This is one of those gotta haves. Beautifully done and Free. Grab it here.

Here is a quick way to enable full path display in the finder windows under Leopard. You can turn this on by issuing the following two commands in a terminal window:defaults write com.apple.finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle -bool YES
killall Finder
You can also undo this effect by issuing the following two commands in a terminal window:defaults write com.apple.finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle -bool NO
killall Finder

So now that I have a basic OSC receiver for aka.iPhone’s XY controller, I’ve been going through Apple’s Demo Compositions – under /Developer/Examples/Quartz Composer/Compositions — and adding my portion of the OSC receiver to them. Here is the latest one, akaRemote-Caterpillar, which is a adaptation of “Caterpillar.qtz” under /Developer/Examples/Quartz Composer/Compositions/Interactive. Again I need to remind you to read the first Article to get started and that these QC compositions are for Leopard/QC3.0 only and require a jailbroken Ipod Touch or iPhone.

I assume you know what aka.iPhone is and what it does. If you don’t please see this article over at Create Digital Motion. I’ve got aka.iPhone 2.1 installed on my ipod touch and while I enjoyed playing around with the accompanying MAX/MSP patch — via the free runtime — I wanted to see if I could get it working with Quartz Composer.

Have a look at the picture above…..This is fresh from my Macbook this morning (when it woke up from sleep mode). Notice anything strange…..let me help you, have a look at the Aiport icon in the menu bar and the actual Airport device setting in Network preferences. Yep, Icon in menu bar says Airport is turned off, the device setting shows it’s on and associated/working. Apple FIX THIS WILL YA…….Oh btw, if you want a temporary fix for this just flick the “show Airport status in menu bar” check box off and on again and the menubar icon will be fixed.

If you like to get rid of the stripes in the list view of the new Leopard Finder, open a Terminal Window and type in the following two commands:defaults write com.apple.finder FXListViewStripes -bool FALSE
killall Finder
If you want the fancy stripes back at some point later, type the following two commands in Terminal:defaults write com.apple.finder FXListViewStripes -bool TRUE
killall Findermore to come soon…..

Okay as much as I like OSX and apple I have to admit, Leopard is not quite ready for consumption. Not unless you’re willing to do a “Erase Install”. After the weekend fun session of “Archive installing” 5 machines, I have found another bug/feature/headache. Here is how it happens:

Well, not quite. It might seem like everything is transfered, until you start wondering about WINS Servers and Windows WORKGROUP/Domain settings. You see under Tiger these two were stored under directory utility, but under Leopard they’ve tried to pack everything under Advanced  Network settings (Preferences/Network/Advanced…). The problem is that if you’ve had your Network locations transfered from tiger, the advanced WINS panel will NOT let you enter/add new WINS servers or change the WORKGROUP field. You can try and change them, but as soon as you press OK  followed by Apply on the next screen, the fields reset to blank. 

Try it and you’ll see if you go back the field wil be blank. The only way to fix this is to create “New” Locations and re-set them up, then you can fill in the WINS and WORKGROUP entries and they’ll stick. Apple are you listening, not only are the Network panels a mess — just compare the 3 different widgets used under Network settings……must be some new Leopard crack they’re sniffing……consistency people — but the network configuration screens refuse to take into effect the changes you put in if you’ve done a “Upgrade” or “Archive” install. This only wasted three hours today, I’m sure someone in Cupertino is having a good laugh.

Just noticed that if you place your dock on either side of the screen you get a flat dock, instead of that floating 3d look. As much as I like the 3D look, I liked the flat look even more, so after poking around I found out how to disable the 3D look. Open a Terminal window and type in the following two commands:
defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES
killall Dock

To get the 3D floating dock back you open a Terminal and type the “opposite” two commands:
defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean NO
killall Dock

Keep coming back…..there will be more soon :-)

Like many of you, I picked up Leopard Family pack last night. You see I have 4 mac’s and for $199 the family pack allows me to install leopard on up to 5 machines (in the same household). Anyways I did run into some troubles so I figured I’ll let you guys know about the gotchas:

Okay so this all started with our users not being able to share files on our webserver. We use SSH only for upload/download and interactive access (ie: no ftp). Through trial and error we found out that the default umask (under OSX Server) for sftp uploaded files are 0033 (ie: rwxr–r–) and directories are 0022 (ie: rwxr-xr-x). This creates a problem when one user uploads a file and another user downloads/modifies and tries to re-upload it — they simply can’t because the group permissions are wrong.

If we were using ftp (which we are not) there are some solutions on the net that allow you to modify the startup parameters for the ftp server so that the default umask for all files is 0013 — which would allow a group of people to share/overwrite each others files — but we are using ssh only.

So we came up with two other solutions — a shared upload account and/or a cron job that would modify the group permissions on the website directory to allow group sharing. We went with the second solution and that’s where I ran into so many problems that I decided to create this post. You see normally Unix users know that spaces (and strange characters) in filenames are a no-no. Well that’s not true for Windows and Mac users, they use spaces and other odd characters in their filenames/folders all the time.

I started writing — what I thought was — a simple “for loop” script to go through the website folder and change the group permissions. Of course on the first try things didn’t work nicely because of spaces, so I started compensating for that and came up with:
for i in `find /Path/to/www -type d -print0 |xargs -0 -n 1`
This kinda worked, but the for loop would still split the lines when it hit spaces in filenames. I tried to mess around with it and gave up. After RTFMing a bit more I tried:
for i in `find /Path/to/www -type d -exec echo \"{}\" \;`
The thinking behind this was that the exec would echo the filenames quoted and it should work….well it didn’t, the for loop still split the input lines at spaces.

Finally after a latenight RTFM session (and lots of cursing), I think I’ve found the ultimate file handling loop statement:
find /Path/to/www -type d ! -perm -g=wx -print0 | while IFS= read -rd $'\0' filename
Okay so this version uses “while” rather than “for” but it works like a charm and chews through spaces and all other kinds of weird chars and creates a output stream that’s ready to be used by your choice of commands (chmod in my case).

After trimming and optimizing the script a bit, here is the final product:
# The following find will search for
# all files under /Path/to/www, that
# are NOT symlinks, and do NOT have
# group write permission. The list is
# "\0" seperated and the while portion
# will loop around this character and
# ignore everything else in the path.
find /Path/to/www ! -type l ! -perm -g=w -print0 | while IFS= read -rd $'\0' filename
do
# We've found a directory with no group
# write permission, so fix it.
if [ -d "$filename" ]
then
chmod g+rwx "$filename"
# echo Directory changed
stat -l "$filename"
fi
# We've found a file with no group
# write permission, so fix it.
if [ -f "$filename" ]
then
chmod g+rw "$filename"
# echo File changed
stat -l "$filename"
fi
done

Hopefully you’ll find this code (or portions of it) useful for your own day-to-day hack-and-slash solutions to annoying problems. Let me know if you come up with an even better solution :-)

So if your menubar is as packed as mine, you usually have to kill menubar utils just to get to your application menus (specially bad when I run Photoshop). SlimBatteryMonitor comes to rescue. SlimBatteryMonitor is a replacement power gauge for Apple’s Mac OS X that tracks both laptop batteries and many UPS batteries. Multiple-battery systems (e.g. older powerbooks) are supported as well. A graphical icon shows the power remaining, and can be accompanied by a text description (battery charge in percent, or time remaining). Colours can indicate whether the system is fully charged, charging or on battery.

Best of all, you can choose different display options for each battery state (fully charged, charging or on battery). You may wish to see the time remaining while on battery, for example, but show only the icon during charging, and hide SlimBatteryMonitor entirely when batteries are fully charged. SlimBatteryMonitor is a better choice because it presents the same information in a much more space efficient manner, allowing you to fit other menu bar items on the screen as well.

SharePoints 3.5.4 is a little known gem that allows you to REALLY “manage” your samba and afs shares under OSX. It’s free (donationware) and now Universal. No more limits as to who shares what with who, no more editing smb.conf by hand. It’s your machine you paid for it, it came with OSX and samba so why run in castrated mode :-)

SharePoints is an application or a preference pane that makes it easy to add and delete share points like in the old Finder. In Mac OS X, by default, you are limited to sharing only what is in your public folder in your home directory. This program makes it easy to share any folder.
In addition SharePoints also brings back users and groups management to Mac OS X as well as easy configuration of AppleFileServer (AFS) and Samba (SMB) Server properties.

Well, I’ll leave this one to you. You can decide on it’s Kosherness. The application is called TED and it can find all sorts of TV episodes you might have missed. From the homepage:

ted can find episodes of any TV show you like to watch. Just add your favorite shows to ted and he will search for the newest episodes and downloads them for you. ted uses bittorrent and RSS technology to get you the newest episodes as fast as possible! ted comes with a huge list of shows, all waiting for you to be watched. ted even displays a summary of each show, to help you choose shows you like.

ted requires Java 5 and a bittorrent client and is available for all platforms (Linux, Windows, Mac). Download here.

While we’re on the subject of saving you some money. NeoOffice, the OSX native version of Open Office, has just released their latest. This release includes support for the Mac OS X Spellchecker and Address Book and experimental support for Office 2007 Excel and PowerPoint files. From the overview page:

NeoOffice is a full-featured set of office applications (including word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, and drawing programs) for Mac OS X. Based on the OpenOffice.org office suite, NeoOffice has integrated dozens of native Mac features and can import, edit, and exchange files with other popular office programs such as Microsoft Office.

Released as free, open source software under the GNU General Public License (GPL), NeoOffice is fully functional and stable enough for everyday use. The software is actively developed, so improvements and small updates are made available on a regular basis.

It is available for free from the NeoOffice download page.

You all know my dislike for Microsoft and their products. Whenever possible I’ve tried to get away from having to use their software. Here is another opensource product that allows us to do our thing without them. From their overview page:

OpenProj is a free, open source desktop alternative to Microsoft Project. The OpenProj solution is ideal for desktop project Click to enlarge in a new windowmanagement and is available on Linux, Unix, Mac or Windows. OpenProj is a complete desktop replacement of Microsoft Project and even opens existing native Project files. OpenProj shares the most advanced scheduling engine in the industry with Project-ON-Demand. The OpenProj solution has Gantt Charts, Network Diagrams (PERT Charts), WBS and RBS charts, Earned Value costing and more.

You can get more detailed information on OpenProj or download now!

Desklickr is my latest obsession. Great little utility that grabs images from Flickr and constantly refreshes your desktop background. There is even a Desklickr group for people who don’t want to think too much. Just set it and forget it.

Here is a quick link to WeatherDock for all you weather nuts. This is one of the best weather utilities I’ve seen in a longtime. Best of all…..It’s Free. Sorry Mac Only.

Hot on the heels of AJA video’s NAB announcement of their IO HD box, MOTU has just announced their version of Portable Studio in a box, the MOTU V3HD. According to MOTU’s website “With one simple plug-and-play FireWire connection, the V3HD turns your Mac or PC desktop or laptop computer into a powerful HD/SD video production workstation equipped with all the video and audio I/O you need.” Both boxes seem — at first glance — to be very similar. AJA’s box works with Apple’s ProPres 422 (hardware), while V3HD seems to be hardwired for DVCPro HD (hardware). V3HD works with FinalCut Pro on Mac platform and supports Adobe Premiere Pro on Windows. All you need is a Workstation/Laptop with Firewire 400/800 connections. So go ahead and build that portable HD/SD studio you always wanted…..it’s easy.

Got a new Macbook thru work today and after Firewire targeting my profile over from my personal MBP, I started looking around the blog for the entry that shows you how to turn off Spotlight. You see Spotlight is a good idea, but I think it needs a bit more work. I’ve noticed that on my MBP and older Dual G5 machines, the mds service sometimes just goes nuts (usually corrupt files or something like that), and brings the machine to a halt. So I like to turn Spotlight off ASAP. Here is how:

• Edit /etc/hostconfig (don’t forget to sudo) and change the line that reads
  SPOTLIGHT=-YES-
  to
  SPOTLIGHT=-NO-
• Run the following two commands from the command line to get rid of existing index files
  sudo mdutil -i off /
sudo mdutil -E /
• Reboot

Note that the crazy spotlight icon will still be there, but the backend (the bad stuff) will be disabled after the reboot. You can optionally kill the icon (not recommended) by issuing the command:
sudo chmod 0000 /System/Library/CoreServices/Search.bundle
Later on if you want to turn spotlight back on (why?) you can do it by doing the following:

• Edit /etc/hostconfig (don’t forget to sudo) and change the line that reads
  SPOTLIGHT=-NO-
  to
  SPOTLIGHT=-YES-
• Reboot
• Run the following command from the command line to turn on indexing
  sudo mdutil -i on /

Enjoy….

Okay so how many times have you “deleted” a file on a USB drive under OSX only to find out later that the storage is still tied up in .Trashes directory. Well there is a easy way to fix this. Open terminal, cd to your USB drives root directory (mounted under /Volumes) and issue the following:
rm -rf .Trashes
touch .Trashes
This creates a file called .Trashes on your USB drive (don’t worry the file size is zero). The side effect of this is that if you delete files off the USB stick, OSX will delete them immediately (since it can not create a .Trashes directory).