To Do through GMail

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I am always trying to find a better way to create my To Do List. Years ago I kept a list in LaTeX and would print it out everyday. That worked well for quite a while. More recently I had been keeping an OpenOffice document and would print it out irregularly. It has sort of worked and it sort of doesn’t work. Just yesterday I ran into http://www.activeinboxhq.com/ which is a small framework around GMail that is interesting. I created a new email address and downloaded their free version and will probably play with it for a while. One quick interesting thing is that I would be able to email To Dos to myself when I think of them as it is all based on an email address.

Mounting a Time Capsule under linux

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My Mac has taken a bit of a dive so I switched over to using the Ubuntu side exclusively. It has been great, Ubuntu has been very solid and I love all the applications. One thing I wanted to do was to mount my Time Capsule on the Linux side. For the most part this should be really easy (either through fstab or through smbmount from the command line). Well, I had lots of problems.

retrying with upper case share name
mount error 6 = No such device or address
Refer to the mount.cifs(8) manual page (e.g.man mount.cifs)

I worked on this for a while and looked all over for a solution. It is 2011 (now) and surely this still can’t be an issue. Well, finally figured it out. Don’t include the Time Capsule name in the mount call, just include the directory name:

[cc lang="bash"]sudo mount -t smbfs -o user=craig,pass= ,rw,uid=503,gid=10000 –verbose //10.0.1.1/craigCapsule/data /media/capsule
[/cc]

and remove the “craigCapsule” and so it is just:

[cc lang="bash"]sudo mount -t smbfs -o user=craig,pass= ,rw,uid=503,gid=10000 –verbose //10.0.1.1/data /media/capsule
[/cc]

Make sure you use the uid and gid (set to your user account) otherwise you will not be able to write to it.

Python plots with no display

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I have been working on some offline processing of data and creating graphs on the fly which automatically get updated on a website. What has been problematic is to do this without a display (for example run from a cron job). I found a solution which seems to work with the EPD package I am using on a linux box.

[cc lang="python"]
from matplotlib.figure import Figure
from matplotlib.backends.backend_agg import FigureCanvasAgg

fig = Figure(figsize=(4,4))
fig.gca().plot(range(1,10))
canvas=FigureCanvasAgg(fig)
canvas.print_figure(‘bob.png’, dpi=150)
[/cc]

There are likely some other ways to do it, but this works for me.

Open Terminal from Finder

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I am always looking for ways of emulating many Linux things on the Mac. I must admit I use the Terminal window almost exclusively for doing my work but there are times that using the Finder is just faster.

Then, often when I find the directory I have been looking for I want to get a Terminal window that is in that same directory. Typically I have just opened a Terminal window and cd’ed to the location – which can be quite laborious. So, finally, I looked around for a solution. I found a nice little Finder button called cdto. This will put a button on the Finder window and open a Terminal in the same directory as where the Finder is currently pointing.

Nice…