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Currently:
2005-03-23»
if i was a Tiger developer, but then again, no»
You see, now that you've helped me fix a problem, I'm obliged to start
blogging again. See how the LazyWeb extracts its pound of flesh?
Does Tiger's Spotlight
search the comment
field of files in the "Get Info" dialog box? No, no, don't tell me, I
know you'd be breaking an NDA.
But here's what I'd do, if I'd paid the $500 to Apple for the Tiger starter
kit. I'd write a little mini-application (or maybe a QuickSilver plugin), that
would let you select a bunch of files in the Finder, and then add a simple
line of text to all of their comment fields. Another keyboard shortcut would
let you easily delete one of these lines from a selected file. Another would
quickly select all the files that contained that line - or, shall we say,
tag in the current folder.
And then, whenever I needed to find all my files tagged with, say,
"oblomovka", I'd just type into Spotlight. Actually, that highlights one of
the problems with this - maybe they need to be prefixed with something, so
you'd search for "tag-oblomovka" rather than the very common term.
It's a bit of a hack, but it would give you folksonomies for the Desktop.
(Unless that's already in Tiger, of course.)
2005-03-22»
mac got the blues»
Well, the server is still down, but the data seems to be okay for now. It's
in a sort of carbonite-like stasis. The machine isn't stable enough to check
to see whether its mobo, drive or IDE controller that's bust, but I have been
able to mount the drive read-only using the Ubuntu LiveCD, and peer at five or
so years of mail. I'm living out of Gmail for now.
Which means I'm also slightly more dependent on my PowerBook than I like.
And as if by magic, MacOS X has started acting in a "I hope you don't think
that three years of OS reliability is an indication of future stability, do
you?"
Does anyone have any clue about what's going on here, for instance?
Selected icons (including the Trash) have turned bright blue. It started
after I rebooted the machine after the last security update. It only happens
on my login, which makes me suspect that it's some debugging feature I turned
on in the past, and has now come back to haunt me. As far as I can work out,
it's icons that are stateful - ie probably drawn in Quartz rather than painted
as Icons.
I'm damned if I know what to do about it. Any suggestions?
Update: I moved
~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.systempreferences.plist out of the way, and
that seems to have fixed it. Cheers, Jason! (This is like a BoingBoing post in
so many ways, isn't it?)
2005-03-18»
slightly inopportune»
Something awfully hardwaric has just happened to my main mail (and
everything else) server. As it traditional, it happened while I'm still two
days away from home, so it's tricky to diagnose. If it's the hard drive, I'm in
for a minor planetoid of pain. Anyway, suffice to say that if you sent me mail
in the last 24 hours, I won't be able to read it for a while. And replying to
other mail will be slow in the next few days (there's a nest of filters on that
box that make coping with my mail bearable).
Hooray for checked out CVS versions, that's all I can say...
petit disclaimer:
My employer has enough opinions of its own, without having to have mine too.
