Chris Degiere and Associates

Note the syntax for ip aliasing is slightly different for OS X than other flavors of UNIX. It’s not just for OS X Server though. Following these guidelines I was able to configure a Mac Mini running OS X (Not OS X Server) in a similar fashion.

If you need multiple ip addresses for development or are just a UNIX hacker looking to see how this works under OS X give it a shot:

• Mac OS X Server 10.0: How to Set up Multiple IP Addresses on a Single Network Interface
• For other UNIX flavors

Oh Firefox, how I love thee. If only you launched a little faster on OS X. But I can’t quit you. Why? Add-ons!

del.icio.us Bookmarks - tag your bookmarks, access them anywhere, share with your friends.
Firebug - indispensable inline DOM visualization, and much more.
Web Developer - a ton of handy page hacking tools.
Aardvark - quickly clean a page up before printing
DownThemAll! - download accelerator and easily fetch all embedded links of a given file type in one go.
Fasterfox - page render time, network speed tweaks, and pre-fetching.
iMacros - page scripting, automation, testing, etc.

Subversion is the defacto open source source version control system these days and a great improvement over cvs. It’s also a steal at the ripe price of free.

Great (and also free) documentation is available here: Version Control with Subversion.

To use any subversion repository you will need to install the client. For OS X, I wouldn’t recommend using Fink but rather downloading a pre-compiled binary, they are more up to date. Binaries for OS X are available here: partners.open.collab.net/apple.html

For eclipse, there’s a handy plugin called Subclipse.

For small projects or distributed development teams not looking to manage their own subversion server: unfuddle.com has a great hosted solution and an integrated milestone and ticketing system.

Lifehacker has a nice list of helpful web applications and some suggestions for managing your distributed workplace.

Check out: Geek to Live: Essential tools for the placeless office

I’m employing a lot of these tactics but there are definitely a few new gems in there that I will undoubtedly give a try! My favorite is having everyone subscribe to a shared del.icio.us rss feed. Great idea.

Red5 is an Open Source Flash Server written in Java. Here’s a collection of links into the Red5 site:

Main:
osflash.org/red5

Download:
www.osflash.org/red5/red5downloads

Installation requires Ant 1.6.2 and JDK 1.5 or higher. I installed mine in ~/Library/Red5 (OS X). Run Red5.app and open ~/Library/Red5/swf/DEV_Deploy/index.html in your web browser to try the demos.

Places to start:

Review the FAQ and *.txt files in the installation directory
Help: osflash.org/red5/help
Tutorials: osflash.org/tutorials
API: dl.fancycode.com/red5/api/
Wiki: jira.red5.org/confluence/dashboard.action

There’s a great article over at the server side about Spring as the new Java EE.

I favored Spring and Hibernate over the more widely sanctioned Struts and EJB combo a long time ago. It’s always nice to see I’m not the only one embracing change and the article covers nicely similar transitions in the Java conference space.

Despite course titles like: Embracing the Standard: Migrating a Spring/Hibernate Application to Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) 5, there was a lot of Spring sessions at Java One this year. Appropriate timing by The Server Side and a good read.

I let OS X handle downloading and installing the latest JDK via System Preferences -> Software Update. Some Java software require that JAVA_HOME be explicitly set, so where should it point?

From various recommendations, this seems to be the cleanest:

OS X 10.4.9 uses the bash shell so add this line to your ~/.bash_profile file:
export JAVA_HOME=/Library/Java/Home/
You can see that this is just a symbolic link to the latest installed JDK:
chris:~ degiere$ ls -l $JAVA_HOME
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 24 Apr 1 23:46 /Library/Java/Home/ -> Versions/CurrentJDK/Home

Whenever the JDK is updated, your JAVA_HOME will be updated.

Having somewhat recently migrated to OS X, I’ve decided to move from Thunderbird to OS X’s built in Mail.app for it’s OS integration features.

One nice thing about Thunderbird is it’s plugin architecture. Here’s a seriously exhaustive list of plugins for Apple’s Mail.app that might even surpass that of Thunderbird: Apple Mail Plug-ins and Tools.

The one’s I found most useful: Letterbox and MailTags. Mail away!

Some of you using Windows XP and OS X in the same environment may have encountered this. In order to have a Mac and PC both able to write to an external USB drive, the disk must be formatted Fat32. Windows XP will not let you format a Fat32 disk larger than 32GB as one partition.

The easiest way to overcome this Windows XP shortcoming is to use OS X to format the drive. If you run Disk Utility, choose your external USB disk on the left and select the Erase tab at the top. There is a Volume Format choice: ‘MS-DOS File System’. Choose this and erase your disk and it will format the whole disk as one partition and be readable and writable by both OS X and Windows XP.

This seems obvious to me now but a few web searches sent me in the wrong direction with third party DOS applications on Windows and unnecessary UNIX commands on the Mac side.

I’m a big fan of David Allen’s Getting Things Done style of productivity jamming. It helps me finish what I start. That’s a good thing. I also love tinkering with software. Sometimes that’s not a good thing. I’ve tried a million different web and desktop applications for organizing my stuff, probably to the detriment of actually getting stuff done.

This latest find however definitely requires mention. Cue iGTD for Mac OS X. Simple elegant organizational software makes my obsessive brain sing. Well documented online, but simple enough not to need it. Also excellent iCal integration.

Give it a try and maybe you’ll get more things done:

• iGTD: Powerful GTD-like organizer for Mac
• Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity