blog.shrub

Here are the tools I mentioned in my Mac Productivity 101 session at the San Fran MusicTech Summit:

Know your instrument

• Inquisitor: Google inside Safari
• Quicksilver and LaunchBar: application launchers

Collaboration

• SubEthaEdit: collaborative text editor
• Screen Sharing: built in to Mac OS X Leopard
• Address Book: built in to Mac OS X
• Teleport: share one keyboard and mouse between multiple Macs
• Adium: multi-protocol instant messaging

Audiovisual

• Audio Hijack Pro and WireTap Studio: record any audio on your Mac
• VLC and Perian: play pretty much any video

Eliminate Distractions

• Spirited Away: hides unused applications
• Writeroom: full screen text editing

Save Your Ass

• DiskWarrior: recover damaged drives

The slides

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Here’s a neat Leopard trick I haven’t seen anywhere else.

Hold down the option key while choosing  > About This Mac, and the menu item will change to “System Profiler.”

That’s much quicker than the old method of (i) select About This Mac, (ii) click “More Info” (iii) close the about window.

It’s not Bungie Spins Off From Microsoft, but rather “Microsoft cuts cord.”

At this year’s Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, I’m giving version 2.0 of my Bug Reporting Best Practices talk.

The official blurb:

Bug reports that are complete and reproducible help to isolate known issues in system and application software, making a solution much more likely. Learn the bug reporting best practices that Apple has developed in partnership with our third-party developer community. Observe the key components of a great bug report, and how they could expedite your bugs through our processes. You’ll also learn to apply these practices to your own bug processes.

The sound bite version is “I’m teaching developers how to write bugs.”

It’s Wednesday, June 13 at 9 am in The Marina.

Here are some comments from people who’ve attended my previous talks:

• “Paul’s presentation style kicks ass.”
• “Great lively presentation and very interesting content!”
• “Flows well, Paul is a great presenter!”
• “Great information.”

Say you have a SanDisk ImageMate (SDDR-95) USB 2.0 card reader with a Fuji xD card inside it.

And you have a Mac running Mac OS X 10.4.9. And you attach the card reader, insert the card, and … nothing. The drive doesn’t show up on the desktop. It doesn’t show up in the sidebar.

Weird.

You check System Profiler. Good news: the Mac can see the device after all:

ImageMate xD-SM:

Capacity: 250 MB
Removable Media: Yes
Detachable Drive: Yes
BSD Name: disk1
Version: 91.39
Bus Power (mA): 500
Speed: Up to 480 Mb/sec
Manufacturer: SanDisk
OS9 Drivers: No
Product ID: 0×9595
Serial Number: 0100536881
S.M.A.R.T. status: Not Supported
Vendor ID: 0×0781
Volumes:
NO NAME:
Capacity: 249.98 MB
Available: 65.66 MB
Writable: Yes
File System: MS-DOS FAT16
BSD Name: disk1s1
Mount Point: /Volumes/NO NAME

Not only can the Mac see the drive, but it’s mounted. Sure enough, if you go to the Finder, choose Go > Go to Folder, type “/Volumes” and click Go, there it is.

So what gives? If you look around SanDisk’s mess of a web site[1] and register, and search the “Self-Help”[2][3][4] section, you find the article “My USB reader/USB Flash Drive won’t mount on Mac OS 10.3.3?“[5]. However, SanDisk’s article just point’s to Apple’s article “Mac OS X 10.3.3: USB device, FireWire device, RAID card or SCSI card doesn’t work after updating to 10.3.3,” which tells you to upgrade to 10.3.4 or better.

But we’re already using 10.4.9. That doesn’t help.

Here was the workaround I came up with:

• Launch Disk Utility
• Erase the xD card

Poof! Eject the card, stick it back in the camera, take a photo, stick it back in the reader and it shows up. Weird.

1. The link I used won’t even take you directly to the product page.
2. Or “Self Help,” depending on which team wrote the copy.
3. a.k.a. knowledge base
4. This site has been outsourced to CustomerNation.
5. I can’t even paste the full 776-character URL here, because WordPress is having trouble with it.

Here’s a simple AppleScript that exports all of the email addresses in your Mac OS X address book as a comma-separated list:

tell application “Address Book”

set emailList to {}

set peopleCount to (count every person)

repeat with i from 1 to peopleCount

set emailList to emailList & (get value of every email of person i)

end repeat

set outputFileName to choose file name with prompt “Save address book as text:” default name “addressbook.txt”

set outputFile to open for access outputFileName with write permission

repeat with e in emailList

write e & “, ” to outputFile

end repeat

close access outputFile

end tell

Alsoft is one of my favourite companies. DiskWarrior is the best Mac OS X disk repair utility, hands down. Well, well worth its price.

As soon as I found out DiskWarrior 4 had been released, I immediately ordered the upgrade, without even finishing the article. This was around December 11.

So, what’s broken?

First, Alsoft’s online store does not send out an email confirmation of your order.

Second, upgrade (loyal) customers are being treated like second-class citizens. It’s been five weeks, and the product is all over stores (and was for sale at Macworld Expo), and I still don’t have my copy.

Third, there’s no way to check order status — I had to phone Alsoft to confirm that, yes, I really had ordered, and yes, it should eventually ship. (But they don’t know when.)

On weekday afternoons, the Toronto Star publishes an eight-page PDF edition, “Star PM.” I download this for one reason: the free crossword puzzle.

But sometimes I forget to download this, and since there’s no archive, I lose the opportunity to do that day’s crossword. So I wrote a script to automatically fetch today’s Star PM and save it to my hard drive. Then, I went one better. Using the CoreGraphics Python module, I remove pages 1-7 of the PDF, so I store only the crossword puzzle. Then, it prints the PDF to my default printer.


## Toronto Star crossword puzzle fetcher
##
## Paul Schreiber <misc at paulschreiber dot com>
## http://paulschreiber.com/
## 1.0 -- 26 December 2006
##
## Licensed under a CreativeCommons-Attribution License:
## http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/
##
## Usage: starpm.py <directory to store crossword puzzles>


For a while, I haven’t been able to view plugin content (Flash, QuickTime, etc.) in Safari. I decided to do some quick regression to determine the source of the problem.

First, I viewed the pages in another browser, Camino, and they appeared correctly. So my plugins themselves were not corrupt.

Next, I logged in as a different user and viewed the pages in Safari. They appeared correctly. So Safari itself was fine.

Third, I logged back in as my original user and looked for potential culprits:

• I renamed ~/Library/Safari to ~/Library/Safari.orig and launched Safari. No luck—it was still broken.
• I deleted ~/Library/Caches/Safari and relaunched Safari. No luck.
• Then, I moved aside ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Safari.plist and relaunched Safari. Aha! That was it.

Now, I didn’t want to lose all of my Safari preferences, so I deleted the newly-created com.apple.Safari.plist and put my old one back in place. I went into Terminal and issues this command:
defaults read com.apple.Safari

I searched through the pages of results, looking for anything relevant. I spotted “Saft Block Plugin,” but it was set to 0, or false. Wait — then I saw that WebKitPluginsEnabled had somehow been set to false.

I ran this command:
defaults write com.apple.Safari WebKitPluginsEnabled 1

and relaunched Safari and I was back in business.

Free admission to Macworld Expo in San Francisco, January 9-12. Use priority code E-SFVA.