Ferg's gaff

Update for Quicksilver

Ferg — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 16:51:00 +0000

So after writing about Albert the other week, there’s an update to Quicksilver!

Download it here

The changelog says increased performance. Nice to see an old dog keep getting updated!

Technorati Tags: albert, launcher, osx, quicksilver

Strawberry Fair is cancelled.

Ferg — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 15:54:22 +0000

So Strawberry Fair is cancelled this year. Whatever the reasons given, it seems fairly obvious that both the council and the police have never been the greatest fans of what should be a celebrated event. Since coming to Cambridge 8 years ago I’ve always loved the Summer calendar of events that make Cambridge a great place to live and work. As a properly free festival that is always a pleasant day Strawberry Fair is something to be proud of. No event is ever trouble free but rather than cancel such an event surely public servants, the police, should work with the organisers to improve it, not produce sufficient difficulties to cause it to be impossible to happen. The video debacle that the police produced to try to ban it (released on Youtube) and now their appeal against the council’s recommendation that they have their license are significant obstacles for a paid commercial event to overcome, never mind a free one. People say that if you live around the common then you undergo plenty of ‘bother’. Strawberry Fair has gone on for forty years. Only people who have lived there longer than forty years have the right to complain!

For work related reasons I am missing the beer festival this year and now this has gone. So my summer in Cambridge will be ever so slightly worse off!

Technorati Tags: Cambridge, Strawberry fair

Alfred: A Quicksilver replacement?

Ferg — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 17:57:49 +0000

Alfred is a new app launcher (and as with the best of those apps it is much more) for OS X. It’s currently in beta, that you can sign up for at their website.

Ever since Raj pointed me to Quicksilver it’s become a pretty essential tool on any Mac I use. However, development has dropped off over the past few years and whereas it still works perfectly now if there’s any major OS update it could be that it breaks. Scary! It’s to Albert’s credit that after a week of using it it’s slipped straight into my workflow without hardly any interruption or even being noticed!

Nice!

What’s also cool, although location only relevant for property programmes, is that the guys are local (to me in Cambridge that is!).

Technorati Tags: launcher, osx, quicksilver

Mythmovies in the UK

Ferg — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 14:40:15 +0000

Mythmovies is a cool plugin to show film times in cinemas around you (geographically speaking that is!). However, up to now it’s been US only. However, this script found on the Ubuntu forums works perfectly in the UK.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1090793

Works great. Now for trailers …..!

Technorati Tags: MythTV, uk

Startup items on OS X

Ferg — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 12:02:51 +0000

For an unrelated reason I just checked the console on my Mac and found that an executable was being called every few mins, that did not exist. WTF!

I used to have a 3G modem made by Huawei (T-Mobile). The software dialler was pretty rubbish, and it appears that the naffness continued after I removed it. It had placed a file in my Launchpad folder which supposedly checked whether there was an updated version of the software available (note: in 18 months of running this software there never was!).

Anyway the upshot of it that it’s not just the StartupItems Preference Pane that shows such items. Also check the following folders:

/Library/LaunchAgents
/Library/LaunchDaemons
/Library/StartupItems
~/Library/LaunchAgents
~/Library/LaunchDaemons
~/Library/StartupItems

Merry Crimbo and all that shenannigans……

Ferg — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 16:48:54 +0000

It’s been a quiet year for blogging here. It’s been a busy year for many reasons and any blogging time has been spent on the house renovation blog and on the work blog.

On a brief tech related note, I got my entire new-old house wired with cat6, including buried wires, I used OS X far more than Linux for the first time, I switched to a Android phone (HTC Hero), which I am very pleased with.

Anyway here’s a apt picture of my new workplace for 2010. Which incidentally is heated mainly by my dual old school Xeon Linux box. I’ll try blogging more next year!

Rebuilding Spotlight indices fixes mail.app search issues

Ferg — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 08:29:14 +0000

Over the last few months searching in Mail.app has been problematic to say the least. I’ve been hoping that Snow Leopard would fix this, but it did not. In fact since upgrading to SL it has got worse, although this was likely just coincidence rather than being caused by the upgrade. So I tried rebuilding the Spotlight indices from scratch. Previously I would have used Onyx to do this. However, the Snow Leopard compatible Onyx has only just come out in beta, and was not available when I did this. Other methods I was aware of include dragging that partition (root) to the Privacy part, then back again. However, this being UNIX you can of course do it quickly from the command line. MDUTIL is a command line tool to interact with MDS, which is the Spotlight indexing tool.

Note all the following commands were run using sudo (or you could su to root). If you do not know what sudo is, perhaps the command line is not a place you should dwell!.

mdutil -i off /

Now some posts seems to indicate that you also need to delete the indices

e.g.

rm -R /.Spotlight-v100

I did not do this.

To add them back I simply turned on indexing again. Note this does take quite a while and leaves a few processes at 100% CPU.

mdutil -i on /

I have since been told that you can just force a rebuild using

mdutil -E /

However, despite the ease of this once the Snow Leopard version Onyx has come out I would recommend using that instead. It’s a cracking app, and I run this once a month at least.

Technorati Tags: spotlight

The Chop House

Ferg — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 21:15:56 +0000

I’ve been quite a few times recently to The Chop House. I’ve always been pleased with the service and the food. It’s nowhere near a top notch restaurant, but the food is always enjoyable, and served with pleasure.

However, recently they surpassed themselves. I was there in a fairly large group (25+). Much (much) wine was drank as well as the full three courses (groan!). Due to ineptitude (and perhaps that excess of wine) both of us paid separately for each other. It was not until a few days later that we realised we’d paid double.

We guessed that by this point we’d had it, however, we rang them up, and sure enough they refunded one card, more or less at our word! Cracking service.

Technorati Tags: Cambridge, restaurants

Spider haunt at the Chesterton cycle bridge

Ferg — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 07:16:36 +0000

The new(ish) cycle bridge at Chesterton is well lit at night with many spotlights along its breadth. After a relatively pleasant evening spent at the Fort St George (all too rare since Greene King took over the place last year and converted it into a cheap rate All Bar One) I was cycling back and had a little trip across the bridge.

Looking at one of the beams in the middle of the bridge, there must have been close to a thousand spiders hanging there. The spotlights illuminate the webs in a very pleasant way.

(Unfortunately my new HTC Hero does not have a flash).

Although I’m sure that the main function of these lights is to make the bridge safe they have a side affect in that they have created an ideal site for webs. These lights draw in flies, moths and other flying insects, and many, many spiders have set up their fly catching homes here.

If you are ever passing after dark then go have a look. Perhaps not alone if it’s too late

Technorati Tags: Cambridge, spiders

Bash shell extension

Ferg — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 06:14:38 +0000

I came across this cool tip whilst browsing the blog of a fellow storage geek’s who’d posted on the Linux RAID list.

Basically you can insert a variety of characters inside braces to expand them. I guess like a smart shell expansion using the tab. The most obvious usage is a major timesaver for creating a backup of a file (which of course we all should do everytime we edit a config file!).

cp foobar.conf{,.bak}

will work as:

cp foobar.conf foobar.conf.bak

Many more examples are given here.

Technorati Tags: bash