that machine each time I need Remedy but that’s just annoying so I’ve been using VNC and it worked OK but I couldn’t copy and paste and the lag was a bit annoying. Anyhow, today a colleague was looking for something else on the MS site and found a Mac version of the Windows Remote Desktop Client and me the link. I’ve just installed it and I have to say I’m well impressed. The app is small, efficient, fast and very user-friendly to configure. I have no problem with lag anymore and can copy and paste to/from the windows machine. It even has a cute icon! Basically everything I expect from Apple Apps but it’s a MicroSoft App! Here’s the link: www.microsoft.com/mac/otherproducts/otherproducts.aspx?pid=remotedesktopclient
Apr
22
Developing My First Dashboard Widget – Unix Time Stamp Converter
Filed Under Software Development, Computers & Tech, My Projects on April 22, 2006 | 3 Comments
I recently did a post on Dashboard Widgets for techies and am working on another about Dashboard Widgets for developers. There was one important widget missing from my list of widgets for techies, one for converting Unix Time Stamps to human readable dates and vica-versa. The reason it was missing was because I couldn’t find one anywhere on the Apple site! I find this strange because I regularly need to deal with Unix Time Stamps in things like logfiles and raw data in Databases, hence I’d have expected others to need this too and hence for there to be a widget for it. Well, I decided to remedy this omission by writing my own Widget which I’ve now submitted to Apple for addition to their Widget Downloads Page. I’ve decided to release it as GPL so you can get it on the downloads page of my home page.
So, how easy was it to develop my first widget? Trivial! I went from deciding to write the widget to a fully working first implementation in about 2 hours including all reading and experimenting that I had to do to get started. IMO that’s not bad at all, in fact I can’t think of any other platform I’ve ever used where I was able to do something useful as quickly.
So, what’s involved in writing a Dashbaord Widget? TBH very little. If you are up to speed with client-side web technologies then you’ve pretty much got everything you need. Yes, there are some extensions to these technologies involved to allow you to interact with the OS and the command-line and also for 2D graphics with Quartz if you want to get fancy but they are very easy to get to grips with and there are some excellent guides on Apple’s Developer Site.
A Dashbaord Widget is basically a web page written in XHTML that is skinned with CSS and made interactive with JavaScript. There really is nothing more to it than that. If you want to give this a go yourself the links below are all you’ll need.
- Apple’s Dashboard Developers Page
- Apple’s Dashboard Programming Guide
- Apple’s help topic on getting your Widget to flip
As I said I had a fully functional Widget in two hours, took me a little longer to get it to do cool stuff like flipping round to show the credits on the reverse side and getting it skinned in a way I was happy with but all in all that Widget was no more than 5 hours work including all the fiddly graphics and layout stuff. A screenshot of the finished product can be seen below.
Apr
4
OS X Dashboard Widgets for Techies
Filed Under Software Development, Computers & Tech on April 4, 2006 | 2 Comments
OS X is becoming a popular choice among techies these days but many of us tend to ignore the Dashboard feature introduced in OS X 10.4 Tiger. I find Dashboard quite useful and have compiled the following list of widgets you might consider installing. They range from the very simple things like password generators to nmap frontends and system monitors.
Beginners/Lazy People
Although I can now easily calculate Unix file permissions in my head I’m sure there are many people who are new to Linux/Unix who may find it helpful to get a bit of help with them so below is the nicest of the Unix Permission widgets I found on my travels.
It’s called, sensibly enough, UNIX Permissions Calculator Widget and you can get it from http://vocaro.com/trevor/software/widgets/.
Another handy one that I do confess to using myself from time to time is the IP Subnet Calculator Widget which you can get from www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/networking_security/ipsubnetcalculator.html.
Password Generators
I’ve tried out a LOADS of password generators over the last few months and some really suck! The first one I tried always gave the same sequence of ‘random’ passwords which sorta defeats the point some what! ATM I use the rather simply named Random Password widget (www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/networking_security/randompassword.html).
System Monitors
There are more system monitor widgets than you can shake the proverbial stick at but after much experimenting and playing around I’ve settled on iStat which comes in two versions. There is iStat Nano which is small and compact and has multiple screens you can flip between as well as a nice, compact overview, and then there is iStat Pro which is far from small but wonderfully detailed. I generally use the iStat Nano but both are very good. The screenshot below is taken on my PowerMac and shows both nano and pro in action at the same time. You can get these widgets from:
- iStat Nano – www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/status/istatnano.html
- iStat Pro – www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/status/istatpro.html
Network Monitors
Something I like to keep an eye on is what network connections are going to and from my machine at any time. A lovely compact little widget for doing this is called Pakze which may sound like a strange name but if you speak Dutch you’ll realise it means ‘get em’ and the background is a rather grumpy looking doggie! You can get Pakze from www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/networking_security/pakzewidget.html.
There are also lots of other network status widgets that tell you what you internal and external IP addresses are and how much bandwidth you’re using etc but since iStat has all that information anyhow I don’t see the point in cluttering your dashboard with extra widgets that tell you nothing new.
What can be useful is a widget called Sunemo (www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/networking_security/sunemo.html) that uses nmap to show you all the machines that are active in your subnet. I only use this widget on my home network and I would warn others to do the same. Your network administrator will probably get grumpy at you if you try using this on a corporate or university network!
Finally, it can be useful when keeping an eye on who is accessing or attempting to access your servers to know where suspicious people are coming from, hence the GeoLocate widget can be very useful to techies. I’m not really sure how accurate it is but it tends to get the country right at least. You can download it here: www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/networking_security/geolocate.html.
Final Word
Those are the techie related Dashboard Widgets I use. Of all the widgets I’ve downloaded and installed I’d say only about 25% are keepers if even that so these really are the cream of the crop that I’ve been collecting pretty much since Tiger came out. I also have other good widgets for helping web programmers so I might do a follow on article shortly on Dashboard Widgets for Web Monkeys.