Ok, you’re a security conscious Mac user so you’ve enabled the Open Firmware password. Now you want to boot from a CD and just holding down the “C” key while the computer starts up won’t work. What do you do?
You boot into Open Firmware (hold down command-option-O-F while the computer starts up), hit return and, when prompted, enter your Open Firmware password. Then at the prompt type
boot cd:,\\tbxi
47DN8DWPETEH
It’s happened a few times—I’m transfering data from one database to another and the old one has a few accented characters in it, but came from the days before Unicode. So if you’re using Perl to pull data from the first database and you have a string with a a word like “façade”, when you try to insert it into the second database you get an error like DBD::Pg::db selectrow_array failed: ERROR: invalid byte sequence for encoding “UNICODE”: 0xe76164.
Fortunately, Unicode::MapUTF8 makes it easy with its to_utf8 function. For instance, if the source data is in iso-8859-1:
use Unicode::MapUTF8 qw(to_utf);
#
# ... snip
#
# query $source for the value, and put a converted version
# into $dest
my $value = $source->selectrow_array('get my_val from my_table');
$dest->do('insert into my_new_table (my_val) values (?)', {},
to_utf8( { -string => $value, -charset => 'ISO-8859-1' });
Based on information found here: Problem with LATIN1 characters from Perl-DBI
So I had a bunch of PNGs with transparent backgrounds that needed instead to be white. This is the kind of thing that ImageMagick is so good for, but this turned out to be a little bit harder.
I couldn’t find a way to add a background (or any kind of layer at all) to an existing image, but you can add one image to another.
