Technical stuff » quickies

OSX list USB devices (lsusb equivalent)

Georgiana — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 11:35:50 +0000

Linux users have the lsusb command to list all their usb devices.
The Mac OSX command line equivalent is
system_profiler SPUSBDataType

For a visual alternative in Lion, the steps are:

click the apple in the top left corner
choose About This Mac
click on the More Info… button to access the System Information application
click on the System Report… button
under Hardware group, there’s the USB option that we were searching for

I needed this information to access my HTC phone with Android that I had connected via USB.

How to fix assets in Symfony2

Georgiana — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 10:30:28 +0000

Did you forget to

php app/console assets:install web/

Make sure you start your assets in symfony2 journey from this introductory Assetic presentation.

hCard brief introduction

Georgiana — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 22:24:58 +0000

Below you can find a brief list to get you started.

reading start point, have a look at some examples, or simply generate yours
for more advanced information, refer to the semanticweb.org
validate it

place a link to

http://h2vx.com/vcf/your.website.com/contact-page/

or to

http://feeds.technorati.com/contacts/http://your.website.com/contact-page/

, replacing

your.website.com/contact-page/

with your correct online URL

discover hCards in the web pages you crawl with the Semantic Radar or Tails Export add-ons for Firefox

Wireshark not listing interfaces on Mac OS X

Georgiana — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 09:04:08 +0000

It’s a permission problem, please check here for the solution.

Migrating phone book from Nokia XpressMusic to Android using a Mac

Georgiana — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 02:45:29 +0000

Looks complicated, huh? Especially when people say there’s no real Mac-to-Android sync software.

But we’re all tekkies here, we solve stuff, and don’t complain about it And we’re using free software to do it, yummy!

All you need is PhoneDirector to get your Nokia agenda on the Mac. Just install it and follow the instructions, you should be just fine. After you get all this, export them into a .vcf file, we’ll need it in a moment.

Now, to get this info in the Android is really a piece of cake. Go to the Contacts settings in Gmail and import the .vcf file you generated with PhoneDirector. Then go to your Android phone and sync your contacts. Ta-da! Welcome to the Google world!

NB: if you’re having a hard time finding the Contacts in the Gmail app, like I did, look immediately under your labels list.

The above steps weren’t good for you? Then you might need to take a look at this.

How to restore your Mac settings

Georgiana — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 23:38:19 +0000

If you installed a program which took the horrible approach of rewriting your .profile settings file and you discover you don’t have access to the shortcuts from your terminal anymore, here’s how to fix it:

open a terminal window and make sure you navigate to the home directory

cd ~

open your profile settings using the full path to your editor (I use nano):

/usr/bin/nano .profile

make sure your PATH setting contains at least the following information:

export PATH=/usr/bin:/bin:

make the shell reload your profile

. ./.profile

Now we’re talking! You can ls and sudo again!

Wget: filename too long

Georgiana — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 14:22:04 +0000

wget -O short_name.ext "your URL"

How to change your layout in Android landscape / portrait mode

Georgiana — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 19:12:30 +0000

In the res folder we are used to having a layout folder, in which we keep the XML files which describe our application’s layouts. This trick will show you how to improve the view in landscape or portrait mode, whichever you might need.

How do I quickly change my emulator from portrait to landscape and viceversa?

Use Ctrl + F11 to test around.

Can I only improve the layout and use no extra code?

The short answer is yes, definitely.

The layouts in /res/layout are applied to both portrait and landscape, unless you specify otherwise. Let’s assume we have /res/layout/home.xml for our homepage and we want it to look differently in the 2 layout types.

create folder /res/layout-land (here you will keep your landscape adjusted layouts)
copy home.xml there
make necessary changes to it
run the application in the emulator and test it using the Ctrl + F11 combination

How to use Android emulator debugging log

Georgiana — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 13:50:12 +0000

Launch the emulator
wait until it finished loading
open up a terminal
use the following command: adb logcat

Don’t forget to have fun!

Forced to develop on Windows? Need a better Putty?

Georgiana — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 15:53:22 +0000

I first used Putty Tray. But today I found a tabbed version, the Putty Connection Manager.

Both do get minimized in the taskbar, isn’t this cool?