I know what you’re thinking, why should I care about Regular Expressions? I failed in math and don’t like Simple or Advance expressions, so why would I care about regular ones? Well now is your chance to learn something, and it doesn’t really have anything that you will recognize that deals with math… well maybe.

Anyhoo, Regular Expressions or Regex for short, are snippets of symbols that represent the type of content you would like to find within a given body of text or string. They can be very handy, and are extremely useful for developers that are trying to parse content out of a mass of other content. But while they are useful (at least for me) they could be a pain to try and figure out what expression will get to your specific content so you can get on with conquering the world. I’ve used a myriad of online tools to help me with this process, but it is always a seeming inconvienience to have to remember where “that” website is to work out my regex statement.

But no more, a great little app is available called Reggy, this little app gives you the ability to insert a segment of content and then play with your regular expression until you get it to grab exactly what you are looking for. Brilliant if you ask me, I just don’t know why I didn’t think of it earlier. hehe. So take a look at this very simple but powerful tool that should speed up your development workflow.

Reggy Project Homepage

Download Reggy

Ok, so you’re using your mac with all it’s apple goodness, and attempt to connect to another computer using the built in ScreenSharing capability. Your computer prompts you for a username and password to authenticate with the remote computer with a neet little login window. You put your login credentials in to the provided boxes and hit “connect”, immediately a little spinning wheel appears along with a “Connecting” message. You wait, and wait, and nothing seems to be happening. You attempt to connect again and you get right in to your screensharing session, but that “Connecting” window just keeps hanging around, and even when it’s not in focus it is still overlaying all other windows on your computer. It becomes rather annoying, and finally you shut off your computer out of desperation and restart. Whew the infamous box has been removed, but you also have to reopen all of your programs and documents to get back to a productive state.

I’ve been there myself many times, it is both annoying and frustrating. But there is a sure cure, besides restarting your computer. This little window is the “NetAuthAgent” and can easily be terminated from the Activity Monitor. Here’s how to do it.

From GUI:

1. Launch the Activity Monitor program (in Applications/Utilities).
2. In the Process Name list, look for “NetAuthAgent”. It may show as “Not Responding”.
3. Select NetAuthAgent, and then click Quit Process (the red stop sign button at the top of the Activity Monitor window). Then, click Force Quit.

From Terminial:

1. ps ax | grep NetAuthAgent
2. kill <pid-of-the-process-found-above>

or the Single Command From The Terminal:

$ killall NetAuthAgent

And there you have it, now you can get back to work and share screens all day long!

Visit the: Original forum post that gave me the lead I have just posted about

I’m sure you’ve been there, working away on your next development project, pushing to meet a deadline for work, or writing that ever elusive thesis paper. And suddenly you notice that you have new emails, or that your friend has just tweeted some new nonsense, or that someone has just decided that they need to IM you about something, or… you get the picture. When you notice that distraction, it derails your train of thought while you direct your mental energies to reading/responding to the distraction. Then when you return to the business at hand you find that you take a little while to get back into the groove.

This is one of the never ending problems with our individual productivity, there are a million different things that are competing for a chance to distract us from being productive.

This is where Think comes in. This handy little app tries to do the same thing as Spirited Away (that we reviewed previously), but throws a new twist on it. Instead of hiding your unused applications, Think allows you to bring one app into focus and hide all other applications behind a covering of darkness… or some other covering if you so choose.

So the basic effect is to Black/White/some other color OUT everything else on your desktop, (icons, applications, etc…) so that you can focus on the application at hand, as illustrated in the screenshots below.

Select an Application

Use an Application

Think is a very simple easy to use application, it gets serious about what it does… keeping you productive.

And although Think is not Open Source, it is a Free Gift from Freeverse.com so you have nothing to loose but your distractions. Check Think out today.

Think App Homepage

Download Think

You’ve been there before, working hard on a project, opening lots of different windows for different applications, and pretty soon you cannot see what you are working on for all the other windows that are hanging around.

With Spirited Away you can avoid getting distracted by focusing on the application that you are currently using, and it alone. How does this litte app get this amazing feat done you ask?

Spirited Away pays attention to the apps that you are using, and the ones that you are not. After a predetermined amount of time (user defined, 60 seconds by default) an idle app is hidden from view. You can also select specific apps that you would like to be exempted from this “hiding” behavior by clicking the ghost icon in the menu bar. So don’t get carried away with yourself, stay focused and productive with Spirited Away.

Spirited Away Homepage

Download Spirited Away

The default forms of information that GeekTool supports are Files, Images, and Shell Commands. This allows you to display the realtime information from any file on your Mac, like Log Files or maybe a ToDo list and similar files. With the Image Plugin you can display any image from your computer or from a URL out on the internet. And with the Shell command, you guessed it, you can display any information that you can Script, AUK and/or GREP from your command line.

Each of these text information sources can be modified to be any size and use any font, style or colors that you would like, Below is a screenshot of how a couple of users use of the text and images to create an amazing way to display information on your screen.

Along with the default content display options, there are many additional “geeklets” or Geektool Plugins to expand and enhance your desktop viewing pleasure.

And best of all this little tool is Open Source, so dive in, Download Geektool, and get started Geeking out your desktop.

Geektool Homepage

Download Geektool Or pick it up on the Mac App Store

Geeklets 

SQLEditor provides the best interface that I have seen to create your database layout in a very visual format. It allows you to build your

tables specifying the column types, linking with foreign keys, and dragging the table layouts around the canvas so that you can easily understand what you were building at a glance when you come back to a project after an extended period.

But the best part comes after the database design is complete, you can export it to a PDF for distribution around the office, send it to a plotter to print a large wall size copy for reference.

But then comes the fun part, after you have made all of your changes to the database layout you can either export the contents directly to a txt file in the SQL dialect of your choice (MySQL, Oracle, Postgresql, etc…) or even connect directly to a database using JDBC drivers and propagate your changes directly to the running database server.

SQLEditor has full support for Mac OS X 10.6 and is ready to run on your Mac Development System.

Although this solution is not freeware or open source, it is an essential tool for every developer who designs or develops database integration strategies. I highly recommend this product and it is well worth the expense to purchase it for the time it will save you. But don’t worry like most software applications it comes with a hassle free 30 day free trial period so you can see how effective it will be in your development workflow.

Here is an extended list of features:

Product Homepage

Here is a short list of protocols that it supports:

• FTP
• SFTP
• WebDav
• Cloudfiles
• Google Docs
• Amazon s3

to name a few.

It’s interface is sleek and simple, providing for a seamless user experience. With support for such features as “quicklook”, “Growl”, “Spotlight”, and “Bonjour” it finds ways to fit into virtually any situation.

I have been using this app for years and it is a very effective, well rounded tool. I suggest that you never leave home without it. So without further adieu click on the link below to check out the developers website, download the app, and when you are satisfied that it is everything you ever dreamed it could be, send the developer a donation, he’s done some hard work to make sure that our lives are better and easier.

Cyberduck FTP Client Homepage

For those who are fortunate enough to find themselves doing development on the mac platform, there is an alternative, which although it may not be the newest game on the block, it is one of the best all around. Sissy FauxVelopers need not apply to use this app. It has no build your app with one click buttons. It is designed to take the development experience to the next level for those who like to get their “fingers” dirty and actually do some major textual manipulations.

From the first launch it’s basic simplicity and power are immediately perceptible. It is feature packed enough to quell the pining soul of the most advanced developer, but simple enough to handle basic text document edits. From customizable coloring of the interface (I prefer the “All Hallow’s Eve” scheme) to the elegant line numbering and code folding features in the applications “trough”, this bad boy was built to move mountains and work minor miracles.

With built in support for dozens of predominant document formats, it provides out of the box streamlining of your developer workflow while also allowing you to add your own file format specifications should you happen to be crafty enough to have come up with your own file formats and specifications.

Additionally you can create functions to validate your files layout and formatting right into your file specification. Giving you on the fly access to all the features you want when you are developing.

This great product has seen me through many development projects, and has greatly increased my development capacity through it’s simplistic yet powerful functions.Although this product isn’t free, it is well worth the €39 purchase price, and it comes with a 30 day trial for all parties that may be interested, but not yet committed to the purchase.

Go give it a test spin. All you have to loose is pain and frustration.

Download Demo

Homepage

Pretty useful information especially for someone in the IT field. Here is the POST

To reset your OS X password without an OS X CD you need to enter terminal and create a new admin account:

1. Reboot
2. Hold apple + s down after you hear the chime.
3. When you get text prompt enter in these terminal commands to create a brand new admin account (hitting return after each line):
   • mount -uw /
   • rm /var/db/.AppleSetupDone
   • shutdown -h now
4. After rebooting you should have a brand new admin account. When you login as the new admin you can simply delete the old one and you’re good to go again!

With an Intel processor under the hood, the current mac is the most versatile computer on the market, In my opinion. You can obviously run OSX on the computer. You can also run Windows, and Linux, BSD, Solaris, etc. So if there is something that you really must use windows for, Two solutions exist. Either using BootCamp to allow you to dual boot into both Windows (or some other more productive OS) and OSX. Or my favorite solution , using some virtualization sofware like Parallels or VMware Fusion. This software allows you to install and run other Operating Systems right from within OSX. With the virtualization software you have the ability to store your files outside of the windows virtual machine on your Mac, and then clone or make snapshots of your windows OS so that when (not if) windows suffers from malware or spyware or a virus, you can simply restore to your last snapshot, not loose any of your documents (because they were all saved outside of windows) and be back up and running in minutes, rather than days or weeks working with your local IT guys.

In my opinion this provides the ultimate computing solution. Safe, secure, performance in OSX that can be accented with brief musings in the Windows world, and then turned off again. Ahhhh, Computing Bliss.