Eternal Search of My Perfect Personal Blog

The X Lab has great tips for managing Spotlight here, some of which saved my day today so I will post them here:

To stop indexing a volume:

sudo mdutil -i off /path_to_volume

To erase spotlight indices:

sudo mdutil -E /path_to_volume

My wife is working on her Ph.D thesis and I feel completely useless being unable to help her. Anyhow, she had some drawings to be done in xfig, which is not been used since the 15th century. I said, OK my mac has BSD under the hoods so there should be some kind of Xfig available there. There are in fact two different projects for using such UNIX tools with Mac OS X. One is called MacPorts, and the other Fink.

MacPorts was installed on my Mac when I was using Tiger, however we had problems with Xfig so I searched a bit more and found Fink which actually does the same job. Unfortunately Fink does not have a binary distribution for Leopard.

Currently I am installing both of them on my Mac at the same time. I hope one of them will help us run Xfig. For those of you out there having problems with either MacPorts or Xfig during installation just keep in mind to put your Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) installation DVD (or a backup of it) and install XCodeTools.pkg and X11sdk.pkg which are not installed by default. That will solve most of all your problems. Problems not solved with this tip, is unfortunately too complex for me and I can not be of any help. Go ahead and asked the communities and developers.

This is actually an old post of mine back at “The Unofficial Mac”. I am reposting for convenience.

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One of the reasons I was itching for an upgrade to Leopard had been the new Mail. I have been using Thunderbird as my e-mail client on my Mac from Day 2. On Day 1 I gave a shot and used Apple Mail for a while, but we were not ticking together so I dumped it and switched to good old Thunderbird.

Now I am on Leopard and shiny new Apple Mail is just waiting for me in my Applications folder so I decided it is the correct time to give it a try.

After I set up my e-mail settings through a very simple wizard I chose Import from the File menu and there was Thunderbird. Import took a few minutes and all my e-mail was available in Apple Mail.

There has been a few glitches for the past few days but everything is normal now. The problem was that, and it happens again time-to-time, when I open a folder none of the e-mails there seem to have content. I noticed this when I have searched for a mail that I know existed but received no results. I don’t know the exact cause of the problem, but it gets fixed by itself when I closed and re-opened Mail so I believe it is somewhat related to Mail not being able to process all e-mail (over 10,000) in the first pass.

I was tinkering with the Mac, and the Windows Mobile Phone to somehow -by chance- get GPRS over Bluetooth running.

I am not sure how or why it worked, but it did, so let me bring together what I have done. It may someday help someone:

1. Get WM scripts for Mac from Ross Barkman’s page. Put them under /Library/Modem Scripts.
2. Pair your phone with your Mac over bluetooth.
3. Make sure that your GPRS connection settings are correct in your phone (get in touch with your provider if necessary)
4. Learn the dialing code for the GPRS connection - I can’t believe there is a dialing code for GPRS. Mine was *99# for Turkcell.
5. Tinker with your Network connections so that your bluetooth device is set up.

As I have explained in a previous post, everyday a few times I can not switch spaces directly by clicking on applications. The workaround is to kill Dock from Activity Monitor or typing “killall Dock” into command line. Performing this three times a day becomes quite annoying so I have done the following:

1. Open ScriptEditor
2. type: do shell script “killall Dock”
3. From the file menu click Save As…
4. Give a name like killDock
5. Choose “application” as type
6. use Quicksilver, Finder or your favorite application launcher to kill dock and solve the Spaces/Dock Problem.

Using a mac after an eternity with Microsoft software is like heaven. Interestingly I have never thought that heaven was fast, lightning fast. My Mac experience has been strongly associated with speed, due to my choice of MacBook Pro as my main machine, 4GBs of RAM I have on board and probably due to Mac OS X. The sense of speed is not available in BootCamp using Windows XP.

Mac OS X seems not to care about the number of open applications and the complexity of rendering visuals. It is as if there are reserve power under the hood whenever you feel like you need it.

There are however two components of Mac OS X, especially 10.5 (Leopard) that makes the experience complete. These are Quicklook and Preview, where the former is 10.5 only, while Preview has been around for a while.

These two applications help you access any resource any time with great speed. With Quicklook you can check the MP3 file you have found with no descriptive name with a single key or access contents of a document you have downloaded in seconds. The alternative is to load up a Word processor (and unfortunately word processors these days seem to be able to clog even a mainframe-class computer). Preview on the other hand opens tons of different file types ranging from images to PDFs and even manipulate them, converting image formats, cropping etc. I have to say that I am impressed these functionality is provided with the operating system out-of-the-box and works smooth as silk.

Note: While writing this post a memory of a game called “Dynamic Dux” arrived from the depths of time when we all had C64s and Amigas. I couldn’t find any pictures, videos and information for this game except some cheats. Can anyone out there help me?

Well if you are like me and have the weird problem of automatic space switching (where you click or switch to an application and the space it resides in opens automatically) stops working for some reason just go ahead and start activity problem and kill the process named “Dock”.

As you may already know, MacOSX has a built-in spell checking feature available anywhere in the operating system. Today I was writing something and noticed that a word has been underlined in red, suggesting a misspelling. Right-clicking the word opened up a context menu, suggesting correct spelling and an option to add to dictionary…which…I…unfortunately clicked.

Now I have a wrong spelling in my dictionary and will never be able to spell notorious correctly. Is it possible to somehow remove this?