Life in the Matrix...

For this post i decided to explain how i've setup Common Lisp Hunchentoot webserver running on Ubuntu 8.10 and how to set it up for remote interaction using Emacs and SLIME (Superior Lisp Interaction Mode for Emacs).

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Coming to OSX from a Linux background it struck me hard that there isn't a single Finder preference/option to allow me to see files starting with a dot (hidden files) in Finder listings. Knowing that this is probably due to security concerns that not-so-advanced users will mess up their whole system, nevertheless i believe Finder should provide this option. I'm used to the great Xubuntu where i simply press Ctrl+h to enable or disable viewing the hidden files, this might not sound like it but for me this is a real productivity booster.

Although i couldn't find such a perl in OSX i did however find on google a way to allow me to view those pesky files with Finder.

Fire up a terminal session and type the following command:

defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles YES

Then simply hold down Option and click on the Finder icon until it the context menu shows up and then select relaunch. Voilá, if everything went ok nest time you open finder it should show all those files for you.

I always wanted to give Apple's OsX a test-drive, it always appealed to me as the best looking Operating System out there but i would never throw away all that money without first giving it a real test-drive. When some of my colleagues got their hands on their macbooks and started bragging about how great it was, making fun about everyone else at the office, i decided i really had to give it a try. I had already heard several stories about people successfully installing OsX on regular PC's and since i couldn't really spend the bucks to get the real thing i had to give it a try.

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While installing some software on my virtual machine i ran out of disk space so i went out googling and found a nice tutorial. I don't really like doing this, kind of pasting someone else's article but, since i keep this blog mainly as a reference to myself and i believe i will most surely need it later, i'll explain here step by step what i did to accomplish this task.

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At work we have been using Google apps to host some of our customers domain e-mail accounts. The other day one of our customer collaborators complained that when accessing e-mails through IMAP (on Outlook 2007) he was getting the following error:

Web login required (Failure)

After repeatedly checking his IMAP settings i decided it was not a problem with his settings so I looked around the web and found a quite dated tutorial (back from 2008). Since all my other approaches hadn't worked i decided to try it, here's the steps i followed:

1. Logged in to the web portal with the gmail account that was returning that error
2. Disabled both POP3 and IMAP functionality and logged off
3. Logged in with a Administrator privileged account for that domain
4. Goto "Domain Settings" and section "New Services and Pre-release Features"
5. Disable "Automatically add new services when they become available" and "Enable pre-release features"
6. Saved these changes
7. Re-enabled "Automatically add new services when they become available" which was the one i wanted
8. Saved these changes
9. Logged off (as Administrator)
10. Logged in to the web portal with the gmail account that was returning the error.
11. Re-enabled both POP3 and IMAP functionality.

After this the user reported that IMAP was working again for him. It amazes me that such a simple and dated (almost 2 years now) solution like this has worked but luckily it did.