Wanting to get spell checking working, I read the Emacs Wiki, and thought all I had to do was install aspell. I even added my prefix portage paths to my Preferences.el file:

While the above did change my path, it didn’t make spellcheck work. The following code did:

The peculiar thing is that I had to specify the full path to aspell, and not just “aspell” with the above PATH additions. Very strange; I’m no Lisp programmer (yet!), so any suggestions would be appreciated.

If you see an error like the following:

… when you are attempting to generate documentation, then you need to install an older version of the libxml-ruby gem, and modify rubyosa slightly.

If this issue is fixed in rubyosa, a simple gem update will override the sed line you just ran, so you don’t need to worry about it again, unless you reinstall rubyosa-0.4.0.

Having spent a long time with GNU/Linux — long enough for it to shape my formative computer development years in high school circa 94-98 — I’ve spent time with the various desktops that implemented workspaces. None — and I really mean none — have done workspaces better than wmii. While the window-manager-that-actually-manages-windows-for-you concept might be strange to some (indeed, not being able to resize windows freely is strange to most), the concept of workspaces via tagging is so amazingly powerful.

It’s how workspaces should be done.

I’ve begun looking into implementing this on OS X using a combination of AppleScript and QuickSilver, or something similar. Research so far isn’t promising. The numbers of workspaces in Spaces.app really does correspond to an underlying data structure, so tagging — especially tagging of windows that should appear on multiple, but not all spaces — will have to be stored seperately.

I wonder how much fighting I’m going to need to do, to implement this? Would anyone out there like to start an open project to collaborate on with me? Contact me, and let’s get the ball rolling.

You might have tried the following:

• Disabled security on your WiFi network
• Regressed to WEP security
• Told everyone not to use the wireless

Clearly, none of these work-arounds is ideal. There is hope.

The problem is among OS X 10.5 – VMWare Fusion / Parallels Desktop – the TKIP WPA2 security protocol. For some reason, installing the VM programs creates a situation on the wireless network that causes a TKIP MIC (or a “Michael“) message integrity check error. In short: OSX and your router think that the network is being cracked, because of a way that the VM programs use or abuse the networking interface stack.

The solution is to regress the security, but by as little as possible. Simply turn of TKIP or “TKIP+AES” encryption on your wireless device, and only allow AES encryption. This is not ideal, because the Michael check is trying to warn you about network intrusion, however, it simply does not work.

Caveat: if you find that AES encryption does not work on some devices, you are probably use the stock Linksys firmware on your router. Consider upgrading to the DD-WRT firmware. Read the docs, go over notes for your router model, and take the plunge. The stable Linux-based environment for your router will make your network work, as well as offering you more features, such as local DNS, for example.

There’s a two-step process to solve this:

1. Terminal->Window Settings…->Display->”Character Set Encoding” set to “Western (ISO Latin 1)”
2. Set the environment variable LC_ALL to “en_US” before you run erl. Also, see the next paragraph for explanations.

The above steps are for U.S. English — something similar is available for most locales, but I don’t know the specifics. Of note, is the 2nd step; firstly, LC_CTYPE is the specific value to set, but LC_ALL sets LC_* to the assigned value, so one usually wants LC_ALL, unless you have a very unique locale configuration. Secondly, I’m using Gentoo Prefix Portage environment on OSX, so while I feel that these directions are applicable to most OSX installs, my setup is slightly different, so your mileage may vary. Thirdly, for those that need UTF-8, they can set LC_ALL to “en_US.UTF-8″, and then they only have to toggle Terminal.app’s character set encoding. Why en_US.UTF-8 works, I do not know — Latin 1 is not a subset of UTF-8, so I’ll leave that to more inquiring minds.

After you find settings that you are happy with, consider adding export LC_ALL="en_US.UTF-8" to your ~/.bash_profile if you’d like it to load with every terminal window that opens. My ~/.bash_profile sources my ~/.bashrc, because ~/.bashrc is supposed to be safe for scripts that run as your user, but non-interactively; so, ~/.bash_profile tends to get a lot of my environment look and feel code.

I recently upgraded my aging Treo 650. I really do like the Palm OS — I’ve been using it for years and years — but the phone was starting to drop calls frequently after one too many drops straight on it’s antenna. *whoops*

So, I got a T-Mobile Dash. As a phone, I like it. As a OSX user that likes having internet connectivity, as well as a business person that likes syncing my calender, tasks, etceteras, I knew I was going to be in for some fun.

Say what you will about how awesome the iPhone is, but for feature-set and “bang for buck,” the Dash is a clear winner. Considering I work for a media-centric company, not being able to record videos on the iPhone made it a non-option almost immediately.

I installed the Windows Mobile 6 upgrade (link). You’re going to have to do this from a Windows box, or from within Parallels or VMware. I didn’t use WM5 for long, but WM6 is stable, and honestly, a lot more pretty.

I’m using Mark/Space Missing Sync for Windows Mobile 4.0 (link). The pre-lease worked pretty well, but I’ve been having some issues with the current release. I have a good feeling from the Mark/Space people, however, so I think that it will be resolved soon.

There is some really good news, as well. Since 10.4.9, OSX supports PAN bluetooth profile, so I can use my Dash as a modem! On the Dash, you can turn this feature on by going to Start->Accessories->Internet Sharing, then make sure “PC Connection” is “Bluetooth PAN”, “Network Connection” is “T-Mobile Data”, and click “Connect”. On the OSX side, if the Bluetooth menu is in your menubar, just click on it, and select “Join Network on XXXX,” where XXXX is your device name.

I edited the bundle to allow it to update itself, using a slightly modified form of the original script.

• Bundles->Bundle Editor->Show Bundle Editor
• Click on the menu entry text “erlang”
• Drag a new separator to the bottom of the erlang bundle menu structure
• Expand the erlang bundle menu
• Use the drop-down + to create a new command
• • Save: Nothing
  • Command(s):
    1. #!/bin/bash
    2.          
    3. if [ -z "${TM_SVN}" ]; then
    4.   echo "You must define the location of your svn client in the variable TM_SVN."
    5.   exit 1
    6. fi
    7.  
    8. echo "Changing to Bundles directory…"
    9. mkdir -p /Library/Application\ Support/TextMate/Bundles
    10. cd /Library/Application\ Support/TextMate/Bundles
    11.  
    12. if [ -d /Library/Application\ Support/TextMate/Bundles/Erlang.tmbundle ]; then
    13.   echo Erlang bundle already exists – updating…
    14.   $TM_SVN up Erlang.tmbundle
    15. else
    16.   echo Checking out Erlang bundle…
    17.   $TM_SVN –username anon –password anon co http://macromates.com/svn/Bundles/trunk/Bundles/Erlang.tmbundle/
    18. fi
    19.  
    20. echo "Reloading bundles in TextMate…"
    21. osascript -e ‘tell app "TextMate" to reload bundles’
    22.  
    23. exit 0

    as downloadble file

  • Input: None
  • Output: Show as Tool Tip

Now you can update the bundle from it’s own menu option!

I have no clue how this problem started. Part of me wants to blame Darwin Streaming Server. I have it turned off, so I no it’s not a conflict with it running, but part of me wonders if just installing it messed something up.

I really don’t want to reinstall OSX. *sigh*

The default postgres version in port is still 7, but postgresql8 is also in port, and currently is version 8.1.3. Looking at its Portfile, we can see that the server variant tells you handy commands that assist in setting up the server. To install the server variant, run:

sudo port install postgresql8 +server

After the install, if you load NetInfo Manager, you’ll notice that a postgres8 user was added. That user is used to set permissions in the steps you are asked to execute by the port post-install process. Follow the directions for setting up the default database, as well as interfacing with launchd. Reading man launchctl can’t hurt either.

The following seems to restart the server, not stop it:

sudo launchctl stop org.darwinports.postgresql8

The following can be used to fully stop the server:

sudo launchctl unload -w /opt/local/etc/LaunchDaemons/org.darwinports.postgresql8/org.darwinports.postgresql8.plist

… and to start (from a stopped state):

sudo launchctl load -w /opt/local/etc/LaunchDaemons/org.darwinports.postgresql8/org.darwinports.postgresql8.plist