Michael Bianco

Email Organization In Apple Mail

I’ve never really spent time creating a mail “workflow” that worked for me; but recently I’ve had trouble keeping up with the email in my inbox and remebering what emails I needed to reply to. I decided to spend some time streamlining my email workflow. Mailboxes The first thing I proceeded to do was to create e-mail folders (or mailboxes as they are called in Apple Mail). I was greeted by a lovely “Mailbox Creation Failed” alert panel. Using my computer troubleshooting skillz I first looked at Mail’s troubleshooting section – nothing. Next I googled “Unable To Create Mailbox Apple Mail”, all i found were unanswered questions…

The State Of App Stop On Intel Based Macs

Many users have come to me saying App Stop isn’t working on their new intel Macs. I’m aware of this problem but I’m unable to do anything about it. Their is a bug in the intel build, but I can’t find it since I don’t have a intel mac to debug on. If you have any experience with Xcode/Objective-C and have a intel mac please email me, I could really use your help (If you have a spare MacBook or intel MacMini laying around that would work too :)).

Mounting The ISO-9960 Partition Of A Hyrbid CD On OS X

Instructions on how to accomplish this are not easily found on the web at all. It took me alot of googling to find a solution that works. Since I spent 1/2 hour googling to find that link, I figured I’d post it up for anybody else who is trying to accomplish this same task.

Upgraded To WordPress 2

Yup, this site is now running WordPress 2.02. I was holding off upgrading because of one of the plugins I used alot, Code Highlight. It still doesn’t have WordPress 2 support, but I found a code highlighter that uses the exact same syntax (and has support for more languages!), Code Snippet. The upgrade process was real easy, took me about 10 minutes. Most of the changes are in the admin panel and I have to say, the admin panel is much nicer. I highly recommend upgrading if you haven’t done so already.

What Does NSString’s Length Method Really Return?

You would think that it returns the number of characters in the NSString, but it doesn’t. Instead, it returns the number of unichars (1 or 2 byte characters). So as far as -[NSString length] is concerned every 4 byte unicode character (the double flat, for instance) counts as 2 characters even though it’ll only be displayed as one character on screen. This isn’t a bug per-say in -[NSString length], but it’s not the behavior I was expecting…

Splitting & Merging Binary Files

Yesterday I had to upload a huge file (1.4GB tar.gz file) to my web-server and uncompress it once it was uploaded. Even my new fiber optic (FIOS) internet connection couldn’t handle a file that big (it dropped out at around 900mb). So I figured I would split the file up into manageable chunks, upload the split files to server, join them together, then uncompress them. Since I’m no unix shell guru I googled “splitting and merging binary files unix”; nothing useful came up, I tried changing the search terms a little bit to get different results, still nothing. Using ManOpen I found the split utility. Looked like exactly what I was looking for…

Sliced Dock!

Yesterday my Dock decided it didn’t like the finder, so it cut it off from the Dock. Mousing over or clicking on the Finder icon wouldn’t cause anything to happen. Pretty weird, I’ve never seen this before. A simple killall Dock fixed it, so it must of been a obscure bug with the Dock.

Disabling NSTableView Sorting While Using Bindings

Cocoa is very nice in that it gives you alot of functionality “for free”; spell checking, table sorting, text searching, font selection, etc, etc. Unfortunately it can be hard to disable the “for free” functionality; for instance, table sorting. To disable table sorting in a NSTableView using Cocoa bindings (via NSArrayController) isn’t as simple as clicking a “isSortable” checkbox in interface builder, or calling -[table setIsSortable:NO];; the solution is less straightforward than you would expect. Apple hasn’t documented how to disable sorting in table views using bindings, so it was up to a clever programmer to figure it out…

Prosit Software: iDictionary 1.0

I’ve finally unveiled what has been keeping me busy over the last few months: iDictionary 1.0; my first shareware application. iDictionary enables you to put a dictionary or thesaurus on your iPod, check out the product page for more information. Now that I have released that, I’ll have some more time to put into this site. I have a couple of new open-source things I’ve been wanting to put up for download, so hopefully I’ll be able to put that up soon.

XHTML 1.0 Transitional Compliant

This isn’t any big news for any of you non-web people, but I just finished making this site fully XHTML 1.0 Transitional compliant. In the process I’ve added some new content on some pages, and tweaked the style of some. On previous sites I’ve created I really didn’t care that much about compliancy but with the last couple sites I’ve made I found that keeping the site complaint made the development process alot easier. If you really don’t know much about XHTML I recommend reading this article; I found it very informative.

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