To run Matlab persistently (so it doesn’t die when you log out), “screen” can be used as described at this link.

To run Matlab non-interactively, I found a concise and useful page with instructions and explanations: http://people.scs.fsu.edu/~burkardt/m_src/matlab_batch/matlab_batch.html .

And it’s very easy to try for yourself, simply visit the Hyperwords Company’s web site (using Firefox, of course) and download it for yourself.

But sometimes there’s a little nugget that happens to arise out of the blue making you wish you had know about it years ago. To wit:

When copying a folder from one location to another, if any files at the destination (x) have the same name as files that are being copied over (y) Windows will present a nifty dialog box:

Would you like to replace the existing file x with this one? y
The options you are given as an answer are:

1. Yes
2. Yes to All
3. No
4. Cancel

But wait! Don’t you sometime wish there was a No to All option, so you don’t have to keep clicking the No button for each file?

Here’s the tip: Hold down the SHIFT key as you click the No button. Windows takes this as the equivalent of saying No to All and goodbye all those extra No clicks.

I’m thrilled.

via Online Tech Tips by way of Lifehacker

Setting it up is really easy, no special plug-ins are required.

First load the Dartmouth People Finder web page. (click the link to open in a new window)

Now ctrl-click or right-click the search field.

In the contextual menu, select “Add a keyword for this search…”

Firefox will now ask you to give the bookmark a name, a keyword, and where to store it. I’m calling mine, “Dartmouth People Finder” and I’m using the keyword, “dnd”. When you’ve filled yours in, click the Add or OK button.

Now it is time for the magic.

In the location bar of your Firefox window, type “dnd” (or whatever you used for your keyword) and the name of the person you want to lookup.

Hit enter and boom… you’ll be brought directly to the results page of your lookup.

The DND People Finder supports fuzzy name matching. So you can enter as much or as little of the name as you want. If there is more than one result, it will return all the matches.

That’s all there is to it. This same technique can also be used for many other sites that you frequently search such as IMDb, Amazon, Wikipedia, etc.

• Cisco VPN
  I know this is an odd one to have first, but I use this a lot from home, so this might have been a deal-breaker. Although the 4.9.00 version does not work with Leopard, the latest version, 4.9.01 (0080), has worked well for me – no kernel panics or other trouble. And, my favorite little front-end for it, Shimo works like a champ in Leopard!
• Microsoft Office 2004
  I wish I could say we didn’t need this, but we do. I normally run the included “Office Setup Assistant” to customize my install. Unfortunately, once you get to step 3 (User Information), the installer freezes and must be force-quit. The workaround is to do the “drag-install” by dragging the Office folder to Applications. However, once you do this, if you try to run an Office app, you’ll be plopped right back at the same user customization screen that will be frozen. The way I found around this was to do all the available Office updates before trying to run anything. Here are the updates you’ll need:
  1. 11.3.5
  2. 11.3.6
  3. 11.3.7
  4. 11.3.8

  Once all the updates are done, customization and subsequent running of the apps works fine.

• XCode 3.0
  Apple has also released XCode 3.0, which includes DashCode for building all those snazzy widgets. Fink, at least, requires that you install XCode 3.0. I’m not even sure XCode 2.4 would install on Leopard, so you should probably get this if you’re going to be doing any compiling under Leopard
• MacPorts
  MacPorts installed fine under 10.5, but some of the ports seem not to work correctly. In trying to build wireshark, tiff failed to build with the following error message:
  ld: cycle in dylib re-exports with /usr/X11/lib/libGL.dylib
  I haven’t spent any time yet trying to sort this out, but hopefully it’s nothing too major.
• Fink
  Although there is no fink binary yet for 10.5, the source compiles and works fine. Follow the directions on fink’s homepage to download the tarball, and then just bootstrap it like this:
  $ tar zxf fink-0.27.7.tar.gz
$ cd fink-0.27.7
fink-0.27.7$ ./bootstrap
  So far, everything I’ve tried building with fink (fileutils and wireshark) has compiled fine.
• Mail.app
  Mail seemed to import all my mail and work fine, but I did have some funkiness (although to be fair, I had some funkiness in Tiger, too). In particular, lots of messages saved locally had no bodies, and both the Activity window and the new “Mail Activity” in the sidebar seemed to be broken. So, I just trashed my ~/Library/Mail folder and com.apple.mail.plist and started over. Since I did this, Mail is much better behaved, and I was able to manually import all my old local folders. I still haven’t gotten my digital signature working yet – it’s in my keychain, but Mail doesn’t see it.
• SafariBlock
  My favorite ad-blocker for Safari doesn’t seem to work in Leopard. I found reference to Apple’s developer release notes stating that InputManagers are deprecated in Leopard and may be removed in future releases. There’s a blog post here with a potential workaround, but I haven’t tried it myself. I may try Privoxy to see if it meets my needs, although it may be a bit overkill.

That’s it for now. I’ll post more comments as I run across any other interesting tidbits or gotchas…

Adblock Plus not only hides annoying ads, but also prevents them from even being downloaded. You can block ads by hand by right-clicking on the ad and selecting, “Adblock Image”. Or better yet, you can subscribe to a filter list and let someone else keep track of ad servers. After installation, a window should appear allowing you to select a subscription list.

If you’re getting getting an error on your Mac whenever you try to use the built-in iSight camera complaining that “Your camera is in use by another application“..

and you’ve made dag-nabit sure there’s no other iSight hogging app running…

and you’ve rebooted…

and you’ve cmd-opt-P-R-ed…

and you’ve Software Updated…

and you’ve tried every hair-brained tip from every far-flung forum that comes up in Google…

Try taking a peek in System/Library/QuickTime and see if you’ve got a wee file by the name of Video905c.component looking all innocent and sheepish. Delete it.

Apparently there is an OS X driver used by generic brand digital keychain cameras that doesn’t play nice. At least that’s how it ended up on my MacBook Pro after an unsuccessful attempt to get a door-prize camera working under Not Windows.

File gone, iSight happy. Back to PhotoBooth distortion hilarity.

The most meta of cheat sheets is available here.

[via lifehacker]

I’m an email pack rat. I find old email messages extremely useful in the course of my work, and I accumulate gigabytes worth of them over the course of a year. But they’re only useful to me if I can find them when I need them.

I use the Thunderbird email client on Windows and found its email searching to be slow when slogging through my thousands of archived message (even when stored on local disk). So I hit on the idea of saving messages in separate folders to restrict the scope of the search. Mostly I saved them in folders named by sender (or recipient if the message was from me), and the concept was that I would remember who the sender was and thus know which folder to search for a particular message or topic. Unfortunately, this resulted in hundreds of folders and way too much clicking and dragging to archive all those messages in the right folders. Also, I frequently mis-filed messages and was inconsistent about which folder got messages sent by me to multiple recipients.

I was spending lots of tedious time filing messages and then having trouble finding what I needed because of the imprecise filing. But I couldn’t live without the messages and needed fast searching.

A Solution

Google Desktop to the rescue! I learned that Google Desktop can search Thunderbird email (full text search and very fast because it’s indexed). Installation was easy (search “Google Desktop Download”, and configuration was straightforward. I made sure the “Email” search type was checked and let it index away (Google Desktop indexes in the background and for me at least does a good job not slowing other work, even during initial indexing).

Now I just hit the Ctrl key twice in quick succession, and a helpful little “Quick Search Box” pops up for me to type in my Desktop search criteria (make sure this is enabled in the “Display” preferences). I type in searches like “from:franklin printing meeting” to search full (in this case for messages sent by me with the words printing and meeting). Google Desktop rapidly presents me with messages of interest. When I choose one, it comes up in a browser with links to open the message in Thunderbird (doesn’t always work in the versions I’m using right now, but I trust our friends at Google and the Mozilla foundation will take care of this), see other messages in the thread, or reply or forward. Yay! This is a massive improvement over my old approach of piecemeal searching in Thunderbird: easier, faster, more accurate, and more comprehensive!

A further benefit is that I now don’t need to think about where I archive messages. I simply drag them from my in box to a “Filed” folder on the IMAP server – no more repetitive-stress-syndrome-inducing scrolling through hundreds of folders to file messages in the right ones. When my IMAP quota is full (Dartmouth has a 500MB per-user limit), I will simply drag the entire contents of the “Filed” folder onto a local disk archive.

A pleasant surprise about Google Desktop and Thunderbird is that Google Desktop actually indexes my in box too (handy for folks who have a habit of leaving hundreds or thousands of messages in their in box). I think this works because it is indexing the cached copies, so you probably need to make your in box available off line for this to work.

Another nifty feature is that the Google Desktop searches other file types if I tell it to. I find it useful that relevant PDF or Word or Excel documents sometimes pop up in a search.