gyom - Developer IT

How to restrict an iTunes smart playlist to contain only entire albums ?

- by Gyom

The title says it all ; What I'd like to have is for example an "albums not played for the last 3 months" playlist, that I could sync onto my ipod. The long story is on apple support forums for those interested. Ah, and yes, I have read the Managing Your iPod With Smartlists document (PDF) (non-PDF link)...

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Make emacs aware of files externally moved/renamed on Mac os x

- by Gyom

I've been using mac os x for several years, and I realize that I've now gotten used to all applications transparently "following" files as I rename or move them (either via mv on the console or within the Finder's GUI), and emacs is pretty much the only program that does not. This is a shame though, because most of my time in front a screen is actually spent in front of emacs :-) Would anyone have any ideas or pointers about what measures I could take to get that behaviour in emacs ? (yes I know this is "impossible" to acheive in general, but when I just rename a simple file, or move it to a directory nearby, it's a shame I have to close/reopen it for emacs to notice. oh and no, I'm not going to use 'dired' as a file manager :-)

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How to manage multiple python versions ?

- by Gyom

short version: how can I get rid of the multiple-versions-of-python nightmare ? long version: over the years, I've used several versions of python, and what is worse, several extensions to python (e.g. pygame, pylab, wxPython...). Each time it was on a different setup, with different OSes, sometimes different architectures (like my old PowerPC mac). Nowadays I'm using a mac (OSX 10.6 on x86-64) and it's a dependency nightmare each time I want to revive script older than a few months. Python itself already comes in three different flavours in /usr/bin (2.5, 2.6, 3.1), but I had to install 2.4 from macports for pygame, something else (cannot remember what) forced me to install all three others from macports as well, so at the end of the day I'm the happy owner of seven (!) instances of python on my system. But that's not the problem, the problem is, none of them has the right (i.e. same set of) libraries installed, some of them are 32bits, some 64bits, and now I'm pretty much lost. For example right now I'm trying to run a three-year-old script (not written by me) which used to use matplotlib/numpy to draw a real-time plot within a rectangle of a wxwidgets window. But I'm failing miserably: py26-wxpython from macports won't install, stock python has wxwidgets included but also has some conflict between 32 bits and 64 bits, and it doesn't have numpy... what a mess ! Obviously, I'm doing things the wrong way. How do you usally cope with all that chaos ?e

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How can get dtrace to run the traced command with non-root priviledges ?

- by Gyom

OS X lacks linux's strace, but it has dtrace which is supposed to be so much better. However, I miss the ability to do simple tracing on individual commands. For example, on linux I can write strace -f gcc hello.c to caputre all system calls, which gives me the list of all the filenames needed by the compiler to compile my program (the excellent memoize script is built upon this trick) I want to port memoize on the mac, so I need some kind of strace. What I actually need is the list of files gcc reads and writes into, so what I need is more of a truss. Sure enough can I say dtruss -f gcc hello.c and get somewhat the same functionality, but then the compiler is run with root priviledges, which is obviously undesirable (apart from the massive security risk, one issue is that the a.out file is now owned by root :-) I then tried dtruss -f sudo -u myusername gcc hello.c, but this feels a bit wrong, and does not work anyway (I get no a.out file at all this time, not sure why) All that long story tries to motivate my original question: how do I get dtrace to run my command with normal user priviledges, just like strace does in linux ? Edit: is seems that I'm not the only one wondering how to do this: question #1204256 is pretty much the same as mine (and has the same suboptimal sudo answer :-)

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how to get latex to hyphenate a word that contains a dash ?

- by Gyom

In a latex document I'm writing, I get an overfull hbox warning because of the word "multi-disciplinary", which happens to be rendered at the end of a line. I can get rid of this particular warning by changing it into multi-discipli\-nary, but the same problem will happen elsewhere, since this word is used a lot in the paper. I'd like to use the \hyphenation{} command instead, but obviously my tentative \hyphenation{multi-disci-pli-na-ry} does not work, because it does not understand the first dash correctly. What incantation do I need to get correct indentation in a word that already contains a dash ? Bonus question: where could I have found the answer to that question myself ?

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How to maintain long-lived python projects w.r.t. dependencies and python versions ?

- by Gyom

short version: how can I get rid of the multiple-versions-of-python nightmare ? long version: over the years, I've used several versions of python, and what is worse, several extensions to python (e.g. pygame, pylab, wxPython...). Each time it was on a different setup, with different OSes, sometimes different architectures (like my old PowerPC mac). Nowadays I'm using a mac (OSX 10.6 on x86-64) and it's a dependency nightmare each time I want to revive script older than a few months. Python itself already comes in three different flavours in /usr/bin (2.5, 2.6, 3.1), but I had to install 2.4 from macports for pygame, something else (cannot remember what) forced me to install all three others from macports as well, so at the end of the day I'm the happy owner of seven (!) instances of python on my system. But that's not the problem, the problem is, none of them has the right (i.e. same set of) libraries installed, some of them are 32bits, some 64bits, and now I'm pretty much lost. For example right now I'm trying to run a three-year-old script (not written by me) which used to use matplotlib/numpy to draw a real-time plot within a rectangle of a wxwidgets window. But I'm failing miserably: py26-wxpython from macports won't install, stock python has wxwidgets included but also has some conflict between 32 bits and 64 bits, and it doesn't have numpy... what a mess ! Obviously, I'm doing things the wrong way. How do you usally cope with all that chaos ?

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