I was trying to install KMyMoney from macports on OS X Mavericks. In turn, this attempted a macports install of llvm-gcc42. This produced the error: “The directory that should contain system headers does not exist” macports
The solution is to manually install XCode tools via xcode-select –install
Note that xcode command line tools are supposed to automagically install, but when they do, they don’t create /usr/include, and that’s what’s missing.
Here are some things I’ve learned about AppleScript and about Mac OS X “Folder Actions”.
Suppose you set up a Google Apps (private domain) with Google, so that your email sent to example.com gets handled by GMail. Google recently published a blog entry, encouraging everyone to set up account recovery for their Google account and their GMail account. But these directions don’t apply to Google Apps for your domain example.com.
Google expects that the administrator for your domain will handle account recovery and password resets for all of your (non-admin) users. That’s you.
But what about your administrator account? What happens if you need to recover that account? You can recover that account using Google’s normal account recovery. First, you must set up that account for recovery. (Similar instructions apply when you want to change your account recovery options – such as when you buy a new cell phone.)
Note that you you have a logical number with Google Voice, you probably do not want to use that number as your recovery number, because you might have lost access to that account. For this one, you should use the physical cell phone number.
Outlook developed a bothersome behavior. Seemingly on random days, it would change my work hours to be later than I set them. I’d shrug my shoulders, set them back where I wanted them, and then a few days later, they’d change again.
At first, I thought the domain admins were applying a group policy. I found that it gets saved in \HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\version-number-here\Outlook\Options\Calendar in the CalDefStart and CalDefEnd entries. I was thinking I’d set it where I wanted it, export the registry key, and load in in my StartUp folder.
Then I realized that it might be happening on the day after I used an HVD (Hosted Virtual Desktop). I suspect that what is happening is that when I use the Outlook in my HVD, that sets the working hours. It could be something borked in Outlook, or it could be that there is a policy applied to the HVD which is changing it, and then Exchange syncs it to my main Outlook. Since our HVD uses ProfileUnity to copy the user profile, I suspect that PU is doing it.
https://app.nirvanahq.com/ is an elegant task (to-do) manager, but it has a number of maddening omissions. Today’s maddening omission is that there’s no way provided to import a bunch of tasks into the system. The closest they provide is for you to email your tasks, one at a time. Ugh. This is particularly annoying because they provide you with a way to export/backup your tasks, but no way to bring them back into Nirvana. Double-ugh.
https://github.com/meeech/nirv (see also here) provides a Ruby API for a few functions, and one of these is adding tasks. Here’s how to use this gem to import tasks from OmniFocus. This is what I did on a Mac, but you should be able to accomplish something similar on a PC. On a PC, you’ll have to install Ruby and you might also need Cygwin.
This does not do a high-fidelity import. If you really want an import bad, this is a bad import. It is going to import task title, task notes, and nothing else. It will import projects as tasks.
Press Alt-F11, and paste the following code into the ThisWorksheet object
Option Explicit
Sub RunMe()
Dim s As String
Dim title As String
Dim note As String
Dim sel As Range
Dim r As Range
If Selection.Rows.Count = 1 Then
MsgBox "This will export the selected rows. You selected only one row. If you want more rows exported, select them FIRST, next time."
End If
If Selection.Rows.Count > 100 Then
MsgBox "You'll have to export in sets of 100 rows or fewer."
End
End If
Debug.Print "#!/bin/bash"
For Each r In Selection.Rows
If r.Cells(1, 1) = "" And r.Cells(1, 2) = "" Then
Exit For
End If
title = r.Cells(1, 1)
note = r.Cells(1, 2)
title = Replace(title, """", "\""")
note = Replace(note, """", "\""")
title = Replace(title, "'", "'\''")
note = Replace(note, "'", "'\''")
title = Replace(title, "(", "\(")
note = Replace(note, "(", "\(")
title = Replace(title, ")", "\)")
note = Replace(note, ")", "\)")
s = ""
s = s + "nirv add "
s = s + "'" + title + "'"
If note <> "" Then
s = s + " -n " ' + note + "'"
End If
s = s + " -t imported "
Debug.Print s
Next
End Sub
. Run that code.
#1 - Stop auto-updating Firefox. It often breaks things. Before you do an update, you want to save a backup, in case you have to roll back. #2 - Install the new version of Firefox in parallel with the old version. #3 - Install https://github.com/TiddlyWiki/TiddlyFox/raw/master/tiddlyfox.xpi . Install it from this location. That gets updated faster than the one on the Mozilla repository.
Microsoft Access has its good points and its bad points. One mostly nice point is that you can use a Visual Basic function to calculate a query result. For example:
Select Field1, Field2, MyVbaFunction(Field3)
But I wanted to do a “select into” and to have MyVbaFunction return a long string. Something like
SELECT col1, col2, MyVbaFunctionReturning1000ByteString(Field3)
INTO newtable
FROM table1
The trouble is, Access assumes field types. It assumes type of text(255) for any function which returns a string. So my 1000 byte result was getting truncated to 255 characters.
There really is no good work-around. You can’t tell a VBA function to return a memo. VBA doesn’t know about ‘memo.’ My hack was to do this in multiple steps.
First, run the query in a simplified form:
SELECT col1, col2, "dummy" as dummy
INTO newtable
FROM table1
Then edit the field definitions for table1 and change the 3rd column into a Memo column.
Finally, run this SQL:
update table1 set dummy = MyVbaFunctionReturning1000ByteString(Field3)
But… If you copy/paste this data from Access into Excel, it still gets truncated in Excel!
I never can remember the syntax for these:
INSERT INTO Table2 (col1, col2)
SELECT col_a, col_b
FROM Table1
WHERE where_clause_here
or
SELECT col1, col2
INTO newtable
FROM table1
WHERE where_clause_here
Here are some notes on diagnosing network latency (slowness) on our home internet connection:
Rule #1 - Do this on a wired network connetion – not a WiFi. WiFi problems are entirely different than general internet problems. Solve internet problems separately from WiFi problems.
tracert google.com
This will give you a line of output for each router between your PC and google. You can control-C to interrupt it after 3 lines of output. Your output will look something like this, if things are healthy:
1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms some-router-1 [192.168.8.1]
2 1 ms 1 ms <1 ms some-router-2 [192.168.1.254]
3 21 ms 20 ms 23 ms blah-blah.sbcglobal.net [99.39.252.3]
Here’s what this means:
What’s this mean?
We have short Ethernet wiring between the PC and the first router, and short Ethernet wiring between the 1st router and the 2nd. Data moves really fast over Ethernet. Data moves really reliably over Ethernet. So long as these two routers are healthy, 99% of these bounced packets (“pings”) will come back in about 1 millisecond. If lots of them take longer than 1 msec, we probably need to reboot one of the routers. (Ask Dad first!)
We have phone wires running from our house to the AT&T box several blocks away. Phone wires are not good for networking, and these wires are much longer than our inside-the-house wires. The phone company has to do some funky stuff to move data over these wires. When the funky stuff is working, it takes 20-25 milliseconds to ping the phone company’s router.
Things are more complicated over the phone wires. If the wires pass by someone’s house and someone in that house starts their clothes dryer (or other large electricity user), it can generate electrical noise, and that noise can interfere with our data moving along the phone lines. If there’s a thunderstorm within several miles, those lightning strikes generate noise which can interfere with your data.
And the phone company’s router is also servicing everyone else in the neighborhood, so sometimes it is too busy to promptly reply to your ping. Responding to pings is the least important thing the router does, so it will prioritize all other work ahead of your pings.
Based on my experiments, if the telco router responds to 80% of your pings within 25 milliseconds, that’s as good as it gets with our internet service.
You can also use the “ping”command, after you use the tracert command. tracert shows you the IP address of the routers. If you want to do extra pings on a router (perhaps to see whether it is consistently fast):
(Of course you should use the IP address of the router you’re interested in, if it isn’t 192.168.8.1). This example will ping the router 99 times, instead of the 3 times which tracert uses.
This is all useful to tell where the latency (slowness) is coming from. You have to know what piece of your connection is slow in order to fix it.
Note: For comparison purposes, pinging one of our internal routers via a good WiFi connection takes from 1.5 to 5 msec, with lots of variance. WiFi is radio and lots more stuff interferes with radio, so you’ll get an occasional ping time of something like 100 msec.