Category Archives: Tips & Tricks

Run IE7, IE8 and IE9 under Mac OS X using the free VirtualBox from Oracle

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Most of the web developers that use Apple computers have to somehow test their projects under Microsoft IE7, IE8 and IE9 browsers. Achieving this is possible by using the virtualization software: Wine, Parallels, VMWare Fusion or VirtualBox, with the added cost of a Windows license (or by using the  Adobe BrowserLab, but that’s a different story).

Well, here is a way how to accomplish this totally for free, by using the Oracle’s free VirtualBox and the free Internet Explorer testing virtual machines from Microsoft. The latter need a bit of tinkering to make them work under the VirtualBox, and there is a script to that for you automatically. Continue reading →

Controlling the Spotlight indexing on Mac OS X

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Sometimes your Spotlight starts to behave by re-indexing your disks over and over again, and you’ll either need to clear the Spotlight index for the drive or just disable the indexing for that particular volume if you don’t use the search often. The Mac OS X Spotlight is controlled by the ‘mdutil’ tool on Snow Leopard and Lion, so first of all get the current state of the things by typing this into your Terminal session:

mdutil -sa

The output will show the Spotlight index status for all connected volumes.

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Downloading files from the Internet using the command line on Mac OS X

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The first time you try to download a file using the Terminal on Mac OS X, you’ll find out that there is no ‘wget’ or ‘fetch’ installed into the base system. Inquiring minds can find a solution after bashing their Tab key for a few near-random auto-complete guesses, but I’ll save you from that humiliating experience 🙂 Please welcome the ‘ftp’ tool. A fast visit to the man page for it will result in knowing that it’s not limited to the FTP only, and you can use it to download files over HTTP as well.

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