from the desk of stinkpot

i’m terrible at managing my time when on the computer. i always end up wasting time surfing the web when i should be studying or writing code. which is why i was really excited to hear about blossom today. blossom is a suggested program for the mac, which’ll tell you how long you’ve spend on […]

sure sftp is more secure than ftp, but the default client has got some terrible usability problems. for instance, it always really bugged me that i couldn’t tab-auto-complete in sftp.  it’s crazy!  how else do you enter long filenames?! thankfully, i’ve finally found a command-line sftp client that does handle auto-completion: yafc (yet another ftp […]

to get latex and pdflatex running in mac os x, first download i-installer. then, install the ‘tex’ package found in the i-installer. then, compile a tex file into a pdf with the command: >>pdflatex mytexfile.tex

to send mail from the command-line, use the mailx utility. this works on both mac os x and linux. it’s also super-convenient for cron jobs where you want to auto-send emails; you can’t stick pine into a script. echo “message body” | mailx -s “subject header” recipient@isp.com nb: your message may bounce back, complaining “sender […]

assuming you’ve gotten phpicalendar working, give an ical the following publishing settings: publish on: “a private server” baseurl: “http://yourserver/phpicalendar-2.1/ login: “webdav” password: “yourpassword”

to decompress a .tar.bz2 file, go with: > tar xvjf filename.tar.bz2

if you’d like a free way to draw 2D chemical structures on a mac, give this program a shot: xdrawchem [update] as of 3/13/06, the server (naranja.umh.es/~atg) hosting a necessary component of xdrawchem (qt3.3) is down. so unless you’ve already got qt installed, it looks like xdrawchem will be uninstallable for the time being.

if you’ve got access to a file server, rsync can be a godsend. for instance, i use the following one-liner to synchronize my itunes music folder with my music server: rsync -av –progress –size-only –delete –rsh=/usr/bin/ssh ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes\ Music/ user_name@server_address:~/Music/ this command copies all of the music in my laptop’s itunes directory to the ~/Music directory […]

i’m still investigating what’s actually going on here, but i’ve noticed that after installing developer tools on my powerbook g4, a hardware preference pane has appeared in my system preferences. interestingly, opening this pane revealed that my L2 cache had been set to none by default. i’m no computer engineer, but it seems logical to […]

to make your terminal display color coded files and directories when you call the ls command, run: sudo apt-get install fileutils (have to have fink installed first if you’re on the mac) then add to your .bashrc or .profile: eval “`dircolors -b`” alias ls=’ls –color=auto’