Posts Tagged ‘osx’

How to make your Adium icon fiery

Here’s a fun tip on creating a fiery looking buddy icon in Adium for OSX.

  1. Take picture in Photo Booth, or directly from Adium’s ImagePicker
  2. Click spiral effect button, then choose the Color Invert filter
  3. Click Set to apply filter
  4. Click your buddy icon, click Choose Icon
  5. Repeat steps 2 – 4 and apply the filters False Color, then Concert
  6. Voila – your buddy icon is red hot!

Typically I’ll take my photos using Photo Booth so I can keep the original, and sometimes I may even use that picture for my dailymugshot.  When you walk through these filters, you’ll notice some filters won’t work as well for some photos, so play around with what you use.  Sometimes I’ll replace Color Invert with X-Ray, or Concert with Gamma Adjust.  It all depends on the picture I choose for a buddy icon.  Sometimes I’ll just keep layering until I create some crazy looking buddy icon, go crazy!

Here’s a photo step by step so you can see the final product.

1.The Original

Starting picture

2.Color Invert

Color Invert filter

3.False Color

False Color filter

4.Concert

Concert filter

A volume failed to mount (Error code -6602)

Yesterday morning I started work as usual as ran into a problem mounting one of the shares from my XP PRO machine on my Macbook Pro.  Obviously the first question I asked was WTF? Everything worked yesterday, and not today.

I did some Googling and found mention about opening some UDP ports, but my TCP/IP settings currently has all ports open, so that didn’t help.  Then just for giggles I decided to turn off simple file sharing.  That fixed it!

So if you receive the message “A volume failed to mount”, and then another one with “Error code -6602″ in it, you should check your PC’s file sharing settings.  You would do this by following these steps.

How to disable simple file sharing on XP

  1. Open Windows Explorer ( Win+E  or  double click My Computer )
  2. Click Tools > Folder Options
  3. Click the View Tab
  4. Scroll down to the bottom, and uncheck “Use simple file sharing (Recommended)”
  5. Then retry mounting the share on OSX

OSX FlexBuilder Java Heap Space error

Here’s an error I’ve run into from time to time while programming Flex on OSX

	[compc] Error: Java heap space
	[compc] java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space	

This error was a real pain in the arse. I found a lot of people having similar issues and they all fixed this problem by setting ANT_OPTS as an environment variable to increase the memory size. This didn’t work for me. I set ANT_OPTS in my .profile, as well as in .MacOSX/environment.plist.  No luck.  I never figured out why the environment variable route didn’t work, but I was able to fix this error within Eclipse.

If you run into this error while running Ant build scripts, try the following steps.

  1. Run Menu > External Tools > Open External Tools Dialog…
  2. Select your Ant build file on the left
  3. Click the JRE tab on the right
  4. Enter “-Xmx640m” in the VM arguments field ( without quotes )
  5. Click Apply, then Run
Flex JVM preferences

Flex JRE preferences

Hopefully this will get you going.

Handy OSX developer tools

This year I had the challenge of using a MacBook Pro as my work machine. While figuring out how to work on the shiny toy, I found a few apps that are worth using. If you’re an apple genius, or end up having to use OSX, I highly recommend getting these apps.

Adium X – OSX Multi server chat client – www.adiumx.com

AppZapper – OSX Uninstaller – www.appzapper.com

BBEdit – OSX Text editor and more – www.barebones.com

Dreamweaver CS3www.adobe.com/products/dreamweaver/

Flash CS3 – *Don’t even bother with flash 8 on OSX – www.adobe.com/products/flash/

Photoshop CS3www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/

Guiffy – OSX Diff Tool – www.guiffy.com

MacParDeluxe – OSX Binary group util – www.xs4all.nl/~gp/MacPAR_deLuxe/

Parallels – OSX Virtual PC – www.parallels.com

Quinn – OSX Tetris clone – simonhaertel.de/quinn

SmartSVN – OSX SVN GUI Client – www.syntevo.com/smartsvn/

Soap Client – OSX SOAP Development tool – http://scan.dalo.us/

Speed Download – OSX Download Manager – www.yazsoft.com

Split And Concat – OSX Binary group utility – www.xs4all.nl/~loekjehe/Split&Concat/

Synergy – OSX iTunes controller – wincent.com/a/products/synergy-classic/

Toast Titanium – OSX DVD / CD Burning App – www.roxio.com

Transmission – OSX BitTorrent client – http://transmission.m0k.org/

Transmit – OSX FTP Client – www.panic.com/transmit/

VLC Player – Great OSX video player – www.videolan.org/vlc/

What Size – OSX Disk utility – www.id-design.com/software/whatsize/

Witch – OSX Alt Tab utility – www.manytricks.com/witch/