DashboardStarter

"DashboardStarter is a small application that brings up Dashboard and closes it right away. Drag the app to your login items and have Dashboard load the widgets in the background."

This loads your Widgets and you do not have to wait them to load the first time your run Dashboard. Very handy.

Did you find the above information helpful? You will find a lot more information in my eBook "Programming Dashboard Widgets". The eBook describes how you can create Apple Dashboard Widgets using many programming languages including JavaScript, Perl, Objective-C, and PHP. You can buy it here.

Problems with printing

After installing the latest Mac OS X update (10.5.5) as well as the latest HP printer drivers (1.1.1) from Apple, I cannot print reliably any more!

Rarely, I can print some small print jobs but most of the time I cannot print!

Please, do not forget to read this.

Do you have a solution? Can you help me?

Read the comments. I think I found a solution...

DTrace

As you may already know, Leopard (a.k.a. Mac OS X 10.5) supports DTrace. DTrace was made by Sun and it is "a comprehensive dynamic tracing framework for the Solaris Operating Environment. DTrace provides a powerful infrastructure to permit administrators, developers, and service personnel to concisely answer arbitrary questions about the behavior of the operating system and user programs."

You can find many information about DTrace here.

AppleYukon2 - en0 link down

Today, I found out a strange problem that I have. I had the feeling that my Internet connection was a little slow so I checked my logs. I found the following message appearing all the time: 

Sep 23 14:39:09 Monastery kernel[0]: AppleYukon2 - en0 link down
Sep 23 14:39:10 Monastery kernel[0]: AppleYukon2 - en0 link active, 100-Mbit, full duplex, symmetric flow control enabled port 0
Sep 23 14:39:11 Monastery kernel[0]: AppleYukon2 - en0 link down
Sep 23 14:39:12 Monastery kernel[0]: AppleYukon2 - en0 link active, 100-Mbit, full duplex, symmetric flow control enabled port 0

This has to do with my Ethernet port (en0).

Any ideas? Please? Do you have similar problems?

Note: my Wireless card works just fine.

Read the comments to see the solution that I found.

MacPorts and LaTeX

A side effect of using MacPorts (see this post for more information) is that I recalled that I was also using a PowerPC version of LaTeX.

Using the information found here, after deleting my current LaTeX installation, I managed to install the MacPorts Universal Binary (UB) version of LaTeX. Everything is working just fine, including Greek typetting!

I like LaTeX so much that I typeset my "Programming Dashboard Widgets" eBook using it.

Fink and MacPorts

When I was first start using Macs, I wanted the GNU command line tools. I first started using Fink and I was very happy with it.

Lately, after getting my Intel MacBook Pro, I decided to update Fink in order to have the Intel binaries. Unfortunately, after trying a little bit, I could not update or re-install Fink to get Intel binaries.

It was then that I thought that I should try MacPorts. I am now happily using MacPorts and I should say that I am totally satisfied.

Using TextMate for LaTeX documents

One of the things that I really wanted to learn is using TextMate for writing and compiling LaTeX documents.
The first place that I looked up for help was Haris Skiadas' blog. Haris is doing a great job in supporting the use of the TextMate editor for writing LaTeX documents. I was not wrong as I found three relevant screencasts there. After googling for a while, I also found a great blog entry titled "Setting up LaTeX on Mac OS X" and I followed its instructions. After installing pdfsync and Skim, I was able to re-compile, view and change a previously created LaTeX project (including BibTeX entries!) that included both Greek and Latin characters.

I am copying the following extremely useful information from the aforementioned blog post:

For enabling the integration of TextMate and Skim you need to use the pdfsync package by including \usepackage{pdfsync} in the preamble of your document. With pdfsync enabled you can press ⌃⌥⌘O (or use the bundle’s “Show in PDFViewer (pdfsync) command”) to jump to the matching place in the PDF file. Vice versa, when pressing Shift-Command-clicking on a location inside Skim, TextMate is showing the matching paragraph in the LaTeX source.

So, as far as writing and compiling LaTeX (and HTML) documents using TextMate, the case is closed!

Note: I have installed LaTeX using the i-installer LaTeX package. The place that I put the pdfsync.sty file is: /usr/local/teTeX/share/texmf.tetex/tex/latex/pdfsync/pdfsync.sty.

Lacie rugged hard disks

After selling my PowerMac G5 and getting a Macbook Pro, I decided that I should also get USB and Firewire powered hard disks (for lowering the noise as well as having more portability).

I now have two Lacie Rugged portable hard disks. A USB-only (250Gb) and a USB/Firewire 400/800 one (320 Gb).

I also have a FireDisk 800-s Unibrain external hard disk (300Gb) that is not bus-powered.

Software that I use

- Mail: Mail.app
- Web Browser: Safari and sometimes Firefox
- TextEditor: TextMate
- DxO Optics Pro for processing RAW files
- VLC - especially after finding out that Apple's DVD Player cannot play extracted DVDs (from VIDEO_TS directories)
- SuperDuper!: this backup software worths every cent of its price. I bought the full version because I wanted to take incremental bootable copies of Mac OS X as they save a lot of time.

Adobe Creative Suite 4

Adobe is going to officially announce Creative Suite 4 on September 23!

Big news!

Sign up for the launch webcast.

The October 2008 issue of MacTech has an article of mine!

Title: A Dashboard Widget that Reads and Saves its Preferences

Subtitle: Create a Dashboard Widget that can save and read data after restarting it

Did you find the above information helpful? You will find a lot more information in my eBook "Programming Dashboard Widgets". The eBook describes how you can create Apple Dashboard Widgets using many programming languages including JavaScript, Perl, Objective-C, and PHP. You can buy it here.