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

There’s a sizeable gap between Apple’s low end stand-alone desktop (the mac mini) and the next tier (the $2500 mac pro). I found that my current mini wasn’t keeping up with what I wanted to do. Textmate, passenger, a couple virtual machines and Photoshop were enough to send the machine, and it’s 3G of ram to it’s knees.

Therefore, I did what any person that can handle a philip’s screwdriver would do, I built a “Hackintosh.” A good set of parts, including a Core 2 Quad and 16GB of ram will cost about $900 if you shop the combo deals on Newegg. Also, while of dubious legality, it’s really easy to do.

This guide has all the information.

The only additional advice I have to add is to be patient while installing Snow Leopard. On my machine, it took an hour for the install to boot. Or four hours clock time as I continued to fiddle with the hardware and settings. So do yourself a favor and when you start the install grab a beer, relax for a bit, then come back and check on the progress.

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.