First, to access a shared printer on another machine, you have to turn on print sharing on your machine. This defies all logic, but there you go.

Second, for some utterly inscrutable reason Apple decided to *dis*able the CUPS browsing protocol, leaving only Bonjour browsing working. ???? Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. It’s as if they said “let’s make sure Mac users will have lots of trouble printing to Linux servers, that’ll improve our customer satisfaction!” To fix this lameness, do the following:

Combining these two tips, the shared printer finally appeared in the “Default” pane of the new printer dialog and printing to it just worked. Hopefully Apple makes this more sensible in Snow Leopard…

Remappable Modifier Keys


Remap modifiers such as control and caps lock to be super elite.

Who knew that remapping modifier keys required Advanced Technology?

Now I've got to upgrade! I mean, uControl is nice and all, and it's made life under OS X bearable, but it's a bit on the flaky side. The caps-lock LED continues to turn on and off even when caps-lock is changed to another key. Also, caps-lock-clicking on links in Safari does different things depending on the state of the button, despite the fact that it's now supposed to be stateless.

Please, oh please, Apple, don't screw this up! Give us a way to remap modifier keys arbitrarily, not just a “swap caps-lock and control” checkbox. In OS X it's handier to have caps-lock be command, since that's the main modifier key for most keyboard shortcuts.

On a more serious note, it's nice to see that the basic unix command line utilities like mv, cp, and tar will actually finally work reliably in Tiger. Up until now, moving a file using mv would cause its resource fork to be lost, potentially ruining it. Pretty shameful for an OS claiming to be “Based on UNIX“.]]> http://www.n8gray.org/blog/2005/04/14/keybindings-4-evah/feed/ 0 http://www.n8gray.org/blog/2004/08/27/yet-again-keybindings/ http://www.n8gray.org/blog/2004/08/27/yet-again-keybindings/#comments Fri, 27 Aug 2004 14:00:00 +0000 n8 http://www.n8gray.org/sandbox/wordpress/?p=72 I thought I would finish out the “keybindings trilogy” with these additional bindings that I use:

    /* Page up/down should move the cursor, not just scroll */
    "\UF72C"    = "pageUp:";
    "\UF72D"    = "pageDown:";

    /* Cmd+Left/Right for next/prev word */
    "@\UF702"   = "moveWordLeft:";
    "@\UF703"   = "moveWordRight:";

    "~-"        = "selectWord:";    /* Alt-Minus */

Enjoy!

Luckily, Lucky Software has written a plugin for the color picker (who knew that
there were such things??) that provides this functionality. It can display the
numerical representation of your colors in a variety of formats, including
#rrggbb, #rgb, rgb(%r, %g, %b), and rgb(rrr,ggg,bbb). It will also tell you if
a color is “web safe.” I think the only thing conceivably missing in this
little plugin is the ability to display values in HSV and CMYK color spaces,
but that's understandable since it was designed for the web, where RGB is king.

You can get HexColorPicker at http://www.luckysoftware.dk/hexcolorpicker.php

Another interesting color picker plugin can be found here.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" 
 "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
        <key>ProductBuildVersion</key>
        <string>7F44</string>
        <key>ProductCopyright</key>
        <string>Apple Computer, Inc. 1983-2004</string>
        <key>ProductName</key>
        <string>Mac OS X</string>
        <key>ProductUserVisibleVersion</key>
        <string>10.3.3</string>
        <key>ProductVersion</key>
        <string>10.3.3</string>
</dict>
</plist>

It might be fun to try tweaking this the next time Apple ties an app to the system version like they did with X11.

Also, see this entry at
CocoaDev for more detailed information
about this file.

First you need to make a subdirectory called KeyBindings in your ~/Library directory. Next, use your favorite text editor to create a file in that directory named DefaultKeyBinding.dict containing this text:

{
    "\UF729"  = "moveToBeginningOfLine:";                   /* Home */
    "\UF72B"  = "moveToEndOfLine:";                         /* End */
    "$\UF729" = "moveToBeginningOfLineAndModifySelection:"; /* Shift-Home */
    "$\UF72B" = "moveToEndOfLineAndModifySelection:";       /* Shift-End */
}

Restart any Cocoa apps (Safari, Mail, or TextEdit) to see the new keybindings take effect!

For more info on this method of binding keys see this OS X hint and this Apple document. The commands like moveToEndOfLine: are actually “Action methods” of the NSResponder Cocoa class.

The first step was to build a cross-compiling version of gnu bintools for x86. We're generating assembly code and using gnu as to assemble it, so I
would be needing a version that could generate x86-elf executables. Happily,
this was pretty straightforward:

  $ ./configure --target=i586-unknown-linux-gnu --prefix=/usr/local/xcomp -v
  $ make all
  $ sudo make install

I could now build little-endian x86 binaries from asm programs like the one in
the Linux Assembly
HOWTO.

The next step was to get an x86 emulator. Bochs is the economical, open-source
choice here. There are other commercial emulators like Virtual PC that are much
faster, but I just need to be able to try out tiny compiler test programs –
performance is not important, and money is.

Setting up Bochs wasn't too tough, but their bochs.scpt had a bug in it that
kept it from working. I ended up just running
bochs.app/Contents/MacOS/bochs manually to launch the emulator.

So now I could build Linux x86 binaries and I could run Linux x86 binaries. The
only issue remaining was getting the binaries into the emulator. What I mean is
that the emulator uses a Linux ext2 filesystem inside a disk image as its
virtual hard drive. If I want to run something on the emulator I have to get it
onto that hard drive (or some other drive that the emulator can access).
Unfortunately, OS X doesn't have built-in support for ext2 filesystems.
Fortunately, somebody
else provides it.

So I downloaded ExtFSManager, installed it and rebooted. Unfortunately, I
still couldn't mount the ext2 disk images I wanted to use. When I tried
open hd10meg.img I would get an error complaining that the image
had no mountable filesystems. Under linux I would have tried mounting the image
to a loopback device and then investigating further. After some research I
discovered that the way to do this under OS X is: hdid -nomount hd10meg.img This mounts the image as a device (e.g. /dev/disk1) without
attempting to mount any of the filesystems on the image.

So now I had hd10meg.img mounted on /dev/disk1. It turns out that I just needed
to fsck a partition on the filesystem to get it to mount correctly with open:

  $ sudo fsck_ext2 /dev/disk1s1    # The second partition of disk 1
  . . .
  $ hdiutil eject /dev/disk1
  $ open hd10meg.img    # everything works fine now...

Voilla! Now I can mount the disk image and copy files to and from it. Next I'm
hoping to figure out a way to be able to copy files in and out of a running
emulator. It seems that just copying files into the mounted image while the
emulator is running doesn't work. I'll have to set up networking or use virtual
floppies or something. But that's work for another day. ]]> http://www.n8gray.org/blog/2004/04/04/a-low-performance-x86-linux-emulation-and-cross-development-environment-on-os-x/feed/ 0