Recently in OS X Category

The package "Glossaries" (the package is found here) is a nice one. You can easily make multiple glossaries and you can also use it to manage your acronyms and abbreviations. Some really nice features, like that the acronym is written on the first appearing out and given in brackets the abbreviation and subsequently appears only abbreviated, have convinced me to use this package. It is also already installed by default in the MacTex-Distribution

Well the only problem ist, that you need some patience to try out the different configurations when you use it the first time. So I have looked around and found some help on the blog of MedienPeter.
By the way: If you are looking for templates or tutorials for a thesis or something like this, I recently stumbled upon an entry on the blog of Philippe Niquille.

But now back to the configuration options and the packages you need to use "Glossaries" in your LaTeX-Document.

The management of a database is most of the time, just a routine task. The responsible has to monitor most of the time the database, its transactions, the backups and the server capacity. Sometimes one needs to correct something or just look up a query and ... There are many exceptional scenarios. My focus in this small report is on the beginning and the end of the life cycle of a database: Designing the tables (and testing it) as well as migrating a database (to a new release for example).

Coming from the web design/development the tools I want to use should fulfill some requirements:

  • Support MySQL and SQL (at least)
  • Support remote connections (ideally with SSH)
  • Run on Mac OS X
  • Cost nothing (at least if I do not use the tool on a regular basis)

On the basis of this selection criteria I have found two free tools. One of the do I use now on a regular basis, the other one is not that great (yet) and I do not use it any more.

After using long time version 7.03 of the Lotus Notes Client for OS X, I have now switched in a first try to the 8.5 Public Beta 2 version, hoping that Notes would have improved.

LN_85Beta_Loading.pngI was positively surprised at the first glance. The application became quicker than the old one. Although after a few starts, I had to realise, that the most caching and loading is now done at startup. You see a nice screen at the startup, which tells you now, that Notes is doing something and not freezing. But compared with other programs, which use a lot of memory (such as Adobe Photoshop), the startup process is within the limits.

Today I had a look at my system.log of my MacBook Pro. There I had to face a bad surprise. A program from Smithmicro, the famous vendor of StuffIt, which I had installed months ago and have already uninstalled, causes big trouble on my system. Somewhere in the launchd, so syslog has reported, is an agent, which calls a folder (and certainly the program in it), that does not exist anymore.

My first idea was to somehow destroy this program using the Terminal of OS X, since I have some experience with command line tools from my Debian-server. But you can not call launchd directly, it has just the option to call it in the debug modus, which I did not want, since I knew the problem.

A quick search with Google revealed the tool Lingon in the macosxhints forum.

LingonScreen.png


The program is quite small and thus easy to download. After unzipping you can directly used it. For the usual security issues/protection within OS X you will be asked to enter your administration password, since launchd is a system daemon and requires root right.

You can now edit your launchd configuration, with adding new services (or agents, as they are called in Lingon), plists and so on. When you have selected one agent, you can reveal it via the "File > Show in Finder"-option.
This is how I found my old entries really fast and deleted them. Just to say it here, that is not the way to do it safely. Make a backup of your file first. But since I have a complete Time Machine Backup every day of my system I have decided to do it the quick and dirty way...