Devon Technologies free OS X services - including WordService

I'm very surprised I haven't been using this free service app. DT lists several others worth looking at. All free. Thanks CT comments!

Needful Things: Services

WordService 2.7

This service provides 34 functions to convert, format, or speak the currently selected text, as well as insert data or show statistics of the selection within all Cocoa applications (such as TextEdit, Mail, iChat, Safari, XCode, or our commercial applications) and Carbon applications supporting services.

Features:

Reformat, Remove line attachments/endings/links/multiple spaces/multiple feeds/quotes, Trim line beginnings/line endings/lines, Sort lines ascending/descending, Shift left/right, Initial caps of words/sentences, All caps and lowercase, Mac/Windows/Unix line endings, Rotate 13, Straight/Smart Quotes, Encode/Decode tabs, Insert date/date and time/time/contents of path, Speak native/German text, Statistics.

Has Google heard of the Macintosh?

From a Google blog post on malware:

Official Google Blog: Working together to fight malware

... Use anti-virus software. Most anti-virus software is specifically designed to find and remove harmful software on your computer. Be sure you have anti-virus software installed on your computer (you can get a free trial through Google Pack if you don't), keep it current, and use it to run frequent full-system checks...

I don't know any OS X user running antivirus software; in any case it would cause far more problems than viruses have to date.

Clearly, someone needs to bring a Macintosh to Google's office. That's the problem with these big, slow, corporations, they're stuck in the 20th century.

Then Google could write something like this ...

Avoid Windows XP. We recommend Vista with anti-virus software if you want to invest in a brand new quad core 4GB 64 bit system with all new hardware, Desktop Linux, or any Macintosh.

OS X support notes - recent updates

Several interesting Apple Support articles have come out recently:

• Mac OS X 10.4: Keychain Access asks for keychain "login" after changing login password. The keychain password and the user account password are stored separately. It's possible to change one and not the other. This tells how to manually change the keychain password to match the login password.
• Browsing for PCs on a network requires that the PCs have NetBIOS enabled. (Wow, that's really old and creaky stuff.)
• How to recover when a server won't let you connect with a different account
• Single user and verbose startup (verbose is new to me)

Someone else has noticed a one year lifespan for a modern XP hard drive

I have two corporate XP machines, and between then I have to replace a drive every six months. My home XP and OS X drives last for years.

So I now have two completely unrelated corporate backup systems that run nightly.

I haven't seen anyone else comment on the lifespans of corporate hard drives, so I liked this post (emphasis mine)...

DadHacker » Blog Archive » Thoughts while rebooting

On the IT-ridden machines I regularly have to swab out twenty megabyte log files, logs from things that I didn’t even know were running on the machine, and when I find something like “ArScnr38″ running I have no idea if it’s spyware or something that an IT monkey stuck on my laptop to scan my Excel spreadsheets.

It’s hilarious when four different scanners are fighting for disk access. No wonder our drives are dying after like a year in service. I don’t work late, so I can only imagine what the buildings sound like at 3AM when Windows Update goes into its happy dance and reboots every single workstation.

“Shhhh… wait for it.”

“What, Dad? I’m sleepy.”

“Any second now…”

clikclickClickClikCLIKCLICKCCLLIICCKK-CLICK-***KA-CHUNGGGKGKGKG!!!!!***

“Wow! Do the lights flicker like that in every time zone?”

“That was nothing. Wait until they all ask the DHCP servers for an address!”

...The IT philosophy of bloat appears to be: “Screw the user, we own the machines, and if they can’t get work done with them then they can’t do any damage. More scanners! And loggers! And Java-based enterprisey things with *****up XML configuration schemas! If there’s CPU or disk space left we’re not doing our jobs; we have to pay for that call center expansion somehow!”

That's what I see. Between my heavy duty database work, the antivirus scanner, the corporate HP monitoring systems, Windows Search indexing, and the two nightly backups the hard drivers are being worked to death.

I really need to switch to an in-office NAS with a hot-swappable RAID array -- so I can rotate out bad drives without the hassle of a restore.

Aperture's SQLite Database

I'm going to fire-up the SQLite Database browser and follow these directions: The Deep Dark Depths of the Database (and some fingerprinting) - Inside Aperture. I wonder what iPhoto is doing these days -- be interesting to look for SQLite files in other Apple applications.

I recall that SQLite was thought to have threading issues with 10.4. I wonder if that's better with 10.5.

A last lesson from our Samsung i500

I like my iPod. I liked the Palm Vx. I even mostly like my MacBook.

So I ain't impossible to please. Just not easy.

So it was hard so say the long good-bye to our Samsung i500s and all their accesories!

They were great tech for their day and today. Palm Classic goodness -- fast, super reliable, elegant. Graffiti One. Compact clamshells with good sound quality and an excellent form factor. Line 'em up against the iPhone and they do pretty well. Sure -- no mobile web. On the other hand, way more reliable and they have tasks too!

Alas, they gradually died. When my wife's failed we switched to AT&T for her BlackBerry and to line-up for my iPhone.

There was one major flaw of the i500 though -- and one related lesson. All the connectors were proprietary - and transient. No USB goodness (BlackBerry, Nokia 6555), and no evil-but-ubiquitous connector like the iPod -- just another one off from Samsung.

So, when a "free for anyone" listing on Craigslist got no hits, I had to toss everything out. Connectors, chargers, accessory cables, -- the whole bit.

That's the last lesson, though most of us have figured it out by now. Don't buy devices that use proprietary connectors -- unless they've made it to evil-but-universal status.

It's a great way to narrow your purchasing options ...

Introduction to the relational database

ATPM 14.04 - FileMaking: Getting Relational turns out to be a fairly comprehensive and quite readable introduction to relational database design. I didn't see anything that's FileMaker specific, it applies equally well to MySQL, Microsoft Access, Oracle, etc. (The promised f/u articles will be FileMaker specific.)

It's a handy reference to keep around for colleagues, students, etc.

Charles Ross covers a range of topics typically taught over the course of several lectures, so don't be surprised if it takes a while to get through the entire article. If you need to understand the topic, this is worth printing out and studying.