First adding comments, which means a “#” mark at the start of every line
sed -i '' 's/^\([^#]\)/#\1/g' ~/.ssh/config

Second removing the comments, just stripping out the “#” marks.
sed -i '' 's/^#//g' ~/.ssh/config

A few things to note here, on the assumption that you can see how Regular Expressions work and are vaguely familiar with sed’s /find/replace/ style syntax:

1. the “-i” flag means “edit in place” and requires an extra argument for the backup file’s extension. I’ve given an empty string so that no backup is made
2. sed requires escaping of capturing parentheses, hence the \( and \) in the first example
3. the final ‘g’ at the end of the expressions means “global”, i.e. replace all occurences

It’s definitely worth going one step beyond google’s own instructions on the matter and correctly configuring the drafts, sent and trash folders in both clients:

Mail.app

Choose the google folder for drafts in the sidebar. From the os x menu bar at the top of your screen choose ‘mailbox’ and then ‘use this mailbox for’ and then ‘drafts’. Do the same with the other folders.

iPhone Mail

Having done the basic setup, go to the settings app, choose ‘mail, contacts and calendars’, navigate to your mail account and choose ‘advanced’ and then setup the ‘mailbox behaviours’ as required.

NB if you are a fan of ‘labels’ in gmail, bear in mind that these equate to copies of the email in IMAP folders. That means that if you have, as I did, several thousand labelled emails from a different account you will have more than one copy of each downloaded to mail.app, assuming you chose to download your messages- and who wouldn’t?

The iPhone seems to work pretty flawlessly, but mail.app sometimes seems to take a while to catch up with changes (especially emails you’ve read on the iPhone while mail.app was offline) although it always seems to get there in the end.

Things from Cultured Code also comes as an iPhone app, and the duo update each other fairly well. They miss out on being being “excellent” because the iPhone-to-mac syncing only happens when both your devices are on the same wifi network, and short of closing one of the pair and re-opening it, I can’t fnd a way of forcing a sync to happen whenever you would like.

That being said, they do both work extremely well. The desktop version has a very nice quick-entry interface which feels a little bit like Quicksilver (and is accessed by pressing Ctrl+Alt+Space) which is a nice touch. Both apps use “dock badge” numbers although the number shown can only be customised on the desktop version which lets you set the number as Due, Due+Today and Due+Today+Inbox; the iPhone dock badge will only show Due+Today so personally although I would like the full count I leave the setting so that both are the same.

Neither app is free. The desktop client is (at the current exchange rate) £37.13 ($49.95) and you can buy Things from the App Store for £5.99 ($7.99). The desktop version is also available as a 5-license bundle for £55.72 ($74.95)

I must admit that although it’s ok for short posts I can’t imagine I’m going to be writing any very long posts on a touchscreen keyboard (although I am starting to get the hang of it even after only two days of light use). Please pardon any smelling pistakes!

The application is open source, which I’ll definitely appreciate if I ever get around to building an app myself.

You can work with multiple blogs, both self hosted and on wordpress.com. Once you have set up a blog you configure the amount of recent posts to show, I found that he default 10 was a usefaul number

When writing a post, you can set both the tags and choose from the current categories or create ones. Draft posts are saved locally, and when you have finished editing you can either publish immediately or at some future date. You can alternatively set the post as a draft or pending review, which will upload it to the server.

There is also support for adding images to posts – from the photo library or a new shot although no ability to control where in the post the images appear – you only get them defaulting to the bottom of the post.

Overall I would say that the app is as good as the iPhone allows.

I’m really happy to hear that, as the official google blog points out, Gmail now has support for Google Gears allowing you to view your mail offline.

This has caused quite a stir in the blogging community – TechCrunch invites you to throw off your chains, GoogleWatch speculates that it might be the tipping point for Gears adoption, Colin Charles mentioning SSBs such as Fluid and Prism (which this article is about), Google Operating System giving a basic overview and also the GadgetWise NYT blog giving it a spread.

So far, so good. Now what if we want to use a Site Specific Browser, such as those created by Fluid and Mozilla Prism? These “SSBs” are essentially entire browsers, but used only for a single web app – which is quite handy really. I think that Google’s paradigm of basically making each tab / window in your browser it’s own application instance may well remove the need for things like this eventually, but for the time being it would be great to use Gmail’s new offline capability in an SSB.

Well – we can’t do much about enabling Gears in Fluid, since it’s based on WebKit. Check back if you here that Google releases some frm of plugin for WebKit (although actually WK already has HTML5 style “local storage” using SQLite so it could be native support).

We can however do some hacking to get Gears installed in a Prism browser, so let’s go through the process. By the way – I am using Mac OS X 10.5, but I think this should work for any platform that can get Firefox and Google Gears.

I’m using a Google Apps For Your Domain account, it’s worked fine there, although your account will have to have Offline access enabled by google (patience, young grasshopper!).

Step 1: Split a Beam

Go and install Mozilla Prism. I did this by installing it as an extension to my current Firefox.

Once it’s installed and you have restarted the browser, login to your Gmail and from the Tools menu choose “Convert Website To Application.”

Choose whatever options you like in terms of where to put the shortcut. Personally I grabbed Chris Ivarson’s awesome Fluid Gmail Icons and used Preview.app to convert the 128×128 version into a PNG file.

I *also* had a slight issue with not being able to create the app inside the Applications folder, because it needed to Authenticate but just failed silently – YMMV.

Assuming that’s done you should have a nice new Gmail SSB, which you can start and log in to Gmail with. Funky.

Step 2: Start The Fans, Please!

[Note: you have to be older than young, from the UK and to know who Richard O'Brien is to get that "start the fans" bit]

So now we need to get Google Gears installed. You can try doing this from Gmail’s own interface but it will fail complaining that “Gears is not compatiable with XYZ” (where XYZ is the name you gave it and a version number). This is because, even though your Gmail webapp *is( Firefox under the hood, it doesn’t report itself as such to the extension. What we need to do is convince the extension that it is in fact compatible with it.

[Note: it might be more efficient if you want to install several extensions to make your SSB report itself as really being Firefox, but I'm happy with a one-at-a-time approach].

The next thing to do is actually download Google Gears manually. I suggest that you really do try (and fail) to install it from inside the Prism app, because you will be told the current, valid URL for the XPI in the process. If you’re super lazy, here’s where I got mine from (not a link so that you’re encouraged to FIND THE RIGHT URL FOR YOURSELF!):

http://dl.google.com/gears/current/gears-osx-opt.xpi

You might want to use Safari / Opera / wget / IE to actually download it.

Step 3: Unpack, Tweak, Repack

An XPI file is in fact just a ZIP file with delusions of grandeur. Rename the file to “gears-osx-opt.zip” and unpack it.

Now open up “install.rdf” and find the bit that looks like this:

<em:targetApplication>
<Description>
<em:id>{ec8030f7-c20a-464f-9b0e-13a3a9e97384}</em:id>
<em:minVersion>1.5</em:minVersion>
<em:maxVersion>3.0.*</em:maxVersion>
</Description>
</em:targetApplication>

The big long string in curly brackets is the Firefox GUID.  We will need to change this, and also the version numbers.

I found the GUID and version numbers inside my (OS X-specific) “Gmail.app” that Prism created.  Control+Click on it and choose “Show Package Contents” then navigate to “Contents/Resources/application.ini” and open this in a text editor.  It is the “Version” and “ID” values that you want from the “[App]” section.

Applying these to the original install.rdf file we get this (I’ve extended the version numbers just for the hell of it):
<em:targetApplication>
<Description>
<em:id>prism@developer.mozilla.org</em:id>
<em:minVersion>0.1.*</em:minVersion>
<em:maxVersion>10.0.*</em:maxVersion>
</Description>
</em:targetApplication>

Save the edited “install.rdf” file and now you need to repack the zip / xpi.  Take note – you should compress the *files* and not the *directory* or it won’t work.

Change your newly created zip file’s extension back to XPI – and we’re ready to install!

Step 4: Install

This may vary across platforms, I’m not sure.

From the *status bar* (an unusual place to get to the Add Ons / Extensions list) of your Prism app, click the cog and choose “Tools”, “Addons”.  This should pop open the Add Ons panel.

Drag and drop the XPI onto the Add Ons panel and, hopefully, bingo!

If you get an error about “version support” then you might have got the ID or version number wrong somewhere.  If you get one about “cannot find install script” then your XPI / zip is badly formed.  Leave a comment if you need more help here.

Step 5: Enable Gears for Gmail

You’ll need to restart your browser and log back in to GMail.  Then you should be able to click the “Offline” icon at the top of the interface and go through the normal Gears “I trust this application” process.

That’s it! You should now be able to access your mail offline. It’s worth noting that the shortcut that gears can create for you to open your email while offline seems to work fine too.

[Update 31st Jan 2009: It looks like Fluid may support Gears sometime soon!]

In order to get a Macbook running Tiger to connect to a BT HomeHub, I had to add a $ before the WEP Password. I have no idea why.

/Library/Application Support/living-e/MAMP PRO/db/mysql

I had been looking in my User directory’s version of the same path (which is where MAMP Pro stores config files), but it makes perfect sense in this context that databases are shared while configuration isn’t.

Having just downloaded and installed MonoDevelop for OS X I can say that the process of getting up and running is an absolute breeze – only involving the normal mac ‘download, unpack and drop into Applications’ routine.

MonoDevelop (and indeed Mono itself) allows you to build several types of application – C++, C#, ASP.Net and the like. You can build cross-platform executables – either console-based or with a GUI (the application comes with quick-start project templates for the Gnome# and GTK# tookits) – and also web-based projects. MonoDevelop comes with the xsp server built-in so the code-compile-debug cycle is only a single click away (as a bonus it even opens your browser for you).

MonoDevelop is a Gnome application, so a minor annoyance when using it with OS X is the key-binding setup which requires you to use Ctrl over the Apple key for things like copy, paste and save.

I’m hoping to do some work on a mono-driven ASP.Net application, so I may be posting more on that in the future. For now though – I’d like to give a big thanks (and say congratulations) to the MonoDevelop team.

I just discovered by accident that right- (or ctrl-) clicking the time machine’s drive in Finder (but weirdly not on the desktop) brings up an extra ‘Backup Now’ option in the context menu.

I accidentally discovered a method for dropping the bluetooth connection properly, and removing the cycling message from the OS X menu bar:

1. Get iStat Pro’s free dashboard widget
2. Make sure your network connections are displayed when you start Dashboard
3. Wait until your connecting goes crazy, and won’t drop the connection
5. Fire up dashboard and, in the bluetooth pane on the iStat Pro widget, click the ‘Disconnect’ button twice

Cool.

Now if only that would help in reconnecting ….

To the rescue comes Double Command, a Preference Pane add-in that will give you quite a number of options, including the somewhat obvious to my mind “Shift + Backspace acts as delete.”

It has quite a nice way of allowing a System setup, a User setup and a Current setup, and a pretty hefty number of altered key options, however I was happy to just stick to the one change (I’m a big fan of the extra “Enter” key next to the arrow keys, and somewhat miffed that it might disappear).

#!/bin/sh
curdir=`pwd`
if [ $# -eq 1 ]
then
usrdir="$1"
ls | xargs -I % echo `pwd`/% | sed -e s!$usrdir!!
else
ls | xargs -I % echo `pwd`/%
fi

You can optionally provide an initial part of the path to ignore. I use this when writing code change emails where I have to list the updated files within a codebase (and I’ve touched most files in a given directory) and I clip the local path up to the root of the codeset. Assuming the script is saved as “lspath”:

lspath /Users/pete/Sites/project/trunk

Even handier is piping it into the OS X clipboard for easy pasting:

lspath /Users/pete/Sites/project/trunk | pbcopy

The most annoying issue is the incredibly slow management of very large text files (sometimes greater than 1Mb) that my phone displays – so i decided to rename them.

Using my mac, I came up with this couple of commands to do the work for me, between them they will split all text files into 1000 line chunks, and assuming an original filename of “somefile.txt” also rename them to “somefile_XX.txt” where XX is actually two letters denoting the part, starting at aa, ab, ac, etc.

The first command is dead easy and splits the files:

for file in *.txt ; do split $file $file ; done

This will split the files and turn “somefile.txt” into “somefile.txtaa”, “somefile.txtab”, “somefile.txtac” etc. which is obviously not great – so we need the next step:

for file in * ; do mv $file `echo $file |
sed 's/(.*).txt([a-z]{2})/1_2.txt/'` ; done

Now you should have all the files nicely named “somefile_aa.txt”, “somefile_ab.txt”, “somefile_ac.txt” etc.

You might prefer numbers rather than letters, in which case just check out the man page for the ‘split’ command.

The application is intuitive and easy, and the best facsimile I’ve ever seen of actually spinning the wheels of steel on a computer. Combined with the fact that it’s free this is a brilliant application to play around with and to have up and running at parties.

Key features:

• drag and drop straight onto the ‘decks’ from a searchable list of your itunes library;
• manually tap out the bpm of your tracks and have djay automatically adjust the tempo of either playing track to the other;
• cue points which let you specify three points of a record and jump back to them at the click of a button;
• independent tempo and pitch adjustments – alter the pitch without affecting the tempo, or use both together to get a different tempo and the original pitch;
• crossfader automation, independently affecting tempo, pitch, eq and pan;
• easy recording of your masterpiece mixes.
• pre cueing (if you have a multi-channel sound card or a USB iMic) to listen to one track on your headphones while playing the other through the speakers.

All in all an excellent application which takes seconds to start having fun with and offers enough features to let you lose yourself in the mix.

Found at MacApper

Basically the idea is to press the Option (or ‘Alt’ key) with one of another set (which correspond to different kinds of accents) and once you’ve let go of those two to actually type the character you want to accent. The following keys work:

• Alt+e and then a vowel for the ‘acute’ accent, e.g. á, é, í, ó, ú
• Alt+` and then a vowel for the ‘grave’ accent, e.g. à, è, ì, ò, ù
• Alt+i and then a vowel for the ‘circumflex’ accent, e.g. â, ê, î, ô, û
• Alt+u and then a vowel for the ‘dieresis’ (or umlaut) accent, e.g. ä, ë, ï, ö, ü
• Alt+n and then ‘a’, ‘o’ or ‘n’ for the ’tilde’ accent, e.g. ã, õ, ñ

There are other shortcuts for capitals of some of the accented characters, but simply adding Shift when pressing the final character to be accented works just as well.

Vigor:~ pete$ 

I had changed my computer name to something I preferred, which works fine for browsing to your own apache server, but this did not have any effect on thebash prompt. I also wasn’t (yet) interested in customising the prompt with a bashrc file as suggested all over the web.

It turned out that the terminal was showing the hostname of the machine, not the computer name. You can set the hostname with the following snippet:

$ sudo hostname whatever-you-want

This would give you a prompt like this:

whatever-you-want:~ pete$

UPDATE: the above method does not permanently change the hostname. It will revert once you reboot. I’ve tried another method which seems better:

$ sudo scutil --set HostName whatever-you-want.example.com

If the scrollbars change (from being there to not being there or vice versa) then the effect occurs, as it apparently does if you alter a containing element’s css position from absolute to relative.

The issue seems to be cross-platform and specific to Firefox.