10. June 2010 by admin.

gnuplot is a great open cross platform data visualization application, that beats just about every other graphing application hands down specially with large volumes of data. I use gnuplot on a daily basis to analyze application and systems performance data on my linux and windows machines. I was hoping there would be an OSX binary ready for me to download and use (wishful thinking). In order to build gnuplot on OSX from source, you will need to do the following

1. Download and install developer tools (XCode) on the OSX machine.
2. Download the gnuplot 4.4 source code.
3. gnuplot on mac does not support PNG and PDF terminals by default. In order to enable these terminals, one must install the GTK X11 package available from research.att.com. Installing the GTK package will make cairo based terminals for PNG and PDF available in gnuplot 4.4 on OSX.
4.  miscdebris.net has step by step instuctions on how to build gnuplot from the resources downloaded from above. I am mirroring the instructions here for future reference.

—x from miscdebris.net x—

1. Download the GTK_2.18.5-X11.pkg package fromhttp://r.research.att.com/ and install it
2. Add to your .profile file in the home directory:

    

    

   1	export PATH=/Library/Frameworks/GTK+.framework/Resources/bin:$PATH

3. (Re)start Terminal.app and see if pkg-config cairo --libs works.

Then download Gnuplot 4.4.0, untar, configure and compile it:

1. Download Gnuplot 4.4.0 from Sourceforge.
2. tar xzf gnuplot-4.4.0.tar.gz
3. cd gnuplot-4.4.0
4. mkdir build && cd build
5. ../configure --with-readline=bsd --disable-wxwidgets. In the configure output you should find something like

     wxt terminal: no (requires C++, wxWidgets>2.6, cairo>0.9, pango>1.10)   cairo-based pdf and png terminals: yes

6. make
7. sudo make install

Posted in gnuplot, open source, OSX | No Comments »

3. June 2010 by admin.

One day out of the blue, Firefox SSL stopped working on OSX. OSX very helpfully prompted me with the message that I should fix the issue and relaunch the application. Reinstalling Firefox did not resolve the issue. I ended up deleting my Firefox profile under ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox. This resolved the issue, however I lost all the addins that I had installed in Firefox.After reinstalling all the addins, i made a backup of my Firefox profile, so that in the future if the SSL issue should reoccur I can simply switch to the backup profile without losing any of my addins!

• Update: Deleting the cert8.db file under ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/XXXX.default is enough to resolve this issue.

Posted in Fail, SSL, Firefox, OSX | No Comments »

2. June 2010 by admin.

One of my pet peeves is the lack of a good note taking app, that works across platforms (Linux, Windows, OSX). I want to be able to write notes on whatever OS I happen to be using at the moment and then pull it up from another and from a browser and from my phone and so on. Notesync is an AIR app that works on Linux, Windows, OSX and uses Google Docs to store the notes (and so works from a browser on my computer or iphone too). It only supports simple text notes, but you will soon find yourself wondering how you got along without this app (specially if you use multiple computers and operating systems).

Posted in X Platform, Windows, Linux, Cloud, OSX | No Comments »