Buy Mac OS X Leopard: Beyond the Manual
A while ago I wrote this post explaining an effective yet convoluted way to rename images using EXIF data. In it I lamented the fact that this was only necessary since ExifRenamer hadn’t been updated in years. Well lo and behold, today it was updated! I consider this one of those holiday miracles. Go get it here!
As the day when my book ships grows ever closer (just over a week now) I thought I’d better clean up this site a bit by creating a new theme. Initially I was just going to replace WordPress with TextPattern (which seems much more flexible in both design and content organization), but I didn’t want to break any existing links or deal with that associated migration chaos. (This switch however is not be out of the question.) So anyway I’ve activated the new theme, however, at this moment it’s not quite polished so for the moment you may find some visual glitches as I work everything out (the new theme is quite a bit different from the old one). If you notice something a bit off or have suggestions feel free to send a message my way. My goal is to have everything looking and working well by the ship date (12/17).
You can add a very useful stack to your dock that can display a variety of you recent or favorite items. Do do this simply enter the following commands in the terminal:
defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-others -array-add '{ "tile-data" = { "list-type" = 1; }; "tile-type" = "recents-tile"; }'
killall Dock
You can then select what items you want this item to display from the stacks contextual menu.
Personally I like to leave it on “Favorite Items” which correspond to the user selectable locations under “PLACES” in the Finders side bar.
Last week I was out in San Francisco for Oracle Open World (which was really quite interesting… Oracle seems IMO to be way ahead of everyone else in the whole enterprise software space). Anyway while I was out there I spent quite a bit of time at Apress in Berkeley and was there as they put the finishing touches on my book and shipped it off to the printer. All this means that it should be on bookshelves all over in about another month (Officially December 17th). Of course you can pre-order it now if you’d like <g>.
Poking around the stuff installed by the latest Leopard 10.5.1 update, I noticed something exciting I hadn’t seen before: pkgutil. This command line tool apparently allows you to finally manage installed packages using a package database (a SQLite database located in /Library/Receipts/db/). At the moment this tool is far from perfect, I’ve noticed some strange data here (inaccurate install paths), plus it seems that the package must be designed to write data to the database, so it currently doesn’t track all packages. One important thing to note: it appears that this tool could be potentially damaging to your system. According to the man page, will allow to remove the files installed by any package without any dependancy checking, so you could really screw yourself with this. (I actually haven’t tried to remove anything myself, so I’m trusting the docs here). Still the existence of this tool is an extremely hopeful sign of real package management on OS X. Check it out with man pkgutil, but use caution.
Today Apple whisked out the first update for Leopard: 10.5.1. This seems to fix a host of bugs in the initial release, some minor, some a bit more serious. I used the System Update tool and installed it with no problems. A list of some of the things fixed can be found here.