How to add drivers to SQuirreLSQL.app

If you’re a SQuirreL SQL fan like me, and you use a Mac, you probably also want to know how to add a driver to the OSX version of the application. Most people just point to an external jar file, but you can also add drivers to the application bundle.  There’s not much to it, but it took me some time to discover that I actually had to edit the plist file in the bundle after adding the driver.

As you can see on the left, my SQuireLSQL.app now comes with the Oracle OCI and Thin driver built in, and because they are part of the application bundle, I can’t wreck my installation by misplacing jarfiles or reconfiguring classpaths. Nice.

If you want to drivers to your SQuireLSQL.app yourself, here’s what you need to do:

Eclipse 3.4.1, OSX and Java 1.6

I recently downloaded Eclipse 3.4.1 for Mac OSX, and tried starting it using the eclipse.app icon. It did not work, and I noticed a message in /var/log/system.log telling me that the JVM could not be loaded.

Hex color picker for OSX

If you’re working on some source code and you quickly need to insert a hexadecimal color code for a color you currently have on your screen, then here is a neat little trick I found:

First, install Hex Color Picker by Waffle software. It will add an extra option to the built-in OSX color picker to show you the selected color in Hex.

To reach the color picker, you usually start up any application which uses the standard OSX color picker and just choose “choose color”. What you can also do, is have the OSX color picker behave as a standalone application in 3 simple steps:

Programmer Quotes

On StackOverflow, there is a question asking for the greatest programmer quotes you know. In the top 3 quotes are the following two quotes which I think hold much truth:

“Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.” – Rick Osborne

“Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.” - Brian Kernighan

These two quotes are briliantly summing up the usual rant I always use. “if my phone rings at 3 a.m. for a prio 1 production issue, I want to be able to easily read the code. And I’m not going to be awake or cheerful at that time of night.” I guess at that time of night, it’s easy to awaken the violent psychopath in me, and so it better not be “smart” code. CVS blame support anybody?

Wiimote Whiteboard

For people wanting to have an interactive whiteboard but don’t have the money, Johnny Chung Lee has found the solution. Using a Wiimote, he can track an infrared lightsource (like an LED) and use that to control the mousecursor. I tried some software on the Mac and the PC, and I actually got both to work without too much trouble.