RogBlog » Technical

Getting sendmail to work on OS X 10.5 (Leopard)

rlevy — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 16:51:16 +0000

With the aid of a couple of helpful blogs (here and here), I have managed to get command-line email-sending capability via sendmail going, at least as long as I’m on UCSD campus:

$ sudo postfix start $ sudo postconf -e myhostname= $ sudo postconf -e relayhost=

And sendmail just works now! Pretty cool, eh?

UPDATE: it’s a bit tricky to get Bcc: effects with sendmail, but I’ve found a way to do it. Specify all the addresses that you want to receive an email as arguments of sendmail, and then include an explicit From: line in standard input. For example:

*** Filename: sendmail.test *** To: Jane Doe From: John Doe Subject: bcc test (put what you want here) *** End file sendmail.test ***

$ sendmail abc@def.com vw@xyz.com < sendmail.test

Using tab on Mac to change focus in web browsers and pop-up windows

rlevy — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 17:21:12 +0000

Since switching from PC to Mac three years ago, probably the single most annoying user-interface feature on Mac has been the loss of flexibility in using Tab and Shift+Tab to move focus: to buttons and menus in web browsers, and between buttons in pop-up dialogue windows.

Thanks to Tony Spencer, I am now able to do this! It’s a simple setting: in System Preferences, select Keyboard & Mouse > Keyboard Shortcuts. At the bottom of the window there will be a button for changing Full Keyboard Access from Text boxes and lists only to All controls. Selecting the latter will give you full flexibility of changing focus with Tab and Shift+Tab.

One other crucial tidbit: on pop-up windows, when you have moved focus to a non-default button, in order to select that button you need to press Space rather than Return/Enter.

Amazing that it took me three years to figure this out…!

tipa and linguex heads-up

rlevy — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 18:06:25 +0000

If you use LaTeX for linguistics paper writing, and use the tipa package for IPA and the linguex package for formatting examples, you may occasionally encounter the problem of odd formatting of examples. Just be sure to call \usepackage{tipa} before \usepackage{linguex}, not after!

Papers: first impressions

rlevy — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 22:43:01 +0000

I’m using the Papers program for the first time, on a 30-day trial basis. It seems like one of those programs whose benefits aren’t totally obvious until you really have been using it for a little while. The problem for me has generally not been having papers scattered on my hard drive — I already have a “papers” directory for this — but rather things like multiple copies and, most crucially, BibTeX export. I’m banking on BibTeX export saving me enough time to make Papers worth it for that feature alone. Some thoughts:

Computational linguistics conference proceedings papers should be obtained through the ACM repository
Psycholinguistics journal articles work well through Google Scholar.
JSTOR doesn’t work yet
The journal Language can be obtained through Project MUSE.
I prefer Skim to Preview for PDF reading. Cmd-Alt-O will open the currently displayed paper in Skim.

The best WinBUGS tutorial

rlevy — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 20:02:34 +0000

I’ve decided that the best get-started tutorial for WinBUGS is this one:

http://mathstat.helsinki.fi/openbugs/data/Docu/Tutorial.html

Also, kudos to Yarden Katz for publishing a webpage on how to use WinBUGS under Darwine on OS X:

http://web.mit.edu/yarden/www/bayes.html

(of course, I am actually using JAGS for most things these days.)

Installing rjags on 64-bit Debian (etch)

rlevy — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 21:19:28 +0000

I’m learning how to use JAGS for a variety of hierarchical Bayesian models. I had a bit of trouble figuring out how to install it on my Debian (etch) server, so I thought I would share how I got it to work (thanks to Brian Ripley and Martyn Plummer for suggestions):

# 1. configure and install JAGS ./configure --with-jags-modules=/usr/local/lib/JAGS/modules --libdir=/usr/local/lib64 make make check sudo make install

# 2. install rjags

sudo R --with-jags-modules=/usr/local/lib/JAGS/modules/ CMD INSTALL rjags_1.0.3-4.tar.gz

And this worked. Critical was to make sure that the JAGS .so files wind up in /usr/local/lib64.

iPhone 2.0, first look

rlevy — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 21:25:06 +0000

I downloaded iPhone 2.0 onto my first-generation iPhone yesterday. I seem to have avoided some of the hiccups that others complained about. I’ve only had time to explore the new iPhone a bit, but my top 3 impressions:

Zenbe lists are pretty cool, and fill the function gap left by the fact that iCal doesn’t have to-do lists on the iPhone.
iCal now has multiple calendars. Hooray!
Camera now says “Camera would like to use your current location” — yech. Has iPhone been geotagging my pictures? I don’t want this. At least I can say “no” now, but it’d be nice to be able to turn this off by default.

good command-line PNG viewer for Linux

rlevy — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 23:12:12 +0000

I’ve found that xzgv is pretty nice!

Auto reload all the time with Skim

rlevy — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 20:30:36 +0000

I’ve said before how much I like the streamlined browser Skim. One of the best parts is that it will auto-reload PDFs that change on disk (e.g., when you recompile a LaTeX document into a PDF). I just found out how to make it even better, so that Skim never asks you whether to reload, it just does it automatically:

$ defaults write -app Skim SKAutoReloadFileUpdate -boolean true

Voila!

BibTeX gotcha

rlevy — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 00:32:00 +0000

For a long time I have been unsuccessful at using the crossref field in BibTeX properly for the situations where I need it most: when I have multiple chapters in an book consisting of an edited collection of articles in my database, and I want to provide book-level information through a cross-reference. I always got the error

Warning--empty booktitle in

which was rather frustrating.

However, I’ve finally figured out that for a book or proceedings, you need to specify both title and booktitle fields in the book entry. Most of the time the contents of these fields will be identical. Looking back at the Guide to LaTeX, this is a no-brainer, but it stumped me for a very long time. May this blog post save you similar agony!