mac-os-x

Introducing SARAH, a Mac OS X speech interaction app

SARAH ("Sarah") is a new speech recognition/interaction application, created by Alvin Alexander and devdaily.com. Sarah is:

By Alvin Alexander on June 29, 2012

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'Why is my Mac slow?' - Debug Mac networking problems

A lot of times when I'm asked to debug a Unix, Linux, or Mac OS X system, I'll hear a complaint like "The network seems slow", or just "It seems slow", followed by the usual "What is it doing?"

I actually think that last question is a wonderful one: What is this computer doing?

You can see a lot of information about Unix processes using the ps command or the top utility, but it seems like many system administrators don't know how to find networking information, at least not without a network sniffer.

By Alvin Alexander on March 5, 2013

Apache NameVirtualHost configuration using MAMP on Mac OS X

Since I can't seem to ever remember this, here are some notes on how to configure a Name Virtual Host (NameVirtualHost) on an Apache web server. In particular, this is from the httpd.conf configuration file that I use with MAMP on one of my Mac OS X development systems.

In short, as I'm developing two different applications, one named "cato" and another named "zenf", these are the important name-based virtual host lines from my Apache configuration file:

By Alvin Alexander on October 20, 2012

My Siri-like Mac speech recognition and computer interaction software

Eighteen months before Apple released their Siri software on the iPhone 4S, I found myself stranded in a motel in Dease Lake, British Columbia, and wrote a little speech recognition, text to voice, and computer interaction application. Here's a demo of how my Mac "Siri like" software application works:

By Alvin Alexander on October 20, 2012

AppleScript code to read file contents into a list (array)

I just ran into a situation where I wanted to use AppleScript to read some file contents into a list/array, and came up with the following code:

set theFile to "/Users/al/Projects/Scala/Sarah/scripts/thank_you.data"
set fileHandle to open for access theFile
set thankYous to paragraphs of (read fileHandle)
close access fileHandle

I can confirm that this code works on my Mac OS X 10.6.8 system. The variable thankYous is a list/array that contains the lines from my file.

By Alvin Alexander on October 20, 2012

Mac apps I use (late 2011 edition)

In an earlier post I wrote about Mac freeware applications, and now, as I'm still recovering from having the solid state drive (SSD) fail in my MacBook Air (MBA), I thought I'd make a list of the Mac applications I just had to reinstall on my MacBook Air.

Here then, in no particular order, is the list of Mac software applications I just reinstalled:

By Alvin Alexander on October 20, 2012

Best free Mac software (Mac freeware)

Mac freeware FAQ: Can you provide a list of the best free Mac software?

While I'm loading up some freeware on a friend's new MacBook, it hit me how much really wonderful free Mac software is available these days. Of course there are free web browsers, which everyone wants, but there are also free Mac HTML editors, mail clients, and other free Mac apps for image editing, FTP, RSS, IRC, and CD/DVD burning and ripping, and much more. You can get a lot of things done these days using only free software.

By Alvin Alexander on October 20, 2012

A sample Mac OS X Bash startup file (.bash_profile)

In case anyone needs a sample .bash_profile startup file for their Mac OS X or other Unix/Linux system, I thought I'd share my most recent version here.

By Alvin Alexander on February 28, 2013

Mac backups - handling spaces in filenames with find, tar, and xargs

This morning I decided to take a few minutes to backup all the songs I've purchased over the last half-year. These are all on my Mac OS X system, under the Music folder in my home directory.

The problem with trying to do this with standard Unix tools is that all these subdirectories and filenames have spaces in their names. Just looking at the Music folder, it contains many directory names like this:

By Alvin Alexander on October 20, 2012

TextMate - converting tabs to spaces (or not)

I finally dug into a problem with TextMate that has been driving me crazy. I always have the TextMate "soft tabs" feature enabled, and want two spaces wherever there was a tab. However, it turns out TextMate doesn't really do what I expect here. Instead of automatically converting tabs to spaces, you have to take an extra step to make this work.

Assume you've just opened an existing document. To convert the tabs in the document to spaces (soft tabs):

By Alvin Alexander on October 20, 2012

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