This section contains short little posts and links to other websites with “quick tips” that don’t really need a whole post about them. In some cases they more or less replicate what is in online documentation but are used to bring attention to little known functions etc that my regular readers may not know about; or for quick personal reference.
The default behavior of the Finder on OSX is to hide UNIX files such as /usr /var etc and dot files (e.g. .htaccess). This quick tip shows how to enable (or disable) showing these files.
This is a quick post for my own reference to show how to search Gmail by date range. I often write little tips like this for myself so I have somewhere easy to reference them as I forget this sort of stuff all the time 🙂
I get a lot of emails from servers addressed to a specific email address sending reports and all sorts of other stuff. I have filters in Gmail to put them into a specific folder automatically, skipping the inbox and I never actually see them. Emails reporting errors don’t get filtered in the same way so those always hit my inbox.
So these error emails are pretty much just there in case I need to look at them for some reason. Every now and then I like to purge out older server emails and the easiest way is to search for them by date range and then delete.
These server emails get filtered into a label called “Servers”. To search for them prior to e.g. May 1st 2011 (so all emails from April 30th and earlier) do a search like this:
label:servers before:2011/05/01
If you wanted to search for any email between say May 23rd and May 29th 2011, do this:
after:2011/05/23 before:2011/05/30
Note that the “after” date needs to be the date searching from (it includes that date) but “before” needs to be the day after you want to search to.
This quick tip shows how to find all the symbolic links under a particular directory using the “find” command from
If you are like me and you prefer to have tabs and not spaces for code indentation and are using Netbeans, it uses spaces by default. This quick little post shows how to use tabs instead.
Go to Netbeans -> Preferences -> Editor -> Formatting on aMac
or Tools -> Options -> Editor -> Formattingon Windows
Uncheck the box that says “Expand tabs to spaces”
If you don’t like the default 8 spaces for a tab then change the “Number of spaces per indent” option as well to a more sensible number like 4.
Click “OK” and you are done.
A little while ago I posted how to use the Linux/Unix/OSX find command to locate files bigger or smaller than a particular size but didn’t cover how to find zero length files. This is shown here.
So you need to put a tab on the command line when using BASH on Linux, Mac, BSD? How to do it? The tab character is usually used for command completion etc so typing in a tab won't render one on the command line.
This issue has been bugging me for a while and I just worked out how to solve it: if you’re using NetBeans and add some files to the project outside NetBeans (like copying and pasting in Finder/Explorer) then they don’t show up in the list of files in the projects tree view.
PHP supports opening remote URLs (e.g. http://www.example.com/something.htmnl) using the fopen and similar functions. It is possible to disable this function in the PHP configuration so this quick tip shows how to check if it is possible to open remote URLs.
I run my webserver and file server from a virtual machine with the files shared using Samba (yes, now that I’m running on OSX I should really share the files with NFS but that’s for another day). When trying to copy files from the Mac to the Samba share I was getting the error message "The operation can’t be completed because you don’t have permission to access some of the items".
If you have some random file name extension (such as .ss for SilverStripe templates) which Netbeans doesn’t know about, it’s easy to configure it to use the correct syntax highlighting.
