The Great Taste of Nothing » code

Speeding Up Spotlight Searches

Paul Hargrave — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 03:49:46 +0000

As much as I love Spotlight for the time it saves me every day, it definitely gets slower as the hard drive fills up. The trick is to add folders and directories to be excluded from searches and indexing, but the problem is to know exactly which to choose.

Go to System Preferences => Spotlight, and under the Privacy tab, click the plus button and then choose the user/Library/ directory to be excluded form the search and indexing functions.

Immediately after you’ll notice a remarkable improvement in speed, and that goes for the whole system since lots of apps write temporary files to that directory and Spotlight is always working on indexing those. No mortal need to know the content of those files, anyway, so off ye go!

Add Spacer to OSX Dock

Paul Hargrave — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 22:36:35 +0000

If you haven’t guessed already, I’m really into computers. I love having the latest, greatest product, but I LOVE my MacBook Pro (BTW, I will NEVER own an iPad). Not only is Snow Leopard infinitely better than Windows, but the hardware is incredible, too.

One thing I’ve noticed, however, is that the OSX dock doesn’t give you an option to add a spacer to organize your program. After scouring the internet (and not willing to install another program [though this is as simple as dragging it into the Applications folder]), I found a snippet of code that will allow you to do just what I wanted.

Step 1: Fire up Terminal.
Step 2: Paste the following code and press [ENTER].

defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-apps -array-add '{"tile-type" = "spacer-tile";}'

Step 3: Run a killall Dock" to restart the dock.

Now you should see a space at the end of the last permanently visible program. You can drag this to whatever space in the dock you would like. To add more spacers, just repeat steps 2 and 3! You can see an example of my dock on the left side of the screen. I have my dock permanently visible on the left, expanded to full height (which automatically adjusts as new programs are run), and with a transparent background.

BIN/CUE => ISO

Paul Hargrave — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 21:50:45 +0000

I had a need recently to convert a .bin/.cue CD Image pair to .iso for mounting on OSX. I was considering writing a quick utility to handle the task, but in the process of researching the file formats, I found BinChunker, a GPL-licensed piece of code that does exactly what I need, simply and directly.

Step 1: Download this file.

Step 2: Once you download the utility, issue this command from a shell prompt in the directory where you downloaded the file:

sudo cp bchunk /usr/bin/

Step 3: To convert a .bin/.cue pair to a .iso, you can issue this command:

bchunk myinputfile.bin myinputfile.cue myoutputfile

And that’s it!

Scoutmasters Are Stoopid

Paul Hargrave — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 20:57:14 +0000

In modifying my original summercamp database program to work with wintercamp, I realized that some people don’t understand what the SHIFT key on the computer is for. In other words, most of the data that I receive from the online registration interface is completely lowercase. This, however, presents a problem; information that I produce for Ho Non Wah is official. We can’t have lowercase names being seen by anyone who matters (this implies that I don’t matter). I needed a way to quickly change the case of the LastName and FirstName fields to proper case, so this is what I came up with.

UPDATE CurrentWeek SET CurrentWeek.LastName = StrConv([LastName],3), CurrentWeek.FirstName = StrConv([FirstName],3);

If I call that piece of SQL from an update query, I can easily update all of the records in the table without touching a single piece of data. This doesn’t take into account names like Mc, Mac, (and Paddywack), but a quick sort in ascending order of the LastName field will show any of the M’s that need specialized attention. I could modify this code at a later date, but this quick and dirty solution works for now.

OMG! WTF? LOLCODE

Paul Hargrave — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 21:40:46 +0000

LOLCODE is an esoteric programming language inspired by the language expressed in examples of the lolcat Internet meme. The language was created in 2007 by Adam Lindsay, researcher at the Computing Department of Lancaster University.