chealion.ca

One of the very first programs I install on any machine I will be spending a good deal of time on is LaunchBar. I am a self confessed LaunchBar whore because of the amount of time it saves me from going down to the Dock or having to find the Applications folder to launch Applications on top of being able to calculate, do web searches and manipulate files just from a few keystrokes.

Here are three snippets I’ve added to my LaunchBar configuration that make my life a bit easier:

Add /Library/CoreServices as a folder to search - it means you can access applications like Screen Sharing and a few other lesser known applications without digging.

Searching Apple Mailing Lists: http://search.lists.apple.com/?q=*&cmd=Search%21&form=extended&m=all&ps=50&fmt=long&wm=wrd&wf=2221&sp=1&ul=

LargeText: x-launchbar:large-type?string=*

Lastly a couple other tips that I keep running up against:

1. ** allows you to do powers of in the calculator. Not ^.

2. If you consistently misspell something (eg. LIHGR instead of LIGHR for Lightroom) you can set the abbreviation by typing in something that does bring up the file or application and then press Command-Option-A (Select->Assign Abbreviation with the mouse) and then type in the misspell that you keep typing.

I came across a process running on my iMac at home tonight that was consuming a fair chunk of RAM, and a consistent 40-50% of my CPU while accessing each and every hard drive I have hooked up. The process in question is called build_hd_index and is part of Apple’s built in Remote Management software in OS X.

The specific file can be found in /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ as part of ARDAgent.app (ARDAgent.app/ Contents/Support/build_hd_index) and is used by the program (Apple Remote Desktop Agent) to build user and applications reports to be sent back to Remote Desktop Admin (an Apple program for managing multiple computers that is awesome). The reason this was even turned on was that as part of an attempt to get a VPN server working I added my home computer to Remote Desktop Admin on my work computer. By default (as it’s set in my preferences and I believe always default) it will gather reports on certain data which run at midnight in order to cache the data on the computer running Remote Desktop Admin so you don’t have to requery such information every time you wish to look at it.

A quick Google search on build_hd_index showed several other people having issues with it suggesting ways to neuter the process (which would break System updates) or other attempts to disable it.

To turn it off, on every computer running Remote Desktop Admin you need to tell it to stop collecting data (Get Info on the computer) or you can force this by removing the plist file in charge of ARDAgent at /Library/Preferences/com.apple.ARDAgent.plist . More of this is covered in detail in Apple’s KBase article.

So as of a result, since my work computer is a laptop and is not on, let alone at work at midnight I’ve turned off uploading information at scheduled intervals - however I still want my work computers to cache the data as the information is useful to debugging why something may be happening.

This is a repost of a much older post that was lost when I transitioned from Moveable Type 3 to 4.

I personally like using WebKit nightlies as my main browser as it’s more or less Safari with a better, faster, and much more current rendering engine underneath it. That and the gold logo looks much better than the silver. It does have bugs occasionally (for example I was unable to post comments to Flickr with WebKit nightlies for a couple weeks) but all in all the experience is very positive. This is the script I use to keep WebKit updated whenever it bugs me for an update. I use an alias in my .bashrc file so I can just type ‘wkupdate’ to run the shell script. The best part is that if I copy it and I’m still using the program the changes won’t take effect until I restart but it allows me to copy it still. (Not advisable however)

EDIT: Updated 12/30/08 - Fixed URL check. Realistically you should be looking for the latest source at the link below:

As always this script can be found in my git repository on GitHub.

At work we sometimes receive DVDs that we need footage off of that are locked. They will play back fine in DVD Player but we don’t want it for playback. The resulting DVD images are always titled SONATA_VOLUME and are created by a stand alone Sony DVD Recorder.

In order to copy the VIDEO_TS file off of the DVD you require sudo access but given that sudo access is limited to administrators (and not the editors) - this gets to be a bit of hassle because I have to be called to copy the DVD which adds unnecessary overhead to just get some footage off a simple DVD.

The solution? Create a droplet application (in this case AppleScript with shell scripts) so the editors don’t have to disrupt their workflow to get me to unlock the footage they need.

The source follows:

After much (okay very little) persuasion from Matt and coincidentally a well written breakdown on how he has set up his WordPress installation I’ve pulled the trigger and installed WordPress. The installation replaces my MT4.1 installation that languished under the wait for me to find some time to design the new blog and accompanying photo blog on mcjones.ca. I had even got so far I had it written it out and sketched in a notebook. Finding the time to sit down and actually code it however never came to pass as when I did make time it was the last thing I felt like doing.

So please bear with some minor growing pains as I decide and modify a theme for WordPress - I’d still love to go with the design I made but since that is never going to come to fruition I should move and start creating articles that interest me.

After seeing this error popping up a lot while having issues with my internet connection dropping packets left and right I searched CFNetworkErrors.h for what the error code meant (since Google didn’t say much other than it appeared in 10.5.3). The line in question is: kCFErrorHTTPConnectionLost = 302,

So if you get kCFErrorDomainCFNetwork: 302 errors, it’s because the HTTP connection was lost somewhere along the way. As to what causes it can really definitely seem like voodoo.

The following AppleScript snippet figures out how many tabs are open in the frontmost window and spits it out to Growl. Helps when I don’t feel like counting how many tabs I’ve opened in WebKit/Safari. Note: To get this to work with Safari change WebKit to Safari.

Note: This was fixed in Leopard. Unsure if it was fixed in 10.4.11 as I don’t use Tiger anymore.

Note: Pictures so far are only on Flickr: Carnarvon Lake Set