Today, when I installed MacOS X Leopard, I was surprised to see that the update had remove Java 5 from the disk! The “1.5” folder now is just a symbolic link to the 1.6 JDK! Where is the sense in that? I guess I am not the only developer who just needs a 1.5 JDK from time to time. I don’t care about the old VM but I do care about the old class libraries. When using Java 6 libraries to develop Java 5 compatible code it can easily happen that one uses APIs that were not available in 1.5. Luckily I had time machine set up, so it was easy to get back the “real JDK”. No wonder they save so much disk space in Snow Leopard …
Where did Java 5 go?
Eric | September 3, 2009Opening multiple eclipse workspaces in MacOS X
Eric | May 2, 2009
One of the things that immediately annoyed me about MacOS X is that you cannot launch multiple eclipse workspaces using the dock because when you click on an already-opened application in the dock this will simply bring the application to the front, it won’t open another instance for it. You can use the command line but that’s awkward if you do it often…
So I coded up a solution. Simply download this DMG file, mount it and drag the application that it contains somewhere on your harddrive. Then pin that application to the dock. Every time you click it, it will open a new Eclipse instance. In the dock they will apper to the right (see above).
Note that the app assumes that eclipse is installed in /Applications/eclipse/.
Update (September 3rd, 2009)
I have updated the file so that it now contains a universal binary. Apparently the former binary was PPC only. (I only noticed when Snow Leopard asked me to install Rosetta when launching the app…)
Printing over SSH in MacOS X
Eric | May 2, 2009This week I found out that I can easily do something in MacOS X of which I did not actually think that it was easily possible: print over ssh! This is very convenient for me because I don’t have a printer at home. So now when I find some interesting article on the web and want to print it it’s just a button click and on the next morning I will find the document lying in the printer at work! Here’s how it works…
Paste the following into a file, let’s say, named “Print to remote printer” and place it into ~/Library/PDF Services/.
#!/bin/bash
TITLE="${!#}"
cat "${TITLE}" | ssh name@your.server.com lpr -P printername
