Michael Bianco

Copy Path / Directory to Clipboard OS X Lion Service

Someone at work recently wanted an easy way to get the path of a file in a format he could paste into an IM or an email. I wrote up a quick applescript and bundled it into a service which enables a user to easily copy the path of a file to the clipboard. The package also includes a service that copies the directory path of a given file to the clipboard. The biggest use case for this service is for an office environment where many people are connected to the same drive externally via VPN or internally via ethernet. It is challenging to easily point a colleague to a specific file if your shared drive is badly organized (which, odds are, it probably is). This tool mitigates most of that issue and works consistently across machines.

Setting Up QuickBooks on Windows XP Professional for Multi-user Environment

Recently I was involved in a project moving a company’s files from a old 2003 windows exchange server to a mac mini server setup. The first setup was to move from Exchange’s email and calendaring to Google Apps. After that step was complete we moved the shared files drive over to thunderbolt RAID 5 storage attached to a mac mini server device. The transition was pretty smooth, however there was one problem which wasted a significant amount of time. The accountant’s in the organization use QuickBooks 2010 for all accounting purposes. Moving to a hosted solution was not an option, and they needed multi-user access to the file (2-3 people could be working on the same quickbooks file at any given moment)…

Migrating Rules From Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps

Recently I was part of transitioning the email system of a 20+ employee business off of a Microsoft Exchange 2003 server to Google Apps. Moving close to half a million emails to a new email service was a big decision. The transition tools that Google has in place are pretty good, albeit slow for that many emails, Google throttles email transfer to one each second after the first 500. However, the one piece that was missing was a good tool to transition outlook server rules. Many employees used those rules extensively and many had 50-100 rules. Outlook does not have any method in place for extracting those rules…

eBay PHP Framework, Tumblr for Kohana, and More

I’ve been throwing a decent amount of code on GitHub + Gist recently; I wanted to highlight a couple of the projects that the community might find useful. eBay PHP Framework Wrapper There isn’t a ton of documentation or examples around the eBay PHP Accelerator toolkit. Actually, I think it has been a couple years since the framework itself has been updated. I’ve put together a small eBay PHP library with some generic posting and searching wrapper functions. The code was pulled out of an active project and still has some references to the context in which it was situated, but it should provide a good starting point to anyone looking to work with the eBay PHP framework…

MacRuby Deployment + Load Order

After reading the official MacRuby docs on deployment, I read over this guide. Although the deployment build seemed to be working fine on my local machine when I dropped it on my laptop with a standard Lion install it crashed, claiming that there was an defined constant – but that constant was a class. How could it be undefined if it ran fine locally? Looking into it a bit more the class that was undefined was being used as a superclass for another ruby class. Taking a look at rb_main.rb revealed that there is no specific load order. Since the load order was undefined, the class requiring the other ruby class as a superclass was being loaded before the superclass was loaded…

Lion, SMTP Postfix Relay, and Dreamhost

When developing web-apps locally it is useful to have a fully functional smtp server to test automated emails associated with your application. Many times the network you are developing on will not allow you to simply start up postfix and and run your own local smtp server. However, this doesn’t imply that you can’t use postfix – modifying postfix to relay all outgoing mail to an external / offsite smtp server that you have control of will enable you to develop & test the parts of your application that require a local outgoing smtp server without an issue. Many times port 25 (the default smtp port) will be blocked somewhere along the line in your network connection…

Custom Premailer Modifications

I’ve had to do quite a bit of email newsletter design recently and I’ve become very familiar with premailer, an awesome open source email preprocessing library that makes developing emails a little more sane. My workflow is a bit different than what premailer expects out of the box, and there are a couple of improvements that I wanted to add to the project…

Lion Frustration Fixes

Installed Lion today, some great improvements, some not so great (iCal… really?), and some frusterating changes than can be fixed. Scrolling seemed delayed and generally choppy on my magic mouse. The scrolling preferences are completed removed from the mouse system preferences. Instead they are hidden in the “Mouse Options” button in the “Mouse” tab of the Universal Access system preference. In the mouse tab you can also remove the scrolling delay. Safari’s cmd+option+l to open the download window was removed! Luckily you can add it back using a script by Daniel Jalkut bundled in a service bound to to the cmd+option+l keyboard shortcut. The new window zoom animation is really annoying…

Dynamic AJAX Content, Internet Explorer, MooTools, and Form Elements

Another day, another Internet Explorer bug. I was using MooTool’s Request.HTML to load some AJAX content to display within an inline popup and IE kept throwing the classic “Object doesn’t support this property or method” error. The error was occurring inside document.id (i.e. the dollar function) which made the issue even stranger. Looking at the dollar function’s source code, it seems as though methods are copied from Element.prototype to the element being retrieved. The AJAX content I was loading contained a form which had a form element with ID “position”. When the Request.HTML receives html content it retrieves a list of all elements contained with the AJAX response using getElements(“*”)…

Using VMWare + Windows to Test Web Sites on Windows

Step 1: Retrieve Emulator’s Gateway IP Address Grab the inet number resulting from `ifconfig vmnet1`. Step 2: Add Test Site’s Local Hostname to Window’s Host File For each site I develop I setup a new Apache virtual host (some info on apache virtual hosts here). For instance, the local domain / hostname for a website could be mabblog.localhost. When developing locally there are some hardlinks to the local development hostname, for this reason the it isn’t enough to use the inet vmnet1 address retrieved above when debugging in VMWare / Parallels; the local hostname must be added to the Windows host file…

Latest Posts