I always thought it was just the tech crowd complaining about Vista but that isn’t so. Apparently “average users” are unimpressed with Vista and/or the machines it comes on or they’re having such a difficult time they need to buy a book.

Exhibit A) College student is upset with her junk laptop. Vista won’t access certain university resources and the battery is always dying.

Exhibit B) Book store worker says she has gotten a half dozen or so people in the last couple of weeks looking for books on using Vista. For an OS touted as being easier to use that doesn’t sound promising. One customer was a trained IT professional.

Exhibit C) My own experience. Windows explorer and the save dialogs are a complete cluster fu*&. Browsing for files is a royal pain because the explorer window shows three different views of the same crap, it is just overwhelming and even with all the information you still feel lost. Also, why does the entire machine hang off of the desktop? Doesn’t make sense.

Or how about the borked send to compressed file thing? If you right click on a file and choose send to compressed file the OS will dutifully compress the file and then highlight the part of the file name you want to rename. How convenient! Only problem however is that the highlight doesn’t have keyboard focus, you have to use your mouse anyway. Maybe it’s because I choose to show extensions but either way, pretty lame.

People are sometimes amazed at how quickly I get some things done. Truth be told I’m lazy and hate having to do more than I need to. Sometimes it is great to have just enough programming background to be dangerous.

I’ve posted about for loops before and they are probably one of my most liked bash items. Here is another reason why.

I’m working on a web site and I need to edit a bunch of files, they all need the same edits done and there is no reason I should get interrupted from working on them all in series. Enter the for loop! With the following command I can edit each file in VIM and when I close the file the next file will open for me.

for I in `ls *.php`
do
vim $I
done


Nice and simple.

Not to toot my own horn, but it is rare that an article comes across with tips that I truly find useful. Up on the IBM website are some UNIX tips that I think are great. Some of them are truly new to me while most of them are things I continuously forget about.

UNIX tips: Learn 10 good UNIX usage habits

A while back I wrote about how I lost my file server. On my file server were a number of video files that I was editing in iMovie 08. While I had managed to transfer the files from tape again, my project file still showed the files as missing. Recently I finally decided to get back to fixing the project and here is how I did it.

I headed over to Apple’s discussions area and searched a bit. After a while I found a thread that discussed my exact issue and it mentioned editing the project’s project file. Well, that was for an older version of iMovie. iMovie 08’s project file is a binary file rather than a straight text file making it much more difficult to edit.

So, rather than edit the file I thought I’d take a look at the contents of the file and make sure my files were in all the same spots iMovie was expecting them to be in. Using terminal, I browsed to my iMovie project file location of ~ruedu/Movies/iMovie Projects/Big Production. In this directory is a file called Project. On this file I used a command called strings. Strings will search for and display any strings that are present in a binary file. Using strings, this is what I saw.


X/Volumes/RAID/iMovie Events.localized/Video/clip-2007-11-03 14
;08;26.dv
X/Volumes/RAID/iMovie Events.localized/Video/clip-2007-11-03 14
;10;25.dv
X/Volumes/RAID/iMovie Events.localized/Video/clip-2007-11-03 14
;1

I then compared this to what was really present on my RAID volume. Sure enough, the file names didn’t match. It was


X/Volumes/RAID/iMovie Events.localized/Import/clip-2007-11-03 14
;08;26.dv
X/Volumes/RAID/iMovie Events.localized/Import/clip-2007-11-03 14
;10;25.dv
X/Volumes/RAID/iMovie Events.localized/Import/clip-2007-11-03 14
;1


I renamed Import to Video and restarted iMovie. My project was now correct!

I recently found myself renaming a website and needed to change some common text in a bunch of php and template files. Here is the code I used to get the job done.

for I in `find . -name "*.php"`; do sed -i "s/old name/new name/g" $I; done
for I in `find . -name "*.tpl"`; do sed -i "s/old name/new name/g" $I; done

Sure a truly savvy person could have done this in one line but that’s just not as fun.

A few times a day I head over to craigslist.org and look in the computer, electronics and game & toys section for things people have under priced so I can sell it for more somewhere else. I’ve had really good luck doing this on a number of occasions and even though it is never a huge money maker it feels good to buy low and sell high.

Well last week I came a cross a deal too good to be true but bit anyway, a Power Mac G4 MDD that wouldn’t boot for $60. This particular model sports dual 1Ghz G4 processors, a SuperDrive and an 80GB hard drive. The machine has room for three more hard drives and one other 5.25 slot. With the onboard gigabit ethernet this machine is actually a pretty good performer.

After picking up the machine I got to work figuring out why it wouldn’t boot. The machine would actually turn on and tone but not the usual Mac start up tone. It would tone once and then flash the power button. I looked up the issue on the web and found that the single tone meant no RAM was present. This was odd since all four memory slots were filled with 256MB sticks of DDR PC2100 RAM. According to some docs on the web this was the correct type of RAM for the 1Ghz MDD model. On a hunch, I decided to try PC2700 RAM and viola, the machine booted into OS X (10.2) and has been running just fine since. It even runs Leopard quite well despite being about six years old.