OS X

I often want to view font characters such as dingbats that do not map directly to the keyboard. The character viewer is obviously the utility to call upon but I keep forgetting how to display the characters (glyphs to be more accurate) for a particular font.

The solution is simply to select Glyph from the view pop=up menu in the tool bar. The Glyph Catalog will be displayed allowing the glyphs to be displayed for a particular font. The problematic font can be selected and the required glyph inserted.

The o2 mobile broadband PAYG package is appealing but the distributed software dislikes OS X 10.6

There is some guidance from o2 but I found that the MobileConnect app simply could not detect the o2 branded Huwaei device despite the recommended multiple installations of the driver package.

When trying to sync a Subversion working copy of a project with its github master I need to build a patch that ignores all hidden directories (in this case .DS_Store, .svn, .git).

The diff -x option excludes a pattern and can be repeated in the command line. Note that the shell expands the pattern if it is not quoted. Hence to exclude all hidden files in the diff'd trees:

diff -rupN -x '.*' ./original ./new > original.patch

The only Musca in the otherwise good Swiss ointment is a lack of support for the GCC -Wno-long-double option. Hence we encounter:

cc1: error: unrecognized command line option "-Wno-long-double">

There is a note on this here.

Workaround is simply to grep the CINT folder and remove the offender. A Successful build should follow.

Once built we only need to export the following (note that on OS X we must export DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH as opposed to LD_LIBRARY_PATH as listed in setenv.sh ).

The title and description settings for an iPhoto image in iPhoto 08 can be modified using the information explorer in the bottom left hand corner of the app window.

The explorer can be toggled on and off using the blue i button.

If you are scripting iPhoto the information title is presented as the title property of the photo object. The information description on the other hand is available as the comment property.

Wanting to provide networked Time Machine backups for a number of macs I decide to try the Iomega StorCenter ix2-200d. This has a wide feature set and a low entry price. Of course, you can build your self a FreeNAS based system that will offer much of the same functionality but the automatic support for Time Machine is what did it for me.

The Apple open source site at http://www.opensource.apple.com has a fantastic browsable repository of open source OS X components. Notables are (check for more recent versions on the source site):

libc - C libraries including stdlib

xnu - the base OS X kernel

objc4 - the objective-C runtime