Category: Mac How To

Google announced Google App Engine, their long-awaited answer to web services offered by Amazon and others. Google took a different approach to their competitors by including a full application stack for developers. This made App Engine less flexible, by forcing developers to use the programming tools and libraries…

The other day at work someone asked me if there was some way to have OS X run an rsync command to an external drive whenever it was plugged in. Well, given that we were talking about Mac OS 10.4, it was easy to answer….

Last week, Chris Lattner — who manages the Clang, LLVM, and GCC groups at Apple — announced that work was well underway to bring ‘blocks’ to the GCC and Clang compilers. ‘So what?’, I hear you ask, ‘My kid has been using blocks since he was 9…

If you do any sort of programming, be it in traditional languages like C or Fortran, scripting in Bash or Python, or web development, you should be using some form of Source Control Management (SCM) system. (You can even use SCM for your Latex documents.)…

We’ve covered using launchd in the past for things like detecting when external drives are plugged in to initiate a backup. In this simple tutorial, we’ll demonstrate how to backup the core service settings of your Mac OS X Server (AFP, SMB, Xgrid etc…) and also…

On quite a few occasions, MacResearch readers have posted questions asking how you parse CSV (comma-separated values) data in Cocoa. CSV is a simple standard that is used to represent tables; it is used in widely varying fields, from Science to Finance — basically anywhere…

This has nothing to do with science, although it is Mac related. In fact i really shouldn’t be posting about this, but what the heck, it’s so much fun I thought I’d share. I was cleaning out my cshrc file of old cruft and came…

Unless you were holed up in a cave last week, you probably saw our announcement of OpenMacGrid. Gaurav Khanna will be writing a bit about the progress of OpenMacGrid soon, but I wanted to use my weekly post to demonstrate just how easy it is to…

Standard plotting and visualization packages are adequate for most researchers, most of the time, but what if you have to follow a path less travelled, and need diagrams that are not easily generated by existing software? With a little Python, you can relatively easily produce…

In this tutorial we are going to take a closer look at the Accelerate framework, how to use it and discuss some of its features. It’s been a while since I spoke about Accelerate, so if you don’t recall the general overview you can view…