Due to the acquisition of some new entertainment equipment, I’ve decided it’s time to completely reconfigure and consolidate my entertainment center.  While I’m doing that, I’m going to ask my good friend Cornelius to jot down some notes as they happen.  I’ll return at the end to wrap things up.  Cornelius, please introduce yourself…

Cornelius at computer

Hello everyone, that’s me on the right.  Josh has asked me to keep a running log of what’s going on as he redoes his entertainment center, and I plan on documenting what I consider to be major events as part of this home project.  It’s a dreary, rainy day here in NYC, so he’s under no pressure to get things done by a certain time.  Let’s get started:

11:00 a.m. - Josh is taking his usual methodical approach by double-checking the equipment and connections map that he made a few days prior.  He’s placed a glass of water near the sofa and has a pad and pen handy, as well as labels for tagging wires.  I have a good feeling that this is going to go smoothly.

Continue reading . . . 

It’s taunting, and mocking, and generally just having a good time at my expense.  Case in point:

Why don’t they match?  Why?!

Because Monday was Memorial Day and I had the day off, I slept in, which resulted in me not going to sleep until late Monday night/early Tuesday morning. I probably got about four and half hours sleep, which is much less than I need.  I was fine until about 9 PM when my tiredness hit me like a ton of bricks, and since I was watching the Mets game, I decided that I would go to bed as soon as it was over.

At 10:15 PM I found myself in bed, and after reading one page of my magazine, I went to sleep.

I was awakened by my alarm clock at 6:30 AM. As I was taking the requisite 30 minutes to wake up, I glanced out the window and thought that it was quite dark for the time of year, but figured that it was either raining or going to rain.  At about 7:15 AM I got out of bed and started my morning routine.

I was about 3/4 of the way through my cup of coffee, watching SportsCenter, and reading the news, when I just happened to glance at the clock on my living room wall.  It said 5:45 AM. I made a mental note to replace the battery in it.  I then looked at the clock in the corner of my computer, and it said—you guessed it—5:45 AM.

Twilight Zone music started going in my head.

I grabbed my iPhone and it agreed.  I grabbed my BlackBerry and, although it complained about it being too early, it agreed as well.

In the middle of the night, my alarm clock’s time advanced by two hours.  That means that I originally woke up at 4:30 AM and got out of bed at 5:15 AM.

No wonder it was so dark out.

It’s much lighter now.

I have a lot of desktop backgrounds (a.k.a. “wallpapers”) on my Mac.  I keep them all in one folder and set them to change every 15 minutes in random order (currently, this folder has 1,329 backgrounds in it).  Every once in a while I see a background that I either love and want to make it the permanent background for a few days, or hate and want to delete it.  The problem is there’s no quick and easy way in OS X to find out the exact path and file name of the currently used background, so browsing through all those files is a major time waster.

Luckily, though, there is one place that the current background file is listed, and it’s in ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.desktop.plist.  If you have the development tools installed, you can use the Property List Editor to look at the /Background/default/LastName value, which, along with the /Background/default/NewChangePath value, make up the full path and file name of the current desktop background that OS X has changed.  The value of /Background/default/NewImageFilePath is the full path and file name of the last manually set background, but I’m not interested in that right now.

The problem with the above solution is that it’s still not the most convenient solution for my problem.  What I really want is a quick way to get the path and file name without having to open a program and a file and plus out some values.  I guess I could just leave a Finder window open to ~/Library/Preferences with com.apple.desktop.plist selected and open it up each time I want to see the background’s name, but that isn’t a very elegant solution. What I really want is an AppleScript that could be quickly launched via Quicksilver or LaunchBar and display the path and file name in a dialog box.

I looked around for five minutes, couldn’t find one, so I decided to write it myself.  Presented below, in all it’s glory, is an AppleScript that will display the full path and file name of the currently used desktop background in a dialog box.

set plistFolderPath to path to preferences folder from user domain as string
set plistPath to plistFolderPath & "com.apple.desktop.plist"

tell application "System Events"
	tell property list file plistPath
		tell contents
			set theResult to value of property list item "NewChangePath" of property list item "default" of property list item "Background" & "/" & value of property list item "LastName" of property list item "default" of property list item "Background"
		end tell
	end tell
end tell

display dialog theResult buttons {"Done"} default button 1

There are a few minor catches…it will only work if the current desktop background was automatically changed by OS X using the “Change picture” setting in the Desktop & Screen Saver preference pane.  Additionally, it doesn’t work for the first desktop background displayed after you set the check box…it actually has to be changed by the OS.

I have not tested it when the background is changed upon logging in or waking from sleep mostly because I don’t care since I’m very happy with it changing every 15 minutes. I’ve also only tested this on OS X 10.5.6.

Taskbar Shuffle is a very handy Windows utility that allows you to move buttons around on the Windows taskbar, as well as icons in the system notification area.  I know this doesn’t sound sexy, but it really is the utility that I find myself using more often than just about every other Windows utility combined.

Windows has this really annoying habit of “losing” icons on the taskbar.  For example, I’ll have Firefox, Explorer, and Outlook open, and for whatever reason, one of those taskbar buttons will just disappear from the taskbar.  If you alt-tab or mouse click to make that particular program active, it’s taskbar button will reappear, but at that end of the taskbar.  To a normal person, this probably isn’t that bad, but I’m not a normal person, I’m a Virgo.  I don’t necessarily believe in this stuff, but Virgo’s have traits that make them, among other things, “meticulous”, “fussy”, and “perfectionists”.  I guess it’s these traits that make me want to have control of the taskbar so that the buttons are always in a certain order.

When I use Windows, either at work or at home, I always want certain programs first on the taskbar so that I can get to them as quickly and easily as possible, without having to hunt around for them.  For example, I open Outlook first, then Explorer, then an MS MMC, then Firefox…I do it this way so that no matter what’s going on, I can find those programs very quickly because they’re my core programs.  If their buttons get moved around due to the quirkiness of Windows, then I find myself getting annoyed that things aren’t where they’re supposed to be, especially when I need them.  So much so, in fact, that there are times where I’ve closed every program open in the taskbar so that I can reopen them in the correct order.  I know…it’s a sickness.

Apparently, I’m not the only one, because someone (Jay) made a utility that allows this quirk in Windows to be vanquished with the flick of the mouse.  I’m very grateful.  I’m going to have to donate.

A while ago I had to call Apple’s phone support due to a problem with my laptop.  Being somewhat technically inclined, first level support was useless to me, so they put me on hold while transferring me to second level.  What I heard on hold made me laugh.

Apple has music playing while on hold, and the song was already playing when I was put on hold.  I recognized it as a Tom Petty song instantly, wasn’t completely sure of the name of the song, but I was able to sing it as it went by (to myself…I generally don’t subject strangers to my singing).  As the song got closer to the chorus, and I anticipated the lyrics, I began to laugh and wonder if the song selection was made purposely.

It was Tom Petty’s “The Waiting”, which contains the line, “The waiting is the hardest part”.

How apropos.

So I’m browsing around the Apple iTunes App Store looking for a cool game for my iPhone, and I’m reading some reviews about a few games when I notice that the iTunes Store allows people to sort of review the review.  At the end of each review is a simple question: “Was this review helpful?” followed by clickable “Yes” and “No”.  To the far right of the review title, it tells you how many people found the review helpful.  The problem is that it thinks App Store users are “listeners”, when I’m pretty sure they’re “users”.

A song from the Music Store.  2247 “listeners” found the review helpful.

A movie from the Movie Store. 456 “viewers” found the review helpful.

An app from the App Store.  18 “listeners” found the review helpful.

I guess someone copied and pasted code from the Music Store and never made the change?

Several days ago I was trying to figure out the elevation of an elevation marker near my apartment.  I couldn’t read it off the marker itself, so I scoured the Internet to see if I could find a topographical map of Manhattan. No matter what I searched for, or where I searched, I couldn’t find a map that displayed what I was looking for.  I got tons of topographical maps for sale, but that really wasn’t what I wanted.  After trying for what seemed like days (in actuality, it was 63 minutes), I broke down and asked my father if he had any idea on where to look, or even if he could look next time he was in or near the library. Less than a day later, he e-mailed me back with an answer to my question.  He had gone to the NY Public Library and found the answer to my query in a matter of minutes using nothing more than the map room and a verbal question (thanks Dad).

In contrast, the first published collection of the plays of one William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon is generally known as the “First Folio”. It was published in 1623 and of the roughly 1,000 copies produced, about 230 are known to be in existence. In 2001, Christie’s auctioned one of the two still in private collections for over $6 million. Next to the Gutenberg Bible, it’s probably the most famous printed book in history. The NY Public Library has a copy, but access to it is limited to researchers “who demonstrate a need to use this irreplaceable material”, which is why I would probably never be able to see it. However, thanks to the University of Victoria, a scanned copy of a First Folio can be browsed online, in all it’s glory; and unlike the printed facsimiles available in bookstores, the resolution of the web copy at the large size is very, very good, and you certainly can’t beat the price.

Sigh.

Update: Time Warner Cable just called to tell me about the benefits of home phone service (the only reason I answered the phone was because I thought they were calling about my issue). I interrupted the woman from her script to let her know that my internet service through them was quite bad at the moment and that the only reason we were able to talk on the phone is because I don’t have phone service through them. She was quite flustered at that. I also tested my internet connection while she was on the phone, and it’s even worse.

Update: Yay!

When I got a new MacBook Pro I also ordered VMWare Fusion at the same time so I could run Windows and play around with a linux installation or two.  It works great, but I ran into a problem trying to install Solaris 10.

Windows XP, Vista, and Ubuntu all installed without issue, but the installation of Solaris, both graphical and text-based would hang at various points.  When I finally got it installed, it would hang on running, never even making it to the login screen. The problem was that even though I was specifying a 32-bit VM in VMWare, the Solaris installation was still identifying the Penryn chip as supporting 64-bit, so Solaris would install the 64-bit version. I wasn’t sure that was the whole problem, but I knew that was the first troubleshooting step.  After a doing a little exploration around the interwebs, I found a very simple solution to that problem.

Continue reading . . . 

How come Interface Builder 3.1, the latest version as of the time of this post, shows rounded application menu corners when OS X Leopard did away with them?

Hemingway once said he wrote his best work in just six words.  I’ll give my latest phone woe a shot:

Dropped BlackBerry.  Bus.  Should’ve had insurance.

If you’re in IT, or just like to hack around with computers, you invariably run into HEX numbers.  About the only fun thing with HEX is that since it uses the letters A-F, you can use it to write out words.  0xDEADBABE, 0xDEADBEEF, 0xBABECAFE, 0xDECAFBAD, and 0xDEFEC8ED (defecated) are the standard ones that come to mind.

You can use this command

egrep "^([a-fo]|ate|to|too|two|for|four)*$" /usr/share/dict/words

to print out a list of words on a *NIX system that can be rendered in HEX using ‘0’ for ‘o’, ‘8’ for ‘ate’, ‘2’ for ‘to’/‘too’/‘too’, and 4 for ‘for’/‘four’.  On Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard), the above command finds the following ‘words’:

Continue reading . . . 

This evening I was copying a large video file from my desktop “server” to my Mac laptop over wireless.  During the transfer, my wireless router conked out, as it does once in a while.  When it conks out in the particular fashion that it did this evening, it generally takes about 20 minutes for it to recover, and all wireless networking is useless during this time.  Because this “conk out” happened in the middle of a file transfer, Finder became hopelessly confused, even after the wireless connection was reestablished.  As I tried to get Finder to behave correctly, it became clear to me that I was going to have to restart it.

How you normally quit a misbehaving application

In the past, when I’ve needed to quit a misbehaving application, I click on the little blue Apple logo in the menu bar, click on the “Force Quit…” menu item, and the “Force Quit Applications” window would open.  I couldn’t do that this evening since Finder is the application responsible for making the little blue Apple logo in the menu bar function.  Since I couldn’t use the mouse to accomplish what I wanted, I had to use the keyboard, but as I reached for the keys to bring up the “Force Quit Applications” window, it hit me that I have no clue what key combination to use.

In Windows, it’s the ubiquitous Ctrl-Alt-Del...a combination that’s been drilled into my head since the days of PC-DOS 1.0.  MS wisely continued to use it in Windows for the same general purpose, and everyone, even my mother, knows to try it when things start behaving badly. Because my Mac hardly ever crashes, I have really never needed to use the combination of keys, and therefore hadn’t memorized them.  It happens to be Option-Command-Esc, but it took me a few minutes using my iPhone browser to find them.

One of the good things about the Mac being so stable is that you don’t need the emergency key combinations often.  The bad thing, is that when you do, you probably don’t remember them.  I think I’m going to print out this list of keyboard shortcuts and store it somewhere.

The new danger is that I won’t remember where I put it.