At first I looked for a way to simply run Gummi on OS X, but this wasn’t really a viable option. I decided the next best thing would be to try and replicate the functionality using TextMate, my favourite text editor. TextMate already has nice support for .tex editing including a “Typeset & View” (CMD + R) command which works really nicely. The one big downside though was that when you re-typeset a document, you lose your position in the preview, which means you’re constantly scrolling down to find the point you want to check.

The next step is to set TextMate to typeset your documents without prompting. This can be done by rooting through the preferences. First you have to tell TextMate to auto-save documents when it loses focus, and also to use atomic-saving which protects against file corruption. Both of these options can be found in the Advanced tab in TextMate’s preferences.

The second part of the puzzle is to tell TextMate what to do with LaTeX files. Open the LaTeX bundle preferences in Bundles -> LaTeX -> Preferences and select Preview (not TextMate) as the default pdf viewer. Then open the tex document you would like to work on.

Once you have it opened select the “Watch Document” command in Bundles -> Latex -> Watch Document. Now when you save your tex file or switch to another application TextMate will automatically typeset it for you! To get a live preview all you have to do is open the document in Preview and work away. Once you save the file or switch away from TextMate PDFView will automatically load the fresh document. Voila! All the nice functionality of TextMate with live pdf previews on top!

Enjoy

Patrick

I hope to have another announcement relating to this in the not so distant future hopefully depending on how things turn out, so watch this space!

Patrick

I’ve been working on a couple of projects recently for different people including myself. I’m working on the launch of IAN with some friends which we hope to launch soon. (Watch this space). I’ve also been working on another Young Scientist project which I hope to enter with a friend of mine in this years exhibition which’ll make it my third year running hopefully.

On the more public side of things I recently released City-Blogger a generic install of the popular Limerick Blogger site. I’m also working on launching the Thinstack website which I’ve been coding for the last while.

All this while learning to drive and holding down an office job…. what a summer eh?

I’d only ever heard good things about SliceHost before so I decided for many reasons on top of their good reputation to give them a try.

So far they’ve been great. I’ve had to talk to support for some little things so far and the response times have been incredibly good. Email’s are replied to almost instantly if you don’t want to try their numerous other support methods like IRC or their own chat service.

On top of all that they’re reasonably priced especially with the Dollar to Euro conversation rates these days.

Long story short, if you need a new host give them a try. It’ll be worth your while

nginx.org was originally developed to cater for the needs of Rambler, a Russian search engine. It has quickly gained numbers though, and recent surveys put it as fifth most used web server on the internet today. It has many nice features, but above all has a reputation for stability, something I can’t say Lighttpd has in quantities.

Installation

As usual I installed nginx through apt and started to configure it to my needs until I noticed many of the things on the wiki weren’t working for some reason. I decided to check the version apt had installed and was surprised to find that not only was it a few revisions behind the current stable release, it was what looked to be a year or more out of date. A lot of new features had been implemented since this release so I decided to install from source instead.

I managed to find some great articles on Slicehost about installing NGINX on Ubuntu Intrepid which even included the making of a init.d script for the install (very handy).

Once everything was installed I had to configure the installation for use with fastcgi for php scripts. This was the hardest part of the install as it isn’t the easiest thing to get running compared to the Apache route. Many of the articles I googled included installing lighttpd for the spawn-fcgi functionality, though fortunately this has since been forked into it’s own project at Lighttpd.net.

Fast-CGI PHP support

I installed this along with another init.d script for Spawn-FCGI which I found over at Codefront.net. Once that was done it was a process of porting all my existing virtualhosts over to NGINX.

Configuration

I decided to use a similar system to Apache for handling my virtualhost configuration files by making a sites-available and sites-enabled directory for them and telling nginx to include all the the configuration files in sites-available. This means that putting a site online is exactly the same as with apache by making the necessary configuration file and then placing a symbolic link in the sites-enabled directory. Handy!

After that it was on to rewriting the mod_rewrite rules for nginx, something which actually was not as hard as I had expected it to be. The one thing that you have to be aware of with nginx is that in each virtualhost config file if you want to have php files executed you need to include the necessary block that tells nginx to pass them off to your fast-cgi process. Not that difficult to do at all, just something I didn’t think of in my first round.

Gains?

So after all that what have I gained? Well for one nginx seems to use half the memory Apache did while still providing a speed increase for static content and php files. Worth it? Definitely!

I played around with the Things demo for a while and I have to say I was quite impressed with it. Things provides a really nice interface which made it easy to use, which was a big plus. Things also sports an iPhone app which synced perfectly with the Desktop version. The one thing (no pun intended) that put me off was the price. Buying the pair of applications for both the phone and the desktop would cost just over €50 which is quite a bit, considering the times we’re in. I also found that while Things sported a lot of nice features, that I wouldn’t necessarily use all of them, so it wasn’t really worth it.

Then I re-discovered TaskPaper sitting in my Applications folder. After firing it up and looking at it properly for the first time I realised it was much much more than a simple application for making to-do lists.

TaskPaper is a GTD application similar to Things in terms of the way it manages things. When adding new tasks to your list you add them to the Inbox for sorting later into other projects. It even provides a quick entry keyboard shortcut that brings up a nice little interface for adding tasks on the go. It selects to add things to the Inbox by default but you can also add them to projects straight away and bypass the necessary organising later. TaskPaper, like things also supports tagging. Tags are added to tasks at the end with the @ prefix. You can add as many tags as you want and TaskPaper provides functionality for searching by tags, which shows all the tasks across all projects that share the tag your looking for. Once you have completed a task you mark it complete by adding the @done tag. You can move it to the Archive project yourself if you want or you can have TaskPaper do them all for you using the cmd + shift + D shortcut.

One of the main reasons I like TaskPaper is that your list is contained in a single plain-text file. The only thing that TaskPaper uses is the formatting with tab indentation and @ prefix for tags. What this means is that even if your not in front of your own computer you can sync it across numerous computers as a simple text file and still be able to understand it without the application. For example if I want to see what I had down in the web development project away from home I can look at the file over ssh and see what I want to see, without the need for any unnecessary software installs. What I guess I am trying to say is that TaskPaper excels in doing a great job while still keeping it simple.

If your looking for a simple, effective way to organise yourself on the Mac, I recommend you try it. You can download a free trial over at Hog Bay Software and if you like it enough, you can buy it for only $29.95, a good price for software this useful.

Enjoy

Patrick

The only problem I find with using these sites is that it takes quite a lot of steps to actually send a message. Open Firefox, load the website, login, navigate to the webtext page etc… This is where o2sms steps into the equation. It acts like a specialised browser that automates the actions taken by the user to send SMS messages and provides the functionality through a CLI (command line interface), reducing the process to a single terminal command. The one problem I faced with o2sms was getting it to work on Mac OS X. While there is the option of installing with CPAN it just did not work for me and it was constantly complaining that dependencies were not being met. While the cpan install worked for me on numerous other systems it just failed to install everything on OS X, and so I was left with the task of manually installing it.

The fix turned out to be easier than I expected. When I ran the broken install of o2sms it gave a warning that certain modules could not be found. While I tried installing them individually with CPAN it still wouldn’t work and so I decided I’d build each one individually and install them one by one. To do this I had to get the source from CPAN and build each one from the source code.

When all was said and done I was left with a working install, which looks something like this

patrick@Odysseus0% meteorsms 1234567890                                   < ~ >
[ recipient : +353234567890 ]
lorem ipsum...
.
[ logging in to 0987654321@meteor.ie ... ]
[ login successful ]
[ message sent to +353234567890, 229 remaining this month ]
patrick@Odysseus0%                                                        < ~ >

Its even possible to send messages using a single command using the -m command line argument.

patrick@Odysseus0% meteorsms 1234567890 -m "lorem ipsum"                  < ~ >
[ recipient : +353234567890 ]
[ reusing last login for 0987654321@meteor.ie ... ]
[ message sent to +353234567890, 228 remaining this month ]
patrick@Odysseus0%                                                        < ~ >

Hopefully this article will help others who have been having troubles with getting o2sms to work on their own OS X installs, or enlighten other people to the brilliance that is o2sms.

Enjoy,

Patrick

The softmod approach requires the transferring of modified gamesave files to the xbox which exploited a bad coding technique that developers employed in their gamesaving mechanisms. There “legitimate” way to do this would be to buy both an xbox memory card and the commercial Action Replay kit which includes a usb adapter to read the memory card on a PC. The commercial kit can cost quite a lot so I decided that I would do it my own way and build my own cable for the xbox and use one of the many USB keys lying around the house in place of a memory card. There’s a picture of the messy soldering job that I did to create the necessary cable at the bottom of the post.

Performing the softmod requires a copy of one of the following games for the xbox

• 007 Agent Under Fire
• Mech Assault
• Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell

Fortunately enough I was able to find a copy of Splinter Cell on ebay which only cost €6 including shipping.

The softmod process itself is very easy to follow and almost impossible to get wrong. In all the softmod process took around 10 minutes max after which I was left with an xbox with a copy of the XBMC software on it. XBMC coupled with the DVD remote which I have for the xbox makes it such a nice experience browsing through all the media content in the house.

In the end it has turned out to be a very cost effective way to get a media centre running and its only made better by the amazing XBMC software which is available for other platforms such as Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. Its great software and I highly recommend people take a look at it over at XBMC.org.

Here’s the cables I soldered together

and the finished product.

The Good

The App store is really nicely done and there are a lot of cool apps to chose from such as Twitterific and the Google Mobile App.

The little tweaks such as mass move/delete in Mail.app and the domain postfix choice when the .com button is held down in Safari are welcomed changes which make things just a little easier.

Contacts search is finally here and it’s a very welcomed change for me. The fact that I can now search through my very badly organized contacts is very useful and it makes a huge difference for me.

The Bad

Even though Apple introduced little tweaks in the 2.0 software there’s still no sign of copy and paste. How this fell tao the bottom of the pile of changes to be made is just beyond me. Hopefully it will be introduced soon as it will be a huge advance for users.

The new apps are nice but the lack of background processes hinders their usefullness. This is especially evident in things such as IM apps which cant function when they’re closed. I can see why Apple did this but it is still a technical letdown for developers.

The changes in the new firmware have invariably broken all the unofficial 3rd party apps which the jailbreaking community have created over the last months. It’s a pity because some of those apps were very useful (for example MobileTerminal.app) and now it’s up to developers to port them to the new firmware which I doubt all will do.

Instead of a list of all the apps I have installed here’s a screenshot of all of them.