Monday, September 29, 2008

Running Firefox 2 and 3 together on OSX.

Create a new Firefox profile using the Profile Manager (i.e. ff2):

/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox -ProfileManager

Then launch Firefox 2 with the new profile:

/Applications/Firefox2.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox -P ff2 -no-remote

Create an apple script using the Script Editor to have a launch icon:

do shell script "/Applications/Firefox2.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox -P ff2 -no-remote &> /dev/null &"

Save as "Application Bundle" and check "Run only".

Some icons with version numbers can be found here: http://browserversionicons.com/

Sunday, September 28, 2008

Hide password in Emacs shell

I often use the EMACS shell to look at log files, but I don't want my password to be shown when I'm typing it in the shell. To hide it, add the following to your .emacs file:

(add-hook 'comint-output-filter-functions
'comint-watch-for-password-prompt)


Or manually type 'M-x send-invisible' before typing the password.

Saturday, September 27, 2008

Make Firefox 3 bookmarks available to Quicksilver/Launchy.

Firefox 3 no longer saves its bookmark to an html file by default so things like Quicksilver can't index it. To re-enable it, go to about:config, set browser.bookmark.autoExportHtml to true and restart Firefox

What I've installed on OSX.

IT upgraded my MBP to Leopard so I had to go through the process of reinstalling my apps. It's a lot simpler to do this on OSX/Unix then on Windows since apps pretty much have to install its settings and user configurations in the /Users/ directories because otherwise they will need write permissions.

However, I did have to reinstall my apps which meant looking for them again. I figure I'll just list them here so that in the future it'll save me time.

GeekTools - to display information such as my calendar and notes on the desktop
Firefox 2
Firefox 3
Versioned icons for Firefox
Thunderbird
MacPorts - the joys of UNIX!
Sidenote - unobtrusive notepad
Quicksilver
OpenProj - to be able to read/write to Microsoft Project files.
Adium - multi-protocal IM client
Colloquy - IRC client
VLC - media player
Tinker Tool - exposes hidden settings. I use it to turn off Apple's anti-aliasing and changing the system fonts
Tahoma (font)
Synergy - Allows using one keyboard to control multiple computers.
Eclipse IDE
Xcode
Flip4Mac


Commercial

Parallels/VMWare Fusion
Microsoft Office
Adobe Photoshop
OmniGraffle