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Had a headdesk moment as I sat down this morning to write a delivery page for a web site I’m current working on. I needed a table of countries, their ISO numbers and two and three letter codes. I’ve done this once or twice before, but had misplaced the script to rip the data from wikipedia and generate the insert statements. I thought I’d run around the web to see if anyone else had the common sense to do the same thing and plonk it on the web.
Lo and behold, the gentleman here has already done it for us. I think he deserves a round of applause and a cup of tea for saving me ten minutes work.
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Mac OS X’s default mail browser, Mail.app, is a pretty straightforward e-mail client with a few bells and whistles. But for those coming across from e-mail clients such as Thunderbird or Outlook, especially from daily workflows that revolve around e-mail, they may find the out-the-box functionality a little lacking. Cleverly Mail.app is easily extendible using a plugin-in interface, so you can just simply add the functionality you require. The list below are my minimum requirements to make Mail.app workable. All are free in one respect or another. Your mileage may vary.
WideMail
http://www.daneharnett.com/widemail/
Why waste screen real-estate on a widescreen laptop monitor with Mail.app’s preview pane situated below your mail list? This plug-in switches the layout to three vertical panes: mailboxes, mails, preview which makes much better use of the available space.
Mail Badger
http://www.tonyallevato.com/node/1
This is infinitely useful you have mail coming in from multiple sources, or want to keep track of specific incoming mail, etc. It replaces the in-built badge functionality and lets you create little badges on your dock icon to count mail based on user-defined rules. Absolute brilliance. As an example I use one rule to count the number of mail coming from known client addresses, and another to count mail coming from my social networks. One I have to keep an eye on, the other is just there for my own interest.
Caius – points out that there’s an alternative to Mail Badger in Dockstar. Unlike Mail Badger, Dockstar is a paid for application and offers greater display options than Mail Badger. Mail Badger also occasionally throws a wobbly and causes Mail.app to crash. I’ve not heard anyone report this same behavior from Dockstar.
SignatureProfiler
http://www.littleknownsoftware.com/sigpro/
Pretty straightforward, multiple identities, multiple signatures. Mail to clients does not warrant the same signature as mail to friends. This functionality should really be built into Mail.app itself but there you go. SignatureProfiler remedies the situation elegantly.
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I often end up working in collaborative environments, with SQL Server accounts which only allow me access to one database on any given server. Using the SQL Server 2005 tools, this wasn’t a problem. SQL SMS showed me all the databases available but threw an “access denied” if I tried to do anything to them. Fairy nuff.
SQL SMS 2008 however refuses to show the databases in the object explorer. I can open a new query window, switch to the database and access it via T-SQL, but I can’t directly interact with any of the databases as I could with SMS 2005.
Turns out that when SQL SMS 2008 probes each of the databases, it’s also checking for the collation of the database. If the user doesn’t have read access to the database SQL SMS throws an exception which stops it from probing any further and returns an empty list of databases. To get around this you need to turn the collation checking off. To do this, select “Databases” in Object Explorer, then press F7 which opens the “Object Explorer Details”. Right click on the columns across the top and deselect “Collation”. Right-click, “Refresh” your databases and you should be able to see them all again.
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I’ve just got off the phone from a Product Specialist at Apple Care.
One of the common tricks to perform to get older games to run stable under multi-core systems is to disable one of the cores. On my previous generation MacBook Black this was straightforward enough. Install XCode developer tools off the install CD, pop into:
/Library/Application Support/HWPrefs/CPUPalette.app
click to disable one of the cores and you’re laughing. Apart from the fact this doesn’t work on the new MBP. So I spent 30 minutes on the phone to AppleCare, who eventually let slip that the developer tools for the new MBP haven’t been finished yet and the ones on the included DVDs were horribly out of date.
All the effort is being focused on the new release of Snow Leopard, but there should be some new developer tools coming somewhere in the next month to resolve the problem.
So if you’re thinking of buying a new MBP and like to play some of those good old-timer games like Myst III and NeverWinter Nights, I’d hold your horses until they get the new developer tools out. I’ll update the blog when they do.
