Inner Solace

How to Reblog Yourself

If you want to reblog yourself:

1. Copy this link into your address bar: http://tmv.proto.jp/reblog.php?post_url=
2. Append the link of the post you want to reblog
3. Hit enter

(via suitep)

HOWTO: Get Legible Colours in Terminal on OSX

I posted a while ago about how to get a nice legible colour scheme in Terminal on OSX Leopard.  This worked a treat, but due to some testing and compatibility issues for work, I had to upgrade to Snow Leopard.  I was delaying this upgrade because I had OSX set up Just So and was too lazy to have to go through that rigmarole again.

Unfortunately the hack that was suggested on this site doesn’t work quite right with Snow Leopard and the linked update to this site also doesn’t work quite right (for me anyway).  Piecing together some of the comments though, I managed to get it working again with this process:

1. Install SIMBL-0.9.7a from the SIMBL site.  The 0.9.7a version will work with 64-bit as well as 32-bit.
2. Download this 64-bit TerminalColors.bundle.
3. Copy the .bundle file to ~/Library/Application Support/SIMBL/Plugins.  You will most likely have to create this directory yourself.
4. Start Terminal and with luck your colour schemes will just work again.

Notes:

• If this doesn’t work, shut down Terminal and run the SIMBL uninstaller then do steps 1-3 using Finder instead.  It’s less convenient, but I couldn’t get this working by using and restarting Terminal as I needed it.  YMMV.
• If this doesn’t work you might also have to sudo chmod a+rx /Library/ScriptingAdditions.  To be quite honest, I’m not sure if I actually needed to change the perms on this directory, but it was one of those things I did just in case because nothing else was working.

HOWTO: IE Testing on OSX

Most frustrating thing ever: Trying to do cross-browser compatibility testing for Internet Explorer when you primarily develop on OSX.

If you want to do cross-browser testing for multiple versions of IE without having to create your own multiple installs of Windows for Bootcamp/Fusion/other, weird emulator hacks or inconsistent ‘compatibility’ modes, or remoting into several different boxes, then you will want to see this.

Microsoft provides a number of Virtual PC hard disk images of the different versions of IE on different versions of Windows that you can use for just such a purpose.  This is awesome.  Except for the following:

1. Virtual PC isn’t supported on Intel Macs only PowerPC.
2. The latest release of updated VPC images ceases to work on anything other than VPC (eg. VMWare Fusion, Parallels, VirtualBox…) because it now detects ‘hardware’ changes and demands that you reactivate your copy of Windows. In addition, the EULA of these says you’re not supposed to be using it on anything other than Microsoft Virtual PC anyway (more on this).

And for crazy people like me who were desperate enough to consider running VPC on a Windows emulator to run the virtual machines (meta meta meta), apparently that causes a whole other world of pain.

Anyway, after much digging I found someone who had figured this out!  Hurray! And it works. MFYAY!  It’s not the simplest solution, but it works. Which is what is important.

You will want to follow this article by Andrew Odri with the following changes:

1. Skip the stuff about The Unarchiver.  You need to extract the files from the image exe files, but you can do that by running your unarchiver of preference on that file. StuffIt Expander happily does it, but if your unarchiver doesn’t like .exe, rename it to .rar and try again.
2. In Step 6 where you have to run qemu-img, that’s two separate commands.  It’s the qemu-img command, and there’s a VBoxManage command.  It’s not one long command that wraps across two lines.  You probably didn’t need this instruction, but I’m silly that way.
3. Read this guy’s comment about stuff to do before Step 7 and 7.9 to get around the activation problem. That link he provided doesn’t work any more, so you’ll have to figure that one out yourself.  But you don’t have to burn it to a CD to mount it, just create an ISO (using these instructions by Jon Todd), and mount that as a CD/DVD image in VirtualBox.

Extra Notes:

I had attempted to import the image into VMWare Fusion (using the built in importer) to begin with, but the imported and converted VPC image kept blue-screening which is why I ended up having to use this method with VirtualBox.  These instructions may still work using VMWare Fusion if you use qemu to convert the image, but I can’t confirm.