I want to overlay text on images on OS X, preferably without installing additional software, so that, as a sysadmin, I can know at a glance that machines are up-to-date, in a way that is easily scriptable and easily modifiable, and can run without GUI access. [Being able to overlay images or apply color-changing effects would be a bonus.]
Mac OS X Leopard comes with a ton of stuff built-in: Perl, Python, Ruby, Tcl/Tk, Bash; wxWidgets, some Quartz integration, and even Objective-C integration for Python and Ruby. There must be several good ways to do this, if I were only versed in these systems.
I'm continuing to go through the examples in the /Developer folder on my computer, and I have got a partial idea of how this might be done in Cocoa and converted to PyObjC. I decided I would have to deploy ImageMagick, but in my testing, I am running into an infamous bus error, and would prefer not to have to compile ImageMagick or GraphicsMagick with all its dependancies if I can do what I need to out-of-the-box. [That said, I would consider installing additional components, but it would be a big win to have something that would work on a stock install of OS X].
This seems like it'd be relatively simple to do using Python and the Python Imaging Library (PIL). I don't think PIL is installed with OS X by default, but it's relatively easy to install manually and doesn't have a ton of dependencies. The PIL tutorials are also pretty good -- it shouldn't be too hard to whip up a command-line or GUI program to do what you want.
CocoaMagic is a single-file replacement for large parts of RMagick (Ruby integration with ImageMagick or GraphicsMagick). It should be useable as a library in its own right, or by appending things to the bottom of the script.
Related
I have Python 3 on OSX Yosemite installed with Brew. I want to make some simple charts (like in Excel). I run Python from bash. Which library should I investigate, and the proper way to have it installed? I am looking for library which is easy to install, and then easy to use. Output probably png files?
matplotlib is a good choice.
How to install it on OS-X is mentioned in the installation FAQ.
Especially in combination with IPython notebooks it gives you a nice interactive environment to play with it.
Another alternative would be gnuplot. Pre-built packages are available.
It is not tied to Python, it is basically a domain specific language for graphing. There are python bindings available, gut it is also not difficult to use it with subprocess.
If you can use commercial libraries, you may also consider ChartDirector.
I enjoy developing in Haskell, but am presently confronted with a challenge. At my place of education, I don't have administrative rights on my account. I want to debug/test while there. I need a way to run Haskell code without installing haskell-platform or ghci or anything else requiring of an administrative level of privilege. For instance, a web site which will run haskell code (abeit limited to not include file access of course) or a java utility (or standalone .app, though java is preferred due to the nature of the "parental controls"), or something else I haven't thought of. Source or compiled Java, Flash, and source code in Ruby or Python are preferred to native code. This is on Mac OS X 10.6, for reference.
You can install GHC without admin privileges, but you'll have to build from source. Check out the Building on MacOS X for more details.
Essentially, like any other open-source project, you can compile code and install it, generally, anywhere on your filesystem like into a folder in your home folder (I often use the ~/.local folder for that purpose).
As the linked page mentions, you can also use MacPorts and install it to any place you can write to. Once MacPorts is installed you can install GHC.
EDIT
As pointed out by Carl in the comments below, you don't need to build from source. Just grab the binary tarball from http://www.haskell.org/ghc/download_ghc_7_4_1#binaries.
In addition to all the other ideas, several companies will rent you virtual (cloud) linux servers for a few cents an hour. You have root on those and can install whatever you want, then freeze the image until you need it again.
Normally this might not be advantageous over a local solution if you can make one work, but a possible extra benefit would be that your work can stay on a single "computer" which you could access while sitting in front of any variety of modern PC that might be available to you on a given day.
An alternative not only for Haskell is http://ideone.com/
For the website option, TryHaskell will hardly cut it, it's way to limited.
codepad, OTOH, is more liberal, and should be of more use.
But honestly the bindist option is the best one, clearly!
If you truly can't install anything, then there's
http://tryhaskell.org/ -- like GHCi, but you can't load modules, which means not only that you can't use many standard functions (say, the functions in Data.List), but also that you can't use certain language features (like user-defined algebraic data types).
I also remember a hpaste-style site which executes its code -- and allows you to have private pastes -- but I can't remember it at the moment. Edit: I was thinking of http://codepad.org/ -- thanks #Mog
Try http://hiji.tinyrocket.se/ It is a haskell interpreter written using javascript.
http://ghc.io/ GHC.IO is a version of the Haskell interactive interpreter, ghci, that runs online in a web browser.
You just need to install homebrew, which you can do without root rights if you do so in your home directory. You can then brew install cabal-install
which will automatically install cabal and ghc, or brew install stack to install stack.
There is a web-based interpreter for Haskell at http://tryhaskell.org/. However, it may not provide enough functionality for your requirements.
I need some smalltalk with GUI for my homework, and I'm running Mac OS X Lion (10.7).
I've seen that unix users usually use GNU Smalltalk and GTK+.
I've tried to install them from different versions of sources and all of them give some errors.
Then I've used MacPorts, but that installation breaks GTK+ bindings for gst.
Finally I've tried to install it using fing package manager (because GNU states that I should install everything nice) but there is no smalltalk package for 10.7 OS (though there is for previous ones).
Is there some way to use smalltalk under Mac OS Lion, or should I for example run Ubuntu on virtual machine?
You could also try Pharo, which is a fork of Squeak.
http://www.pharo-project.org/home
Uko,
Have you looked at Squeak? Its an open source version of Smalltalk which is really fun to use and is supported on most platforms.
See:
http://squeak.org/
You will need a specific SqueakVM for the Mac:
http://www.squeakvm.org/mac/
Let me know if you have any further questions...
Squeak or Pharo are real Smalltalks (unlike GNU). This means they have a Smalltalk specific IDE. IDEs were invented by the creators of Smalltalk, so whatever you think you know about IDEs, you probably don't.
My video series, Squeak from the very start, shows how to download the latest Squeak Smalltalk and get started with it. Pharo isn't any harder to install either.
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6601A198DF14788D&feature=view_all
You can also give the Personal Use version of VisualWorks a spin:
http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/main/developer-community/trying-cincom-smalltalk/try-cincom-smalltalk/
I'm assuming you'll get a 7.8(.1?) version there. The OSX skin is pretty dated. I promise it's getting better. Look for 7.9 soon now.
I would like to build a GUI for an OCaml application I'm writing. My first idea was to use GTK+. I would like my application to run on Macs, Linux, Windows with a natural look and feel. I know that, while GTK+ uses X11 on the Mac by default (which looks awful), there is gtk-osx-application which uses quartz and looks natural and which I've just installed using macports.
I have three questions:
(1) Is it actually possible to use gtk-osx-application +quartz+no_x11 with OCaml? (My GODI installation which previously (with x11-based gtk2 in place) installed lablgtk2 with no problems, now (with gtk-osx-application +quartz+no_x11 and the previous x11-based gtk2 removed) is complaining about not finding /opt/local/lib/libgtk-x11-2.0.0.dylib, which is x11 related. But, as far as I know, there's no way to choose quartz over x11 when installing lablgtk2 through GODI.)
(2) If I develop my code on my Mac using the gtk-osx-application, can I use the code as is for compilation in other platforms which use different GTKs or can this bring problems?
(3) If it does bring problems, do you know of any other environment for developing GUIs in OCaml that may potentially be good regarding both look and feel and still be readily cross-used? (I am aware of labltk but I'd prefer something with more capabilities, for example, the ability to use notebooks, a.k.a tabbed panels, and being able to use Glade for rapid GUI design.)
Thanks for any help!
Cheers,
Surikator
Assuming you can get lablgtk to work, it is probably your best bet at present.
To get it working: have you tried rebuilding lablgtk after removing X11 GTK and installing Quartz GTK? A LablGTK built against X11 GTK naturally won't work on a Quartz GTK, as it will be linked against the wrong library, but a rebuild might be successful. It could also be that LablGTK won't correctly detect that X11 integration calls don't work and therefore fail to build, but I would expect that to be not-too-difficult to fix as LablGTK does support Windows.
If you develop code for GTK on Mac, it should work on other platforms just fine. You'll want to test it, of course, but it should work. Do be careful to use the GTK facilities to make things like dialog button order work properly.
I think there was at one time a set of OCaml bindings to wxWidgets, but they do not seem to be widely used and wx is painful to work with in my experience. There has also been some work on making Qt bindings, which would be awesome, but I don't think there are any projects with good headway on that front yet.
If the UI is a small-ish piece of your project, you could look at decoupling it from the backend and writing the UI in C++ with Qt, or writing platform-native UIs, and having the UI call out to OCaml code in an embedded runtime to get the real work done. But that is likely more work and may not give you much benefit, depending on your application.
So: GTK is your best option in the current landscape.
I've gone through the academic Scheme stuff (read SICP, The Little Schemer, The Seasoned Schemer, TSPL) and been playing with Scheme as a toy for a while.
But I want to get practical.
Today I needed to write a shell script to do some batch file processing, and thought "why not do it in Scheme?". I did, and it was a joy.
Now I'm forced to wonder what the best implementation is for shell script type stuff.
I know all implementations differ in terms of what they implement beyond R5RS. (Basically, they differ in all the useful and practical extensions you'd want in a scripting language).
So I'd like to pick one implementation and stick to it. I'm looking for something that:
Is cross platform (Linux, OS X, Windows).
Has extensions that are useful in day-to-day shell scripting, and those extensions are part of the base install.
Is easy to install. (e.g. there are a number of pre-built binaries, and/or it is a standard package on many distros.)
Is actively developed, with an active community.
Has Unicode support.
I've been using Gambit so far. It seems to satisfy the above constraints. PLT seems like overkill. Wondering about Guile, MIT/GNU, etc.
PLT Scheme meets all of your criteria. Since it looks like you know that already, you should to use the MzScheme package. MzScheme is the runtime on top of which all of PLT is built.
If you were to download the full PLT Scheme install it would seem large as it includes a lot of documentation and an IDE in addition to the runtime.
Have you heard of scsh? I haven't used it, but it sounds a lot like what you want.
I recommend Gauche, which is:
Running on Linux, OS X, Windows w/
Cygwin and some other UNIX-like
platforms,
The base install contains
POSIX-compliant system libraries and
useful modules such as
network protocols, file system,
DBM, multithreading, etc...
Several package system such as MacPorts, apt-get, yum are available
(or just say configure, make and
make install),
There are active English and Japanese mailing list,
Supports UTF-8 as an internal encoding.