10.4-Tiger

I was just chatting with Josh, and was mentioning that the Pachyderm server would be getting additional bandwidth allocated through to the commercial internet, thanks to campus IT. I was searching for the spelling of a word to describe the price we were quoted. Couldn't remember if it had an "a" or an "o" in it, and Dictionary came through for me! The dictionary entry even included images that look like actual old-school dictionary woodcuts, likely directly from the Oxford dictionary (perhaps a live image linked from their website?...

For the Mavericks project, I get to manually "fix" several large xml documents that are spit out of a couple of piped legacy databases and content management systems. Each time a file is exported, it is slightly different, and after the file is handed off to me I get to go in and manually massage the distressed bits so I can use it in a meaningful way. Until now, that meant going in and doing the tweaks by hand - fixing stupid MS Word quotes and dashes and stuff, and replacing some crazy legacy-induced formatting tags etc....

I've had to use a MacOSX 10.3 laptop for a little while this week, to get it set up to run as a temporary CAREO server. What struck me is that while I was using the laptop, just how much I missed Dashboard and Spotlight. If you'd have asked me, I would have said I didn't use them much, nor did I care that much about them. But, take them away, and boy do I notice....

Josh and I were working with a batch of resources this afternoon, and we had to rename them all to match a particular specification (by prepending each filename with a string). We didn't want to use the Finder to manually rename each file, so Josh was trying to remember enough shell scripting to get the job done, finally resorting to renaming them individually via Terminal in duplicated mv afilename prefix_afilename format....

I've been trying to use Spotlight as my primary app launcher (after being a diehard user of Launchbar and then QuickSilver). One thing that annoyed me about Spotlight is that you have to enter your query, then cursor down to the "Top Hit" before hitting RETURN to launch it. I just stumbled across this... If you enter your query, and after there are some results, just hold down the COMMAND key and the selection will toggle between "...

I've tried playing around with the Folksonomise your files with Automator tip from MacDevCenter.com - I really like the idea of it. If you follow the tip, you get a handy item in the Finder's contextual menu that lets you bring up a text field to enter tags for the file. Like you do with del.icio.us, or Flickr, or iPhoto. Then, Spotlight lets you find them easily. Or, you can create Smart Folders in the Finder for tags, and have these files be found (even if the tag isn't contained within the content of the file - a case that would normally make Spotlight overlook it)....

For the Mavericks project, I get to transcode 9 DVD-ROMs worth of high resolution TIFF images into JPEG images for use during authoring by Pachyderm (I could use the TIFFs directly, but that would tax the system more than I'd like to during beta testing). At first, I was wondering what to do about this. Back in the day, I'd use Debabelizer Pro, or a Photoshop action or something. But, I just fired up Automator....

It seems as though MacOSX 10.4 is a wee bit memory hungry... My Powerbook has a gig of RAM, and I've been stuck in VM thrash hell for several minutes on a couple of occasions (which hadn't happened at all since I upgraded to 1GB from 256MB while running 10.3). I don't recall exact memory usage on 10.3, but Safari alone is filling up almost 200MB of real memory, with almost half a gig of VM....

I've been using Safari as my RSS reader today, to see how it works, and am actually pretty surprised at how well it handles all of my feeds (after going through a roundabout process to get all 390 feeds imported from NetNewsWire Pro 2.0) The combined display has grown on me - at first I absolutely hated it, with my body physically rejecting it in preference to manually cycling through posts by title in a list, and seeing the selected post individually displayed in a pane....

I just installed the Dasher pref. pane, to pull up Dashboard after a couple of minutes of inactivity - instead of a screensaver. Activity Monitor is running in the background, and while walking by, I noticed the CPU was pegged. I opened the detail view, and it listed 4 dashboard widgets as taking 10-15% CPU each. The widget was "World Clock" - 15% of a 1GHz CPU to render an analog clock?...