Well I’ve been missing in action on this blog as I had been getting more involved in web development and design than Macintosh technology. However, I just upgraded my computer at both work and home and now I am running Leopard. I like it, as I do like the intel machines, too.
First things first for [...]
Although not specific to Mac OS X, Flex is a nice way to build cross platform applications. I decided to take a run at building a web application with Flex and a webservice. Check out the details.
A colleague of mine wrote a little script for me. Actually two lines of shell. I needed to read a directory and get the last file and copy it. I was thinking I would do a readdir in perl, but he just fired up a shell script with ls into tail to grab the last [...]
I downloaded the Adobe Air SDK so I could develop some Air applications, but once I downloaded it, was at sort of a loss for how to go about installing it. Their instructions are missing from the package and nowhere to be found on their site. I have a PPC mac, so these instructions should [...]
I needed a script to backup a workfolder to a Windows network server. I wrote this perl script that can be triggered using cron. First create a mount point. I used /smb/public. So to do so in two steps, mkdir /smb, then mkdir /smb/public. I put my scripts in ~/bin. Put this perl script below [...]
I’ve been using NetNewsWire Lite as my RSS reader. It is great. Not only is it a standalone application for reading rss, but you can sync your rss feeds up with NewsGator online, so regardless of what machine you use to read your feeds, you can be in sync. Click on the badge to check [...]
I’m a big Adobe Illustrator user. But I realize that is a rather expensive program for the average mac user to have to penny up for. So I went in search of an application that could fill in for those who don’t have the resources. I came across a very capable program called Inkscape. It [...]
I have been wanting a way to carry my passwords around with me. I purchased a USB card. The next step was to find a way to easily manage the passwords on the disk. After much searching, I found a java application, that has been written to work nicely with Mac OS X. It is [...]
I use cpan to install perl modules all the time. I recently installed Perl LWP. Unfortunately the install replaces and important text command file in /usr/bin. The file head was replaced by LWP head and this has caused some problems on my system. I found it out when I tried to install Sun’s Netbeans IDE [...]
I had a very large folder of images that I needed to build a tale of, as well as links for the images. I wrote a perl script to read the directory and build the table based upon the image file names in the folder. For our purposes here I am simplifying the script.
#!/usr/bin/perl
use File::Copy;
my [...]
I just launched Skim, the freeware pdf reader and was greeted with the install update screen. Apparently it is now up to 0.5. If you haven’t tried Skim and you do read pdfs, give it a try. It seems odd to me that Skim even exists. Adobe Reader is a perfectly good pdf reader and [...]
I have to reprise a blog entry I had about Safari vs. Firefox. I have once again made the switch. I was using Safari for quite a while, and I still like Safari. It seems fast and responsive when rendering screens. However, the developer set in Firefox is invaluable. I work almost exclusively in Firefox [...]
I’ve been playing around with a new application called Incubator by a company called MindCad. It is a pretty cool brainstorming application when you need to branch categories or categorize things. You just double click on the page to add an item, or command double click to add a topic. Then you can slide your [...]
I’m in the middle of a lot of changes. I recently changed positions in my career. I am still on a mac and intend to be. I’m at the University of Akron now, doing web design and development projects. I’ve come to look at web development from a whole new perspective. A website that supports [...]
Ever writing code and need to get a list of the input field names in your html document. I wrote this little perl script to parse out a list of names of the input fields.
#!/usr/bin/perl
open (INFILE, ‘
while ($line=) {
chomp $line;
my $input = $line;
if ($input =~ /input /
$input =~ /name=\”(\w*)\”/i;
$input = $1;
print “$input\n” ;
}
}
How it [...]
May seem simple to most folks, but just in case you are looking for an expression to remove the path before a file name here is an expression to start.
[\w/]*/
It searches for all the word characters before the last slash. If you need periods in the path add those to the character class.
I just updated my LAMP (Apache, MySql and PHP). I found that PHP installation can become problematic with MySql 5. Apparently the mac binary doesn’t include shared libraries. PHP fails when you build it against mysql. So I googled and found this excellent resource for helping you step through the installations. Start with Mysql and [...]
I found a good way to make use of a scalar reference in perl. For development when you are using a dev and live server, you can change some settings using a ref.
Here’s what I did recently. In this case I needed two different mount scripts, one for a dev server and one for a [...]
What a pain. Even CPAN couldn’t help. I love using CPAN for installing perl modules. It is usually a seemless operation. But DBD::Mysql on Mac OS X just wouldn’t go for me. I am installing in the usual location for a standard install - /usr/local
What I eventually had to do was this to get it [...]
One thing nice about Mac OS X are the avenues for development. There is Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, C, Objective C, java, javascript, applescript and shell, just to name some of the possibliities. One of the things I have always wanted to be able to do, was to write .asp and test it on Mac [...]
