A good site for options ?

http://www.onmadera.com/

Stickies are awesome

I looked at Stickies once when I got my Mac, but didn't really use them a lot. Now that I'm finally doing a lot of design stuff at work, I need some way to quickly jot down my ideas so I can discuss them later with my team. I used to open up text files previously, but then I had to remember where I saved those and always had to come up with names. I tried Outlook's notes on Windows but again, I tend to not look at them. Stickies are perfect. They stick on my screen like these blaringly colored Post-Its so they are always on my mind. And I never have to save them since I rarely shutdown my Mac anyway.

SSH Configuration

I had a really tough time while trying to SSH to my Linux machine at
work which is running my company's custom version of Debian Woody. It
always died with an error saying "Permission denied (publickey).". I
tried all the usual things like cleaning up known_hosts, creating a new
key, etc, but nothing seemed to work.

Finally looking closely at the known_hosts file, I saw a DSA key for my
Linux machine there. Looks like that key of bad ... but the more
interesting thing was that my Mac was using protocol version 2 by
default. A quick change to /etc/ssh_config did the trick. I simply
added Protocol 1,2 to it and everything was fine. I could have tried
creating a DSA key myself, but I use protocol version 1 everywhere else
and didn't want to create a second key.

resolv.conf issues

I had a tough time dealing with network issues for the past couple of
days. I usually like a few different search fields in my resolv.conf so
I can connect to my regular servers without typing the FQDN. So, I
wrote a cron job that runs every minute as root and updates
/etc/resolv.conf, which works so well on my Linux machine.

It worked well on my Mac too .... till I went home and connected to my
wireless network at home. resolv.conf refused to update itself to
whatever network I connected and I had to manually change it to the
Comcast domain and nameserver. Same thing when I returned to office
today, it still had the Comcast information.

Searching on the web didn't get me good leads till I was persistent.
One article mentioned something about /var/run/resolv.conf which made
my error clear. When I connect to a different network, lookupd seems to
update /var/run/resolv.conf and /etc/resolv.conf was just a link to
this file. I broke that link and broke my network preferences. Just
repairing that link solved my problem.

I'll have to think of a more intelligent way to write my cron script
... maybe update /var/run/resolv.conf, but for now I'm all set.

Keywords : DHCP, nameserver, domain, resolv.conf

Backspace and Delete

Reading the forums on Mac
Rumors I finally figured out how to delete on a Mac. The delete key
basically does the Windows equivalent of backspace. To actually do the
delete, you need to do Fn{delete}.

Space versus Enter

Navigating forms on a Mac definitely needs some learning. For example,
I typed something in TextEdit and then hit CMD-W to close the window.
It pops us the standard dialog asking me to either Don't Save, Cancel
or Save. I can use the tab key or the cursor keys to move between the
options. But, it's always the default one - Save - that stays
highlighted. Navigating to others just gives them a blue border. Then,
I realized that hitting Enter always selects the default option, no
matter what is currently selected. To actually perform the action that
you have selected, you need to hit the spacebar. This is completely
different from what happens on Windows.

Using Camino

I never tried Safari and didn't want to use IE on a Mac so I was going
along with FireFox till now. That's the browser I use on my Windows and
Linux boxes and it was nice to see the familiar interface wherever I
surfed. But what kept bugging me was that I could not navigate web
forms in FireFox by using just the tab key on Mac. When you hit tabs,
FireFox only jumps between the input text boxes in the form. It won't
select dropdowns, checkboxes, radiobuttons, etc and I had to use my
mouse to select those. I hated doing that because for some of the
sites, I'm so used to navigating just by the tab key.

Enter Camino. I had dismissed this earlier because it's still 0.8 and
didn't seem any different from FireFox. But now I realize it does
understand all the other inputs also. Plus, now that I'm getting used
to the Mac interface look-and-feel, Camino looks better since it has a
native Mac UI. The really sad part is that it doesn't support
extensions as yet so I've lost my darling Google bar. The built-in one
works just as great but I don't like how it's banished to one corner
and I can't do quick searches for the words in the page.

Hopefully they come up with Version 1.0 soon.

Eudora Sucks on a Mac

Strong words, but that has been my experience. I started with Mac Mail,
decided that I should stick to my regular Eudora (which I've used on
Windows ever since I got a POP enabled email address), but have gone
back to Mail now.

The Eudora Mac interface sucks big time. The fonts look weird. Even if
I select the same viewing font in Eudora that I did in Mail, it looks
really odd there. And what's up with that <snip> thing it does in
the preview window ? OK ... maybe it's good, but I have to double click
every-time I have to follow a thread. There should be an option of
turning it off. I can turn it off by saying 'None' for the compact
options, but then it starts spitting out email headers also !!! Also,
if I double click and open a message, it selects everything by default
so a single key stroke just deletes the whole content and I have to do
a CMD-Z to get it back.

So, I finally made the decision to say goodbye to Eudora (which has
really served me so well so far on Windows). The ads in the sponsored
mode are a bit more intrusive on a Mac compared to Windows, since the
ad window is floating, and that was another reason. Mac Mail is free
and has everything I want.