Technobabble

With OSX El Capitan 10.11 (build 15A204h), the Amazon Workspaces client is still broken. Now the "Internet Connection" works but the next check for the "Registration service" fails.

Here are the instructions to install RMySQL on OS X "Yosemite": Download and install the MySQL community server for OS X . You will need a free Oracle account to complete the download. At the time of this blog post, I installed mysql-5.6.22-osx10.9-x86_64 via the DMG archive. By default MySQL will be installed in /usr/local/mysql-5.6.22-osx10.8-x86_64 (if you use a different version, look for an equivalently named directory under /usr/local). Download sources for the RMySQL package from CRAN . At the time of this blog post, I downloaded RMySQL_0.9-3.tar.gz . Open a Terminal window and run: export DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/mysql-5.6.22-osx10.8-x86_64/lib:$DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH You may want to consider adding this line to .bashrc as well. In the same terminal window compile and install RMySQL using this command (in a single line): R CMD INSTALL --configure-args="--with-mysql-dir=/usr/local/mysql-5.6.22-osx10.8-x86_64 --with-mysql-inc=/usr/local/mysql-5.6.22-osx10.8...

Oracle's JDK 7 installer for the Mac somehow thinks that OS X Yosemite's 10.10 version number is an unsupported version. There's a simple trick to fool the installer by giving it a version number that it expects. Open a Terminal window and edit the file /System/Library/CoreServices/SystemVersion.plist as root/Administrator. If you are familiar with vi , simply run sudo vi /System/Library/CoreServices/SystemVersion.plist . The file should look something like this: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd"> <plist version="1.0"> <dict>      <key>ProductBuildVersion</key>      <string>14A329f</string>      <key>ProductCopyright</key>      <string>1983-2014 Apple Inc.</string>      ...

Tristan Hume has an excellent article on improving window management in OS X, using Slate . Well worth the time to read that and configure Slate to your liking. I'm already feeling much more productive, all without spending on window management software - Slate is free! Here's my .slate configuration file .

Here are the steps to install QuantLib , a free/open-source library for quantitative finance, on OS X Mountain Lion: Install MacPorts . Install Boost using MacPorts by running this command: sudo port install boost This will install Boost and its dependencies under /opt/local . Download and extract the QuantLib sources . Configure QuantLib by running: ./configure --with-boost-include=/opt/local/include --with-boost-lib=/opt/local/lib/ Run make , followed by sudo make install .