Living the startup life in Atlanta, GA.

Having the process automatically set the name of the terminal in OSX almost never works for me. A little googling turned up the bash sequence for setting the process name in the terminal.

echo -n -e "\033]0;TerminalName\007"

This command will set the name of the terminal to “TerminalName.”

Instead of trying to remember this string, I created a little shellscript:

#!/bin/bash
 
echo -n -e "\033]0;$1\007"

I called this script setname and put it in /usr/local/bin. Then you can call it with:

setname TerminalName

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Yes, so I’m one of those really lame people that doesn’t have an iPhone. Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, I finally discovered how to do this somewhat easily.

I usedAudacity to shorten my MP3′s. Like most things open source, it doesn’t really work like a Mac app. You have to copy the entire contents of it’s dmg into a folder, otherwise nothing will work.

Also, you can’t drag-drop into Audacity. Once you get beyond that, it’s pretty easy to trim your MP3 into the correct size.

Trim Command

When it comes time to export back out into an mp3, you have to point it to the library for LAME. I installed this through ports.

The next step is using The Missing Sync to put your new ring-tone sized mp3 file onto the Q. Once it’s on the phone, open the file browser and move it to the /ApplicationData/Sounds folder. It will now show up in all ringtone lists.

It’s not hard, but somewhat un-fun to figure out.

For some reason, PostgreSQL is sorta a pain to get working on the Mac. Much of this is that the ports version does bizarre things, such as make all the directories you expect to have end with the Postgres version number. Once you install it, you have to go symlink a bunch of things just to make it work sensibly. To top it off, the way ports (used to, maybe not now) adds the Postgres user makes it so that it shows up on the login screen. The Mysql installs don’t do that. It’s odd to me that a database that’s some weird conglomeration of Oracle and Sun is easier to get up and running, but it’s true and annoying.

Apparently, my brainwaves have been radiating that annoyance somewhat strongly, and was picked up by a developer who appears to live right here in Atlanta. Andy Satori is maintaining PostgreSQL binary installers for mac. He’s also built a few lightweight gui tools to use along with Postgres, including a pretty decent Cocoa query tool:

Installing the package was easy and there’s no Postgres user on my login screen. Double win. If you want Postgres on your mac, this is definitely the way to go.

Making my Postgres filled evening even better, I didn’t even have to go through a series of elaborate contortions to get my gem to build. gem install postgres was all I needed.

To round out the Postgres post, check out this visualization on the PostgreSQL project commit history.

Safari’s really fast. It blows Firefox 2 and my previous favorite, Opera away.  However, I’ve held back from using it as my primary browser because the one thing that bothers me more than slowly loading websites are websites that insist on playing music or showing a video as soon as I load them.  

This was a complete deal-breaker until I rediscovered SafariStand.  SafariStand is a small set of plugins for Safari that includes little features like colorizing html source, a sidebar that shows the thumbnails of all open tabs, and a way to block flash animations from automatically loading.  

It’s mac only, and if I read the broken English right, will be that way for the planned future. If you want your Safari experience to be even better, it’s worth checking out.

Most of the information about this is outdated and not very useful. Collaboa’s site suggests that you need to build the bindings from source. If you attempt this and use Macports for dependencies, you’ll get un-resolvable errors regarding time.h.

Installing subversion-rubybindings from Macports itself doesn’t work either. This approached failed since it was unable to find the dependency db44.

Thankfully, there is a solution if you want to do this. First install Ruby and whatever from Macports. Then grab the OSX one-click installer. Once that’s installed, you need to make Ruby aware of the bindings. Do this by copying the bindings files into your Ruby:

$ sudo cp -r /opt/subversion/lib/svn-ruby/universal-darwin8.0/svn /opt/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/i686-darwin9.1.0
$ sudo cp -r /opt/subversion/lib/svn-ruby/svn /opt/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8

Do not use symbolic links. I tried this at first and it didn’t work.

You can then test to make sure it works with:

irb
>> require 'svn/core'
=> true
>>

Since my computer is hosed because I’m stuck installing Visual Studio (don’t ask), I figured I might as well add to the noise about Steve Jobs Keynote.

Yesterday at 12, we all packed into the conference room, hoping for a live video feed. Instead we watched the live blogging on macrumorslive.com. Overall, it was a total snooze. Little apps that should have been on the device anyway, for $20. A hard drive on a wireless router. A software update and price drop on what has been a sub-optimal device. No wonder the stock price started tanking. Hey Steve, if I want boring, I’ll get a PC.

The highlight of the announcement was the AIR. Besides having a really dumb name, it somewhat compelling. Not to long ago, I got it in my head that I wanted another sub-notebook to replace my nearly 4 year old Fujitsu-P2120. Unfortunately, the only devices available had crippled chips and cost over $2100. I can manage carrying around an extra pound to save a grand, and get more power and a larger hard drive as well. I could never figure out why a smaller machine cost so much more. The $1800 AIR brings this market segment to a more sensible range.

However, as far as light, somewhat durable machines with good battery life go, the bottom of the food chain is far more interesting. This year, we’ve seen 3 offerings of well functioning internet devices for $400 or less, the EEEPC, Ipod Touch. For “coffee-house computing,” which is all most sub-notebooks are really capable of, these make a lot more sense. Drop it. Spill coffee on it. That would really suck, but at least you have some money left in the wallet.

So I rolled on over to my blog reader and came across Mark Finkle’s post about the release of Prism for something other than windows.

Back when Prism was still called WebRunner, I gave it a try, since I’ve been looking for a way to have Zimbra have it’s own little icon in the doc. At the time, WebRunner was just a little bit too buggy for daily use. Hopeful that the major issues were resolved, I pulled down Prism, fired it up, and entered the address of my Zimbra install.

Does the Zimbra client work better in Prism? I can’t tell. They changed the way security settings work to completely disallow self-signed certs. Needless to say, I’m not buying a certificate so that the two people using my mail client can feel all warm and fuzzy because Thawte says it’s safe. Of course it’s safe, the two of us administer it.

Even more troubling is that there is a forum thread about this issue, but without any response on how to get around it.

I understand that users need to be protected from themselves at times and many blindly hit ‘okay’ to any dialog box they see. However, Prism is not an end user product yet. By it’s own admission, it’s a prototype. Therefore, it only follows that it should be easy to use for developers. Which means allowing non-fully trusted certificates.

Forum thread’s been updated, too

All ranting aside, the way around the in-built limitation is to copy your firefox certificates over your prism ones. The file’s called cert8.db and you’ll find it in the directory of your firefox profile.