Monday March 21, 2005 Markdown & Humane Text Service
It seems that I've been missing out doing clever stuff with my Mac. Most recently I've been reading 43 Folders, a site dedicated to "Getting Things Done", but largely, for me, a great resource of tips and tricks for "productivity toys" on the Mac.
Most recently, I've been introduced to:
Now, I couldn't see what the fuss was about. At first. Mostly because I couldn't actually get the damn thing to work.
In order to get it to work, I followed the instructions for Humane Text Service, then:
- went to ~/Library/Services/HumaneText.service/Contents/Resources
- rm forward
- ln -s Markdown.pl forward
And, suddenly, everything worked.
The beauty of it all is that you can write plain English (with a few syntax quirks), and the whole thing is completely readable. In fact, this blog entry is being written in Markdown format and is totally readable. At least, as readable as anything else I write!
The beauty of it is that it plugs into any Mac app that supports services, so I can type away in Markdown inside a textarea in Safari or Firefox, then hit convert text->html ( Cmd-{ ), and voila, I have nicely formatted HTML. Now, for most applications, I don't really need it, but it does mean that I can easily write documents in plain english for any media...
Posted by ajt [Mac] ( March 21, 2005 10:59 PM ) Permalink | Comments [3]
Friday February 25, 2005 Well, Rosie & I have just come back from a couple of days in Florence. A surprise trip that ended up not being a surprise because her passport had expired... However, I did manage to keep the purpose for the trip secret : to buy our wedding rings on the Ponte Vecchio.
All was going to plan until we went into the first goldsmiths, and the woman behind the counter extinguished her cigarette (!) and spoke in a broad Brummie* accent! There was just no way I was going to go all the way to Italy only to buy our wedding rings from a bloody brummie. No matter how nice the rings were.
So we went to the next shop, to be greeted by someone who was probably South African or something. But much better looking than the woman in the first shop. And not a Brummie. So that was OK. :-)
On the upside, though, Florence was, as ever, beautiful. Even in the cold. Especially in the cold, actually. You could actually walk around the streets without being forced to get overly friendly and sweaty with throngs of tourists (isn't it odd how no-one seems to categorise themselves as being the same as all the other tourists? Or am I wrong?). I've never been there in the winter before - whenever I've been before it's been just the wrong time to be there.
Pics can be found here
For those of you lucky people who don't know what a Brummie is, it's one who originates from Birmingham, or the West Midlands, and has what has to be the worst accent on earth. Imagine the most whiny voice you can think of. And multiply it by a hangover, and you get the idea.
Posted by ajt [General] ( February 25, 2005 10:36 PM ) Permalink |
Friday November 05, 2004 I've played with jEdit, gVim, Emacs, HyperEdit, BBEdit, and various others - all the usual culprits that UNIX people would fight a corner for - but none of them have quite managed to be just right. The traditional UNIX ones, like vi/vim/gvim and emacs, whilst being great editors, and being what I've been brought up on, just don't fit in in the Mac environment - they're just too un-Maccy! :-) (and yes, curiously, I'm agnostic in the vi/emacs sphere - I use them both)
---Shameless Plug---
However, I recently got pointed at one called TextMate, which seems to have a great deal of the functionality that one gets from jEdit, whilst being native OS X. Highly recommended - the best feature is it's project sidebar, which is great for working on several files : where other project sidebars (like in jEdit) are able to list all files, I've not seen any that allow you to create pseudo-folders, so you can group all files relating to a particular part of the project together.
Get it from MacroMates.
---Shameless Plug---
Posted by ajt [Mac] ( November 05, 2004 04:37 PM ) Permalink Comments [1]
Thursday October 21, 2004 Setting up virus/spam free e-mail at home
By the fact that you're reading blogs.sun.com (note the arrogant assumption that someone might actually be reading this blog), you're probably an enlightened person who run an OS that's less vulnerable (or, at least, less targetted) to viruses. But, how do you handle spam? What do you do, if, like me, your other half runs Windows and uses Outlook - and their company policy (ok, it's a school, she's a teacher) is only to upgrade virus defs every now and then?Well, obviously you could go down the line of setting up SunONE Mail Server, but that's overkill for home, surely? (Especially on my poor little Ultra 5 with only 64Mb RAM) Well, how about just using a standard sendmail installation?
I've got an Ultra 5 sat in the loft (but this could apply equally to Linux), which sucks down mail from all her accounts, and all my accounts (not Sun, obviously!) via fetchmail, runs it through 2 virus checkers, and spamassassin, then delivers to our relevant mailboxes - in her case, local to the Ultra 5 (served via IMAP), for me, to gmail.com. All this is done by using a little bit of perl, called MailScanner, developed originally by Julian Field of Southampton University.
MailScanner works very simply - it's a perl binary that sits and scans your mail queue dir (you set sendmail to queue only), picks up each mail and scans it through whatever progs you configure, then delivers the mail. I've chosen to use clamav and f-prot virus scanners - each of them updating thrice daily out of cron - and spamassassin.
Since I installed this about 12 months ago, we've not had (touch wood) a single virus - the system is rejecting about 10 a day, largely because Rosie gives out her e-mail address to some students, who, presumably, have virus infected machines. The amount of spam that I get has gone down from around 50 per day to 2-3 a day.
Well worth trying.
Posted by ajt [General] ( October 21, 2004 11:08 AM ) Permalink |
But, and keep this very quiet, I have a confession to make. I took out Rosie's DSLR (Canon 300D) at the weekend. And, despite finding the viewfinder incredibly small (I was using the Mamiya at the sametime), quite enjoyed it, and got some reasonably good results with it.
Blasphemy! I feel somehow dirty,tainted.
Perhaps I'd best go take a shower.
Posted by ajt [Photography] ( October 21, 2004 12:58 AM ) Permalink Comments [2]
The default browser on the Mac is Safari, which is great. Except it's very keen on caching, or seems to be. Which, when you're doing web page development, is a pain in the thing you sit on (no, not the chair!).
So I decided to try out other browsers. Camino, from the Mozilla folks. Great browser, happy with this. Until I notice a random extra flashing cursor in all my pages. That can't be right... So I've tracked this down to a text input field "showing through" from a different tab - if, say, I'm composing a mail in google mail, and switch to a new tab, the wretched flashing cursor from the compose box is still showing in this new tab!
So, next stop, Firefox, being a Mozilla fan. Now, Firefox doesn't, unlike every other Mac browser, understand about the location based proxy settings that MacOS X has - it expects you to set your own proxy settings. A pain, when you're moving between work and home.
Opera? Doesn't work with gmail.
Omniweb? Doesn't work with gmail.
So I find myself in this limbo state of constantly switching between 3 different browsers - I really want to use Camino, but this flashing cursor just irritates the hell out of me :-(
Posted by ajt [Mac] ( October 21, 2004 12:53 AM ) Permalink | Comments [2]
I've been hunting round on the net for quick and easy ways to knock up a prototype DB and data entry system.
I've stumbled across DBDesigner4 for Windows/Linux, from FabForce, which is excellent for doing the relational database bit, and JaneBuilder for the Mac, which features something that is randomly called AutoJane - for some reason I think of Austin Powers style FemmeBots at this point, but that's a whole other story that I probably shouldn't tell anyone.
The Auto-Janes (femmebots, go away!) basically go like this:1. Select : New Record Auto-Jane
2. Connect to DB
3. Select table you want to populate.
4. Select fields you want to populate and setup what sort of HTML inputs you want for them.
5. Click generate
And out pops a bunch of HTML and PHP for you, all very nice and quick. And nice clean HTML/PHP too - I just tacked on a one line include to pull in my site template/css, and in the space of about 30 seconds, I'd got most of my prototype written.
I heartily recommend JaneBuilder - I hope it stays free! DBDesigner 4 gets an 8/10 : great tool, doesn't run on the Mac :-(
Posted by ajt [General] ( October 21, 2004 12:46 AM ) Permalink |
Saturday September 25, 2004 First posting - singing in Winchester Cathedral
Well, I finally decided to post something to this blog. But, like many, I find it pretty intimidating being surrounding by so many clever people posting interesting stuff in their blogs. So, I thought I'd mention some of the musical stuff I've been up to recently - I run a couple of choirs down here in the New Forest area of England, and recently got to cover the services at Winchester Cathedral with my choir, Lauda. Quite an experience! 8 singers, trying to fill the vast Gothic expanse of Winchester. And the surprising thing? We managed it pretty well! Posted by ajt [Music] ( September 25, 2004 09:52 PM ) Permalink