Computers-Suck

Problem You need to run a program (like icalBuddy) which requires access to protected macOS resources like your Calendar, Reminders, or Contacts. When you run it from the terminal, you are prompted as usual and grant access. Later, you try to run that program via some other process and nothing happens or you get some obtuse error. In my case, I was trying to run icalBuddy to pull my calendar appointments into Obsidian, following Ben’s example. Worked great from the command line but not so much from within Obsidian. The problem, as it turns out, is that the privacy grant applies to the “top most app” which launches the process, in this case iTerm.app, and there’s no way to manually grant access directly to icalBuddy or Obsidian. ...

according to the research firm the Standish Group, 94 percent of large federal information technology projects over the past 10 years were unsuccessful — more than half were delayed, over budget, or didn’t meet user expectations, and 41.4 percent failed completely. via Getting to the Bottom of HealthCare.gov’s Flop - NYTimes.com

Game over.

If you’ve ever run into this annoying message before: $ wget https://raw.github.com/bagder/curl/master/lib/mk-ca-bundle.pl --2012-06-12 14:42:46-- https://raw.github.com/bagder/curl/master/lib/mk-ca-bundle.pl Resolving raw.github.com... 207.97.227.243 Connecting to raw.github.com|207.97.227.243|:443... connected. ERROR: cannot verify raw.github.com's certificate, issued by `/C=US/O=DigiCert Inc/OU=www.digicert.com/CN=DigiCert High Assurance CA-3': Unable to locally verify the issuer's authority. To connect to raw.github.com insecurely, use `--no-check-certificate'. There’s actually an easy fix! You may want to run ~/.ssl/mk-ca-bundle.pl occasionally to keep things up to date as well.

Sounds easy, doesn’t it? Well it actually is quite simple but the error messages along the way can really trip you up! My first attempt at profiling a bit of code was to use the full-boat Eclipse stack: Eclipse Test & Performance Tools Platform Project! Well, what they don’t tell you anywhere on the project page is that it’s only supported on Windows and Linux. A Mac port was started sometime around 2004 and never completed. Yeah, it’s been that long! ...

I recently compiled Q4M on my Mac and I’m documenting it here now because it proved to be somewhat painful so hopefully you’ll avoid a bit of grief by reading this. First off, you need MySQL Server. I’ve been using MacPorts for some time now, so this is installed via ports. Unfortunately, it seems to be a pretty barebones config so I had to create a custom variant to add the necessary --with-fast-mutexes option. You can grab my modified Portfile from github. Just clone it into some directory and then add that path into /opt/local/etc/macports/sources.conf before the rsync line. Once you have that, go ahead and reinstall MySQL: ...

So it turns out that Windows Firewall, even in Windows 2008, still can’t accept a range of ports, either in the UI or via command line, most commonly when setting up PASV FTP transfers. The common workaround is to create one entry per port in your range like so: C:> FOR /L %I IN (60000,1,60200) DO netsh firewall add portopening TCP %I "Passive FTP"%I While this does work, it’s slightly annoying that you have to create 200 individual entries in your config. My slightly better workaround is to just stick every port into the text entry field using this simple ruby helper: ...

After suffering through yet another morning of ‘find’ pegging my CPU and grinding my sad little laptop hard drive for a couple of hours, I finally decided to rectify the situation. Most Linux distributions these days ship mlocate by default, and so I decided to give it a go on OS X. Unfortunately, it doesn’t quite support OS X out of the box yet. I’ll spare you all the miserable details (it was an epic struggle getting this compiled), but I finally managed to get it working. ...

tl;dr- Yes, you can add a 2nd GPU; OS X will ignore it; Windows will use it. Make sure to disable the card in the 1st slot to use it for gaming. Apple makes great hardware, there’s no doubt about it. However, occasionally they make decisions that not only boggle the mind but are completely infuriating. Like putting non-standard ports on a laptop and charging twenty bucks for the proper adapter cable! A similar problem I ran into recently is the issue of the graphics card in the Mac Pro: only specially branded “Mac-compatible” GPUs will work in OS X. What’s the problem with that you ask? Availability and pricing.