Anyway, if you hold down the Cmd key (aka the Apple key), a menu pops up that shows the folder hierarchy of where the currently opened QuickTime movie is in your filesystem:

This works in all Mac apps that display the filename of the currently open/focused file in the titlebar.

It’s useful for me since my NADD means I try to close as many unused windows as possible to adhere to my Cmd-Tab diet – now I can close Finder windows after opening files and be sure that I can get back to them quickly. What about QuickSilver? Yup, I do use (and love) QuickSilver but I don’t let it catalog every single file!

Another nice thing about this is that I can easily reveal files in Finder in my favorite text editor (TextMate) without needing to use the project drawer:

Well, if you wanna check out the proposed Mac OS X Firefox 3 UI for yourself, grab yourself a copy of Firefox 3 Beta 1 and go get the Proto theme.

The name is completely not my idea so I claim no credit – I stole it from my girlfriend’s brother, who conceived the SSID of “AssAssID”.

What’s your SSID and have you seen any amusing ones? Or is yours one of the bajillion ‘linksys’ or ‘DLINK’ SSIDs in existence?

Some of the features are pretty cool, most of them are mundane. For me, I am really looking forward to:

• the new Finder – Finder sucks so bad as a file system interface. I use Path Finder, which incidentally had an upgrade recently to 4.7. The new Finder looks pretty (Cover Flow for files, sexy!) but what I’m really hoping for is a Finder with which you can actually be productive.
• Ruby and Rails baked right into Mac OS X – while installing Rails and upgrading Ruby is a breeze on Mac OS X as it is right now, having these installed by default is pretty sweet. Even Capistrano will be included. Now, how one upgrades Ruby is another thing though…
• Time Machine – Even though I already own a licensed copy of SuperDuper!, I’m still eager to use Time Machine. I mean, who isn’t hooked on the time travel metaphor yet? It’s like System Restore done right (with the advantage of hindsight, of course).

What are you looking forward in Leopard?

If you’ve found other neat ways to use the free Ubuntu stickers (or even the Apple stickers that comes with iPods), do post it!

While trying to install Rmagick on my spanking, new, glossy, kakkoii MacBook, MacPorts reported a checksum error with the ImageMagick source tarball:

Target com.apple.checksum returned: Unable to verify file checksums

At first, I thought it was an outdated portfile but even after a sudo port selfupdate and sudo port -d sync, the checksum error was still occurring (checksum of the file: 4bcb4264c2170fe562b10a732f43e7af, expected checksum in the portfile: 9469ce1b1b645f8c728158cc434b0ff8).

Turns out, the first listed master site (where MacPorts gets its source files from), http://imagemagick.linux-mirror.org/download/ is hosting a source tarball with a bad checksum. Digging around the man page for port a bit, and switching the order of the master source sites solved it, so it was just a case of a bad file on one of the mirror sites.

sudo port edit imagemagick to edit the portfile and change the source mirror to a legit one. You should see something like this:

master_sites \
  http://imagemagick.linux-mirror.org/download/ \
  http://ftp.surfnet.nl/pub/ImageMagick/ \
  sourceforge:imagemagick \
  ftp://ftp.imagemagick.net/pub/${name}/ \
  ftp://ftp.fifi.org/pub/ImageMagick/ \
  ftp://ftp.nluug.nl/pub/${name}/

Just move an alternative master_site to the top of the list (I used the SourceForge one). There probably is a way to specify the master_site on the command line with port install but I’ve had just about enough of reading man pages and the now nearly unfindable MacPorts documentation (whatever happened to the old Darwin Ports site that had great documentation?)

Anyway, I’ve written to the webmaster of the mirror site linux-mirror.org, so this would probably be fixed for all two of you who are gonna be installing ImageMagick via MacPorts within these few days or so. Still, it was a good exercise in debugging bad port installations.

Get a nightly here: https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk/

To test Firefox 3 nightlies without possibly messing up your existing profile (preferences, extensions, what have you), use the Profile Manager to create a new profile just for testing. Way less stupid then trying to load up 48 tabs from your current profile in Firefox 3 and then seeing most of the extensions fail to work (which was what I tried to do, once).

Source: Bug 362685 – Growl Integration for Mac OS X (nsIAlertsService)

How’re these for red/green test results?

Tests (specs) passing!

Tests (specs) failing :(

Much better! Now I don’t have to glance at my terminal window (I recently realized how painful it is while coding with a single monitor) and get unobtrusive notifications.

Unfortunately, this is Mac-only (or wherever Growl is supported). I had to follow links to several blog entries to get it setup nicely (see Growl + Autotest Rails with Zentest 3.4.0 and Green goodness with autotest + growl – those are my references).

Basically you need Growl installed, and the growlnotify tool in your path. growlnotify can be found in the Extras/growlnotify directory in the Growl dmg (for example, after you’ve mounted the Growl-0.x.x.dmg, you can find it here: /Volumes/Growl/Extras/growlnotify). Just copy the growlnotify executable into your path (I copied it into /opt/local/bin since I’m using Darwin Ports and don’t have a /usr/local/bin directory). Verify it’s running by entering:

growlnotify -m "Testing growlnotify" Boo Ya!

into a terminal window. You should see a Growl notification.

Now, you need to create an Autotest hook by creating an autotest init file in your home directory named .autotest, and copy this chunk of text in:

module Autotest::Growl
  def self.growl title, msg, img, pri=0, sticky=""
    system "growlnotify -n autotest --image #{img} -p #{pri} -m #{msg.inspect} #{title} #{sticky}"
  end

  Autotest.add_hook :ran_command do |at|
    output = at.results.last.slice(/(\d+)\s.*specifications?,\s(\d+)\s.*failures?/)
    if output =~ /[1-9]\sfailures?/
      growl "Test Results", "#{output}", "/Data/Pictures/Icons/rails_fail.png", 2, "-s"
    else
      growl "Test Results", "#{output}", "/Data/Pictures/Icons/rails_ok.png"
    end
  end
end

Replace the paths to the pass/fail icons (as you can see, mine are in /Data/Pictures/Icons/) with the correct paths to any images you want to display (grab them from Green goodness with autotest + growl or roll your own). You can change the parameters passed to growlnotify however you want (use growlnotify -h to see what parameters it acccepts). The pri parameter sets the priority level of the message (test failures come up with a priority of 2, hence the red background of the Growl notification). Passing -s to sticky tells Growl to keep the notification sticky. If you’re running your (auto)tests on a remote server (e.g. in a Continuous Integration system), you can even use growlnotify to send remote notifications (see the -H switch) to your development workstations!

Lovely! I love you, MacBook Pro serial no. W86280NAVWW (despite your broken DVD drive and you randomly freezing up on me when you get too hot).

What’s IDLE? Well, quoting myself:

Simply put, IDLE is a command that allows IMAP email servers to transmit updates to the client in real time. This saves the client from having to continuously poll the server to achieve the effect of new mail appearing immediately. All in all, an exceptionally useful command that saves Thunderbird the work of polling IMAP servers continuously.

So anyway, it’s really simple to install and use (just simple checkboxes for enabling IDLE for your IMAP accounts).

Remember to configure Mail to stop polling these mail accounts every X minutes or so now. Enjoy the geeky feeling of knowing you’ve just saved several CPU cycles and a few kilobytes of bandwidth.

First point of reference: Print from Windows XP to a shared Mac printer tip on Mac OS X Hints. The tip suggests you select a PostScript driver in Windows after finding it on the network (which requires you to do several things first, but we will come to that later). This worked, but it was sub-optimal because you couldn’t use the printer driver software to do stuff like 2-up printing (i.e. print 2 pages per side per sheet). This post will show you how to share a USB printer from Mac OS X to Windows PCs with full driver capability.

1. On the Mac (the one that the USB printer that you want to share is connected to), go to the Sharing preferences pane and ensure Printer Sharing and Windows Sharing are both turned on.
2. Fire up your browser and go to http://127.0.0.1:631 – this is the web interface to CUPS. When asked to enter a password, login with your Mac OS X user account (it has to be an administrator account).
3. Go to the Printers tab and add a new printer (yes, in addition to any existing printer configuration that already exist for the same printer). Choose a name that’s short and descriptive (no spaces). For the purposes of this guide, let’s call it ‘uberprinter’. Best to keep it under 12 characters since Windows is finicky.
4. When asked to select a device, select USB printer.
5. You’ll be asked for a Device URI. To find out, open up a terminal and type lpinfo -v. You should see your USB printer coming up. Mine came up as ‘direct usb://HP/Deskjet%201280?serial=CN516851RPUN’. Copy and paste this (without the ‘direct’ part – i.e., I’d have copied ‘usb://HP/Deskjet%201280?serial=CN516851RPUN’) into the ‘Device URI’ field.
6. Select a ‘Make’ of ‘Raw‘. Keep going until the printer is added.
7. You’re done configuring from the Mac. But before you go, determine your Mac’s IP address (do a ‘ifconfig’ in a shell or fire up System Profiler and check out the ‘Network’ item) – note it down somewhere. Now it’s time to hook up your Windows machine to use the shared printer.
8. OK now go to your Windows machine and add a new printer (Control Panel -> Printers and Faxes). Select ‘A network printer… blah blah’. Don’t browse for the printer, you will enter its IP address directly in the ‘URL’ field. Enter ‘http://your.macs.ip.address:631/printers/uberprinter’ (replacing ‘your.macs.ip.address’ with your Mac’s IP address and ‘uberprinter’ with the short name you gave your printer). If you can’t remember your printer’s name, just scurry back to the Mac and browse to http://127.0.0.1:631/printers/. You should be able to see the printer you added listed there – its name is linked there.
9. Now, all that’s left is to install the correct Windows printer driver on the Windows machine. If you’re lucky Windows already has your driver, if not do whatever you need to get the proper driver – after all, the purpose of jumping through all these hoops is to get full printer driver functionality off the shared Mac printer.

That’s it. That’ll teach you for not getting a print server or one of those new printers with network functionality.

Problems?

Some readers wrote in with their own difficulties and have kindly allowed me to share their solutions. First off, Patrick McKrell who had a solution for cases where you still are just not able to print from the Windows machine (it involves killing a daemon so it’s pretty sweet).

Thank you for making available your instructions for sharing a USB printer connected to a Mac using OS X with a Windows PC. All of your points worked flawlessly on the Mac. My Mac is a B&W G3 running OS X 10.2.8. The printer is an HP PSC 1510.

…

Back to Windows Add Printer. Is my driver there? No. I browsed the Windows file system to Program Files/HP/. No luck. Couldn’t find or add my driver. Next I unplugged the printer’s USB cable from the Mac and into the PC. Windows detected the new hardware, created whatever files it needed, and automatically created the USB-connected PSC 1500 series printer in Printers and Faxes. Well, that’s pretty darn close. I opened the printer’s properties, changed the port from USB to Internet Port (as per your configuration guidance), sent a print job….and nothing. Hmmm.

Finally, I recalled seeing someone’s web post –thanks to your point of reference. I followed the poster’s instructions, and, yeah, it prints, and in color. Thanks again, Chu, for your post. It was easy to follow, and importantly, it worked with my setup (despite the color issue).

Patrick McKrell

The solution? Change your CUPS configuration to allow raw printing:

Basically, I saw that every job on the windows side had “error”.

After looking at the error logs for cups on the mac box (/var/log/cups/), I noticed this line repeatedly:

print_job: Unsupported format ‘application/octet-stream’!

Did some googling, and found a post with the answer:

>
> You probably need to uncomment the following lines in
> /etc/cups/mime.types and /etc/cups/mime.convs:
>
>
> /etc/cups/mime.types:
> #application/octet-stream
>
>
> /etc/cups/mime.convs:
> #application/octet-stream application/vnd.cups-raw 0
> -
>
>
> That will allow raw printing.

Then, kill -HUP the cups daemon, and you’re good to go.

Mac OS X users, if you watch videos in full screen mode (like I do most of the time), you’d be delighted to know that they added a full screen controller à la the video player in iTunes:

That was one of my pet peeves with VLC when I was still using Windows as my main desktop OS, and I’d stayed true to Media Player Classic right to the point where I switched to OS X. Media Player Classic is Windows-only, so I had to switch to VLC as well (QuickTime player never impressed me and I wasn’t willing to pay for the Pro version). The lack of a full controller in full screen mode and the inability to move to specific spots in the video timeline with sufficient granularity seems to have been fixed with this new full screen controller panel.

And while they still haven’t made it possible to pause a video by clicking on the video output (which was the case in Media Player Classic), I’ve mostly compensated for it by hitting the space bar. Now that they’ve added a right-click context menu to the video output screen, the same can be done but in 2 clicks with just the mouse – not optimal but it does feel better to see a context menu pop up when right-clicking. I guess that’s the Windows user in me talking – I still feel that almost everything I see should have a context menu or it just feels wrong.

Oh and they added support for the Apple Remote Control. Works great, I just have to remember to take out my remote control and use it next time I’m sitting back watching a movie or anime.

If you can look past the fuzziness of the photo, it’s actually someone using a HP laptop with an Apple sticker. Now, if only I can get a HP sticker for my MacBook Pro…