Downloading Z specification for mac - formal-languages

sorry if this doesn't belong in overflow but I have a real urge to continue making specifications using Z, as I've come to learn it during uni this year.
I wanted to know if its possible to download it on a mac pc, as I currently understand its normally used on Linux or SunOS but I don't have either at home. I would greatly appreciate the resources to where I can download it as I couldn't find any by googling it. I'm wanting to install zans animator and ztc type checker as well.
Thanks in advance.

Although the question was asked a year ago, here is a link on how you can do it:
http://andrius.velykis.lt/2012/09/installing-zeves-on-mac-os-x/
Other people might be interested in this.

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CLIPS decision maker frame work

I am just getting started with CLIPS and I have found a couple tutorials but I can't find many example projects. I am just trying to create a simple system to help someone pick a laptop. nothing crazy just 15 or so questions with 10 possible outcomes.
Can anyone point me towards an example project that does something similar? (maybe diagnosing some problem or recommending something else) I typically learn best from hacking together my own starter projects from examples on the internet but can't find anything similar to what I want to create
Thanks in advance
You could modify the wine recommendation example to do something similar with laptops: https://sourceforge.net/p/clipsrules/code/HEAD/tree/branches/63x/examples/wine.clp
There are also GUI wrappers for the wine examples (and others) for .NET, Java, iOS, and CGI available here: http://www.clipsrules.net/?q=node/3

Where can I get resources for developing for Mac OS Classic? [closed]

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I recently got bored and fired up my old Mac OS Classic emulator, and then got nostalgic for writing old-school applications for the system. So, my question:
Where can I get dev tools that can still target Classic? (Ideally free, since this is just for fun, but if grabbing a used version of CodeWarrior on eBay is the best way to go, so be it.)
Where can I get at least reference materials so I don't have to guess-and-check my way around Carbon/the System Toolbox?
Are there any forums still running that would be open to answering old-school Mac questions for when I get stuck?
This is purely for fun, so don't worry about how impractical this is. I know.
Where can I get dev tools that can still target Classic?
You can get Apple's command-line (yes, for Classic) developer environment, MPW, from their FTP site: ftp://ftp.apple.com/developer/Tool_Chest/Core_Mac_OS_Tools/MPW_etc./MPW-GM_Images/MPW-GM.img.bin .
The shell is fairly UNIXish, except it uses a completely different punctuation alphabet. Your backslashes, bangs, and angle brackets are no good here. You generally should use Commando instead of trying to forge command lines yourself; type a command like “make” and hit option-return to get a GUI for it.
Note that you will have to run MPW inside your Classic environment; there is no native Mac OS X version. NeXT's Project Builder (now Xcode) replaced it in the move to Mac OS X.
Where can I get at least reference materials so I don't have to guess-and-check my way around Carbon/the System Toolbox?
Google search for site:developer.apple.com "inside macintosh. Good luck—they've started burying this stuff. Currently, Inside Macintosh matches will be nothing but PDF and will have titles like “IM: Text”.
There used to be web versions of Inside Macintosh, alongside the PDFs, but I think those got trashed/concealed-too-well-to-find in the last shuffle of the documentation on the site.
Carbon documentation is more available than Inside Macintosh, which refers to the old Toolbox documentation. Carbon docs will usually say whether something is only available on Mac OS X or not. If the docs don't say, the headers will. Note that Carbon requires CarbonLib on Classic, and the last version of that was 1.6.1, IIRC.
Are there any forums still running that would be open to answering old-school Mac questions for when I get stuck?
You could always ask on Stack Overflow.
There used to be web versions of Inside Macintosh, alongside the PDFs, but I think those got trashed/concealed-too-well-to-find in the last shuffle of the documentation on the site.
Nope, here is a link:
https://web.archive.org/web/20130111022302/http://developer.apple.com/legacy/mac/library/documentation/macos8/mac8.html
I know almost zero about Classic Mac programming, but there's quite a few members of the 68kMLA that are programmers specifically working on Classic programs in general and even some very early System 6 apps specifically.
The developer/maintainer of Clasilla (http://www.floodgap.com/software/classilla/) Mozilla port to OS 9 is a profilic poster there and that is perhaps the last major project targeting the Classic environment, for example.
The wiki also has some programming resources, eg. http://68kmla.net/wiki/C/C%2B%2B_Programming_for_68k
Not that great, but it has a download link for the MPW IDE.
Unfortunately, it is not specifically a programming forum but a Mac forum in general.
Good luck though!
The site URL is http://68kmla.net
I don't know where you can get CodeWarrior.
A lot of documentation is available in the Xcode documentation reader, though much is marked "legacy" etc. You might ask questions on Apple's carbon-dev mailing list; though classic questions may be considered off-topic, the list is pretty low traffic these days. You might also want to look at the wiki at carbondev.com.
You can get codewarrior at Macintosh Garden. There are more recent versions on the site, but this is the version used for developing Classilla, a browser for OS 9, so it is probably good. To find the more recent versions, just search for "CodeWarrior". I downloaded it myself, so can verify that it works.

How to stay DRY? Do Not Repeat Yourself! [closed]

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Closed 9 years ago.
I find that one of the most frustrating aspects to software development is finding a solution to a problem, forgetting it, then being faced with the same issue in the future only to forgot how you previously solved it. Or to write a useful bit of code, then on a later project not be able to find this code.
My general question is this: How do you keep track of all the new things you learn each day while programming? Does anyone have a systematic way to capture knowledge and easily and efficiently apply it in the future?
UPDATE: Thanks the for the responses, here's what you came up with:
Social
Stackoverflow
Tumblr
Twitter
Evernote
Blogs/Wikis
Code Repositories
Github
Unfuddle
LaunchPad
Google Code
Desktop
Dropbox
Yojimbo (mac)
VoodooPad (mac)
Wikidpad (win)
Surfulater
Stackoverflow is a good place to start :-)
Keeping a blog is another thing (here's mine).
Even Twitter can be useful for this.
There are also a number of "desktop wiki" applications that I find very useful: VoodooPad on the Mac and Wikidpad for Windows.
Finally, if you need to store snippets (or more) of code (that you have the rights to, of course), then there are plenty of source code repositories available now (GitHub, LaunchPad, Google Code or Unfuddle if you want complete control).
The brain has limits. Accept it.
The solution is to have tests for your code so you can merge repeated code without breaking a sweat as soon as you notice it.
I use TiddlyWiki to keep track of a lot of things. It's a one-page, self contained wiki that you can run off your desktop, or your server.
If you want a hosted solution, you can get one for free over at TiddlySpot
I'm having this problem myself too. I've just started couple months ago by adding good SO questions/answers into my favorites, even those I answered or posted. I guess that's a good start. :)
Write a blog. Publish your findings, code samples and everything else. The best way to save the knowledge for future.
I don't care too much when I forget how I solved some problem five years ago. Chances are that in the meantime, there is a better way to do it available. GIYF.
If it is for an organisation, having internal wiki page (or something similar) could help.
If it is only for you (and anyone that's interested), write a blog, favourite snippets on internet etc.
For code, a good approach (in both cases: organisation and yourself) is to keep something I call "Utilities Library". Each piece of code I like usually fits into one of the problem scopes / namespaces of the library. This way, over time, you have a neat code base that allows you to not to invent the weel again. Of course, after couple of months or years the library needs documentation to find anything in there :)
I think Evernote is one of the best resources for storing all kinds of notes. You can even upload photos of texts (say from your iphone, or just your computer), and the text will be OCR'd, so that you can free-text search for parts of the text later.
I use Yojimbo to keep track of just about every neat algorithm, code snippet, or handy idea.
A database of notes (I use an application called Surfulater) and a directory tree of source code (also kept in a Subversion repository).
If I were to start today, I'd probably use some Wiki framework to store my notes.
I always carry around all my interesting projects with me using dropbox. Then I usually know where to find the tricks I did before.
Everytime I see something good on SO I star it, everytime I see a good article on the web I bookmark it.
Keeping a blog or a tumblr is also nice.
I am used to carry my flash disk wherever I go. So, I have different folder there for C# notes, Asp.Net notes, Design Patterns etc.
And whenever I do something that I feel I can use it in the future, basically I open the relevant Word document in it, add the details and the code snippet with a header and save.
I do not know how the others do it but it really helps me.
Do not forget to add a reference index in the beginning of your document.
P.S : I also carry all the e-books in my disk. To have them all in my pocket gives me really good feeling.
I use google reader to store all the interesting blogs and I add notes on the issues it was about.For codes strangely I always forget after having solved the issue but now I either post on asp.net forum and stackoverflow. But only strange thing happened to me couple of years ago, I had an issue and I managed to research to solve it but when I reviewed some codes I had written 3 years before I saw that I had used the same function and identical code for a similar issue. I think even if I didn't remember the code, it must have been hidden somewhere in my mind :)

great first run experience [closed]

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Does anyone have good examples of software that has a fantastic first run experience? Some software obviously just works "out of the box". However, there is significant software that requires some configuration before it's usable.
Any examples would be much appreciated.
Cheers,
Yi
I was very impressed by Opera the first time I tried it; within a week I switched from Firefox. It comes with a lot of features such as an IRC and Bittorrent client, which is important to me at school, where there is a quota of 50 megs on disk space! Most of Opera's features are eventually available/copied to Firefox as plugins, but I still prefer Opera at home because the text looks better.
Time Machine for Mac OS X 10.5. If you have a Time Capsule, all you do is flick a switch in a control panel to turn it on. When you need a backed-up file you can visually go back to a point in time when you knew it existed. You can browse your hard drive (or just the directories that were backed up at that point in time) as it was in the past to retrieve it, and when you do, you can see it being copied to the present time. Gimmicky, but now I love deleting files just so I can restore them later.
Basecamp has an incredible out-of-the-box experience. This is a result of keeping things extremely simple, having a hosted solution (no install/setup) and also brief but noticeable welcome messages explaining how to get things started.
Some other examples of things that work the first time and work perfectly as soon as you start using them would be TripIt, FogBugz and BlinkSale.
How about the iPhone? Almost all Apple product are shipped with minimal manuals.
Most things from Google are good in that regard. Firefox is alright, as is OpenOffice (albeit a bit slow, but can be tweaked).
I don't think it's possible to answer this question in absolute terms. What's a fantastic "out of the box"/"first run" experience depends on what's the expectation of the person running it. If the product meets or especially exceeds that expectation, that's a great experience.
Here's a simple example. I consider Google Chrome browser to be a great first run experience because it is simple, installs nicely, and is super fast. For some others (especially many reading stackoverflow.com), it might be flawed because their expectation is that Chrome can also seamlessly import their Firefox or whatever other plugins, which was not part of Chrome's original features. So for them, it would not be a great experience because they were expecting something that wasn't there.
Apple, iPod and iTunes are other classic examples. Many people (myself included) consider finding and buying music from iTunes a great easy experience. Many others find it appalling because until recently, the music wasn't (and some of it still isn't) DRM-free.
OS X, Parallels
Windows 7, Vista (somewhat controversial I suspect)
I would say Ubuntu has a good OOB experience. It was a very simple to get installed and running. I've never bothered with the Live CD but I hear that's also great and it's fantastic how that allows you to try Ubuntu without actually having to install it.

Is QuickSilver dead? [closed]

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After having read that QuickSilver was no longer supported by BlackTree and has since gone open source, I noticed more and more people switching to/suggesting other app launchers i.e. Buttler and LaunchBar.
Is QuickSilver still relevant? Has anyone experienced any instability since it's gone open source?
Quicksilver is still alive and well. There are at least a couple of endeavours to keep it going, up to date and restructure and clean up the code base. Check out the code from Google Code.
As for launching apps, not even Spotlight comes close to how fast it is in Quicksilver.
Of course the real joy of Quicksilver is past just launching apps and using triggers, scripts and the many plugins. My workflow goes to a new level with Quicksilver. I'd be lost without it.
Update: Since posting this I switched and use LaunchBar for a while. This was during the time that QuickSilver seemed to be almost close to death. Loved LaunchBar and didn't need to switch back to QuickSilver. Recently though, I have left LaunchBar and have been using Alfred. I would highly recommend it. For me, LaunchBar and Alfred are pretty close. But, aesthetically and operationally, Alfred suits my tastes more than LaunchBar.
It still runs stably for me. I would be miserable without it.
And yeah, I would recommend switching if you only use it for an "app launcher", but launching apps is like white belt Quicksilver. I don't know of any program that lets you simply tell your computer what to do in such a simple way. And even Spotlight won't remember the keys you usually type to identify an object or action.
Ubiquity for Firefox is pretty good, but it's locked inside a browser...
I haven't used OS X in a while, but the impression I get is that Spotlight has largely negated the reason for using a launcher in the first place. Quicksilver has some cool things like direct objects built in, but by and large it was mostly used for launching apps, and Spotlight can now do that just as fast.
I also gave up on QuickSilver for a while when Leopard came out. I tried Spotlight. I gave up on that and returned. QuickSilver is much faster, and it does so much more that I missed.
I have not noticed any instability (Leopard) running B54 (3815) - it looks like the open-source version is B56A3 though.
QuickSilver is awesome when integrated with Parallels/VMWare Fusion to launch Windows apps too. You don't get the deep integration as with the various OSX plugins, but it definitely helps the dual-OS usability.
I love QS and agree that it is so productive that I am willing to put up with its flaws. I usually have to launch it several times before it gets up and running, though. To fix that issue I created a little quicksilver launcher app.
I use quicksilver all day (on latest version of OSX); and no spotlight doesn't negate it... quicksilver is still much faster for launching applications.
After Quicksilver stopped being updated for a while, I migrated to LaunchBar. Quicksilver had some occasional crashes and could be very resource intensive. LaunchBar has largely the same functionality without these problems. It is not free though.
The one thing I do miss was using QS to quickly send attachments via email to people in my address book. Highlighting the file, activate QS, Current Selection tab Mail to.. tab Person's name was just awesome.
After the 10.5.5 update, I find Spotlight to solve 99% of the things I originally used Quicksilver for and the speed is nearly identical now. Spotlight is invaluable for finding information you may not remember where or when you last saw it. Unless a major rewrite of QS causes me to reevaluate it again, I suspect Spotlight will be all I need and use.
There are a couple branches out there that are active, I think I'm currently running B56 and loving it. I have too many scripts, triggers, objects that I rely on daily...I would be lost without it.
It's 201 and it's still running strong!
QuickSilver is still alive, and well.
You can find the hub-website for all activities at http://qsapp.com/
GitHub (used for source code and issues tracking) is at https://github.com/quicksilver/Quicksilver
The latest version, B58 (3841) is quite stable on Snow Leopard (10.6.6).
No. It's back, baby.
I didn't know Quicksilver wasn't being as actively supported.
It does all I need it to do at the moment though.
Just installed LaunchBar but I can't set it to be Option + Space to "launch", I can't deal with it not using that, I'm too use to Spotlight on Command + Space and Ctrl + Space is for VS 2008 :P

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