Anuj Gakhar's Blog

Anuj @ Flex, ColdFusion and other RIA stuff….

Archive for category Mac

Quickly Empty Trash on MacOS

Jul 20

Posted by Anuj Gakhar in Mac | No Comments

So, I often end up in situations where there is just too much data in my Trash and emptying Trash on a Mac can take ages. The annoying bit is – while Trash is being emptied – you can not delete anything else meanwhile. I ran into a situation today where I needed 40GB space on my disk and the only way to do so was to empty trash which had about the same size of stuff in it. Deleting via the Finder window can take ages as it counts the files and deletes them, it almost seems like an endless process.

Apparently, you can do so via the Terminal window


cd ~/.Trash
rm -rf *

That command recursively and silently deletes everything in Trash within minutes.

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CF/Flex Connectivity in Flex Builder : Invalid root. The WEB-INF/flex folder must contain either flex-config.xml or services-config.xml.

Jun 8

Posted by Anuj Gakhar in ColdFusion, Flex, Flex Builder, Mac | 4 Comments

I was setting up a new Project in Flex Builder with Application Server Type as ‘ColdFusion’. I had the default values in the Flex Builder wizard. But the Wizard wont let me go past the second screen. I kept getting this error :-

Invalid root. The WEB-INF/flex folder must contain either flex-config.xml or services-config.xml.

And I was sure that the WEB-INF folder actually had the correct files under it. Read the rest of this entry »

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Installing ColdFusion 9 on MacOSX with Apache : Broken Apache Config

Jan 22

Posted by Anuj Gakhar in ColdFusion, Mac | 2 Comments

I had to re-install ColdFusion 9 on my MacOS today and having installed CF approx. a million times before, I thought it would only take few minutes.

Here is what I did :-

1) Went to /Applications/ -> Moved existing “ColdFusion 9″ folder to Trash.
2) Ran the CF Installer and everything went well. But finally, the installer got stuck at “Installing WebServer Connectors” – I waited a few minutes but then gave up.
3) Repeat Steps 1 and 2.
4) I then decided to try the installation with the in-built webserver. That worked, but I could not load any pages at all in browser. Basically, Apache was not working.
5) I opened Terminal. Ran the command “sudo apachectl start” – It says “Already running”. At this point, I was wondering whats wrong.
6) Ran the command “sudo apachectl restart” and it appeared as if it got restarted. No changes.
7) Did some Search and ran this command. “sudo apachectl configtest” to make sure the Apache config was fine. Turns out it was throwing this error. Read the rest of this entry »

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Installing RoR

Apr 4

Posted by Anuj Gakhar in Mac, RoR | 5 Comments

So, last night, I thought of installing RoR on my Mac. Luckily, on Leopard, Ruby and Rails are pre-installed along with some other RubyGems. Out of the box, you get Ruby version 1.8.6 and Rails version 1.2.6, the latest stable releases at the time Leopard shipped. Ruby releases are few and far between (it’s still at 1.8.6), but Rails has frequent new releases. All you need to do is make sure that you have the latest updated gems.

sudo gem update –system
sudo gem install rails
sudo gem update rake
sudo gem update sqlite3-ruby

I just ran those commands one by one and all done! It takes a while for these commands to finish though. There is an excellent article on Developing Rails Applications on MacOS Leopard which gives you a full tour of Ruby on Rails 2.0 on Leopard—starting with building a web application using the latest Rails features with Xcode 3.0, and finishing with deploying the application to a production server running Leopard Server. There is another great article for the older version (Tiger) . I dont think there is anything that these articles dont cover to get you started with building your first RoR app/scaffolding etc on your Mac.

However, if you are on Windows, you could use this One Click Ruby Installer for Windows. This would install the Ruby language on your Windows box. You would still have to update your gems I think via the command prompt. The next thing would be to install Rails. You can use InstantRails for Windows.

So, now, I have my Mac ready for RoR development, I can do some real work. Lets see how it goes!

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Flex Builder Shortcuts for MacOS

Mar 30

Posted by Anuj Gakhar in Flex Builder, Mac | No Comments

Elad Elrom has compiled a pretty useful list of Flex Builder shortcuts for Mac users. You can grab the PDF version here. To me, this is something I could use on a daily basis. Thanks Elad.

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Talk to your Mac

Mar 19

Posted by Anuj Gakhar in Mac | No Comments

I just read this very interesting article on how can you set up some commands to talk to your Mac. I didnt know this was possible.  I am going to try this as soon as I get home (I dont get to use my Mac at work :( )

By the way, I am a regular reader of makeuseof.com,  the articles are extremely useful and practical.

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Mac OS X Leopard: The Missing Manual

Feb 1

Posted by Anuj Gakhar in Books, Mac | 4 Comments

So, after being a MAC user for over 6 months, I finally decided to brush up my Mac skills . Till now, I have only been using some basic things like Firefox, Safari, iTunes, Eclipse, CF, SVN, and other basic stuff. Now, I want to go one step ahead and dive into the real power of Mac. Probably try and get used to the Terminal window.

Which is why, I just ordered this book : Mac OS X Leopard: The Missing Manual . I have read the book’s reviews and it looks like a good book for beginners/switchers like me.  Anyone already read this book and can give me a heads up?

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How to edit httpd.conf on MacOS

Jan 19

Posted by Anuj Gakhar in Mac | 13 Comments

I know this is an easy one for most of you out there but not so easy for me! I am a relatively new Mac user and everytime I want to make some changes to my Apache configuration file, I open Finder and go to /etc/apache2/httpd.conf , open it with TextEdit or TextWrangler and make changes and thats when I get the message “httpd.conf cant be saved as you dont have access” . Damn! Read the rest of this entry »

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Setting up Subversion client on Mac

Oct 16

Posted by Anuj Gakhar in Mac, Subversion | 4 Comments

As the title says, I was trying to setup my Mac with a Subversion client. Althought I have been using Mac for a few months now, I always jump into my Windows VM to do certain things and this was one of them (purely because I like TortoiseSVN). However, today, I decided to setup Mac with a Subversion client. I know we can always use Subeclipse as an Eclipse plugin and that would serve all your requirements but I wanted something that would integrate with the Finder window. So, it turns out that I had to install the Subversion client and ScPlugin to get that working.

I found a really good step by step blog post on the very same subject and I thought I’d mention it here as a thanks to the author for taking the time to write a detailed informative post.

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Migrating emails from Outlook to Mac

May 26

Posted by Anuj Gakhar in Mac | 2 Comments

I was trying to transfer all my emails (keeping the folder structure intact) from Outlook (on Windows) to Mac. I decided to go with Thunderbird as my email client on Mac (the 3 contestants were Mail, Entourage and Thunderbird).

To my surprise, it was not the most straight forward thing to transfer emails over (as I had thought). Apparently, Mail (email program on Mac) needs mbox files and you cant convert your .pst files easily to mbox files. There are a few apps out there that would do this for you but they are all paid ones. I didnt think it was worth it to pay for something so simple. After looking at a few options, the one I found to be the easiest was this :-

1) Install Thunderbird on your Windows machine and import email/settings/addresses etc from MS Outlook into Thunderbird. (might take a while if you have lots of emails,  took me about 20 mins to do this)

2) Copy the Thunderbird profile to a USB stick or drive.

3) Copy the profile on to your Mac and then if you prefer to use Mail , you can import the Thunderbird profile into Mail or if you prefer to use Thunderbird ( like I did ), you can just replace your default profile folder with the ones that you just copied over. Or you can restore the backed up profile. There is a program called Mozbackup which can backup and restore profiles for you and you wont have to bother about knowing where the profile is etc but unfortunately it only works for Windows. So, would work only for a Windows to Windows transfer.

Thats it, you should be done.  I found this to be the easiest and cheapest way to transfer emails over, I might be wrong though.

Anyone got any better ideas ?

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