Miscellaneous bits of information worth keeping track of for reference. (remind me to add some kind of search feature here)
Latest entries:
date information side info
2007-08-01 To tweak the speed at which sheets appear in windows (for such things as saving/opening files, etc), season to taste the following at the command line: 
defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSWindowResizeTime .1
2007-07-23 To kill/restart the menu bar, kill the process Id for SystemUIServer
2007-07-19 To enable the Safari debug menu: 
defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1
2007-03-28 Ran across this over on Mac OS X Things (http://face.centosprime.com/macosxw/?p=171) but wanted to also have another location for it on the web. All credit goes to Bob Ippolito who has made my Pythoning life much better with this tip. To get Python to work with readline, hence allowing the up/down arrows in the interpreter to work, among other things, just type in this gem at the command-line: 
           python `python -c “import pimp; print pimp.__file__”` -i readline
Mac OS X 10.4.9 (Tiger)
Python 2.3.5
2006-06-03 For some reason, I notice that some percentage of downloaded files have a false compression extension on them. An example would be a file that downloads as SomeFile.dmg.gz, but it can't seemingly be opened. A trick that works way more often than I think it should is to just snip off the last suffix. So, in this example, rename the file SomeFile.dmg, and it very well may open correctly. This must be a common problem that some websites have in their work flow when they ready a file for download.
2006-02-18 When using an external display, the relative positions of the two monitors can be incorrectly re-set when one disconnects then reconnects the display. This is avoided by remembering whether you disconnected the external display while in sleep mode or while it was awake. However you did it to begin with, do it the same way to reconnect. Disconnecting while awake, then reconnecting while the machine is asleep, for example, will re-set the display arrangement to a default and probably incorrect setting. Mac OS X 10.4.x
Displays Preference Pane 2.1.1
2005-07-19 In order to build MySQL-python-0.9.0 from source (in order to build ZMySQLDA-2.0.8 for Zope 2.7 — the files are available for direct download, if these changes are ok with you)...

The setup.py file needed the following change to find the correct mysql libraries (this will vary in general) 
	elif os.name == "posix": # most Linux/UNIX platforms
		include_dirs = ['/usr/include/mysql']
		library_dirs = ['/usr/lib/mysql']
had to become: 
	elif os.name == "posix": # most Linux/UNIX platforms
		include_dirs = ['/usr/local/mysql/include']
		library_dirs = ['/usr/local/mysql/lib']
Then, I had to modify the _mysql.c file by changing:

on line 191, that begins: 
	static char _mysql_connect__doc__[] =
I had to take out all end-of-line "\" characters and return characters (so that it's just one long line of text in quotes after the equals sign).

on line 764: 
	if (_PyTuple_Resize(r, i, 0) == -1) goto error;
becomes 
	if (_PyTuple_Resize(r, i) == -1) goto error;
on line 1052: 
	r = mysql_shutdown(&(self->connection));
becomes 
	r = mysql_shutdown(&(self->connection), SHUTDOWN_DEFAULT);
After all that, it builds with the two commands: 
python setup.py build
python setup.py install
 Mac OS X 10.4.2
Python 2.3.5 (default)
MySQL 4.1.8 (package)
2005-02-22 PHP/zlib note. It appears that putting 
zlib.output_compression = On
in your php.ini file is going to work fine for pages which are pure PHP pages, BUT will produce garbage if you try tricks like including a php page using a server-side include directive: 
<!--#include virtual="something.php"-->
 OS X Server 10.3.8
PHP 4.3.10
Apache 1.3.33
2005-02-18 If the Terminal window starts producing jibberish, because of some strange character code sent to it, just head up to the menu and select File->Send Reset, or simply hit command-R. Terminal v1.4.4
OS X 10.3.8
2005-01-04 I couldn't get my first test project of PyObjC to work in Xcode just now (just tried build and run without modifying any code on a fresh Python Cocoa application project). It broke with the error (among others) of: "ImportError: No module named PyObjCTools". Looking into the info.plist file, I saw the following: 
<array>
	<string>@executable_path/../Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.3/Python</string>
	<string>~/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.3/Python</string>
	/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.3/Python</string>
	<string>/Network/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.3/Python</string>
	<string>/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.3/Python</string>
	<string>/sw/lib/libpython2.3.dylib</string>
</array>
which I changed to this to stop Xcode for looking for the wrong version of Python: 
<array>
	<string>@executable_path/../Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.3/Python</string>
	<string>/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.3/Python</string>
</array>
Save, build-n-run, everything works fine now.		 OS X 10.3.7
Xcode 1.5
PyObjC 1.2 (for 10.3)
2004-10-25 Forget trying to manually fix the PEAR installation. Just type "curl http://go-pear.org | php" (although you may have to try "curl http://go-pear.org | sudo php" if it complains about not being able to create a directory, and if that also complains about sudo, do a quick authentication by typing "sudo ls" first). Takes about twenty seconds. Mac OS X 10.3.5
Client machine
2004-07-14 When running a dual monitor set-up with the monitors arranged one on top of the other, stickies can get "stuck" only being able to be seen on the lower monitor. If the external monitor is the upper one and you disconnect it, you can't get to the stickie notes. However, arranging the the monitors side-by-side, but with one monitor much lower than the other, provides a way to slide the lower stickie notes from one monitor to the other and then to the upper screen. What a pain, but it works. OS X 10.3.4
Stickies 4.2
2004-07-10 I noticed on my laptop that MySQL stopped running, and the *.err file gave me this note: "Can't start server : Bind on unix socket: Permission denied". The problem was that the /tmp directory's permissions were too restrictive. I did run a permission fix using Disk Utility the other day, and it seems to correspond to when the logs say that MySQL stopped running, so I think it reset /tmp to the wrong settings (yikes!). At any rate, I gave /tmp the ol' 
	chmod a+rwx /tmp
and now all is well. should it be a+rwxt ? Not sure.		 OS X 10.3.4
MySQL 4.0.15
Disk Utility 10.4.2
2004-06-23 When importing into mysql from a client's database dump, I ran into an error complaining that mysql got a packet bigger than 'max_allowed_packet'. It was caused by the default max packet size being set to 1M. I fixed this issue by going into mysql at the command line and typing: 
SET GLOBAL max_allowed_packet = 16 * 1024 * 1024;
(good reference)		 MySQL v4.0.15
OS X 10.3.4
2004-06-05 To change a project name in Xcode, set all of the following fields to the new executable name in the Target's Info panel:
  1. General -> Name
  2. Build -> Product Name
  3. Properties -> Executable
 Xcode 1.2
OS X 10.3.4
2004-05-03 To get newlisp-tk to work, I had to switch to zsh at the command line to get the wish shell to start up properly. Seems to be a problem with setting environmental variables. 10.3.3
newlisp 8.0.2