Articles Posted During November 2003
apt-get.org
apt-get.org provides a searchable interface, with regex, to hundreds of unofficial APT repositories for Debian. Currently, you can search 450+ repositories containing 104,912 packages.
2003-11-20 15:35:07
FUSe
For me, one of Panther's most important new features is Fast User Switching, but Apple's implementation is goofy. Wasting all that menubar space on the user's name is just poor design, in my opinion. Fortunately, Martin Pittenauer, one of the folks behind SubEthaEdit (the editor formerly known as Hydra), has released a slick menu extra called FUSe that displays an icon, as I'd expected the default to behave.
Note that FUSe requires MenuCracker, but you may already have it if you have other menulets installed, such as Spy or iAddressX, both of which I also recommend.
2003-11-20 10:13:21
poisoned
If you're looking for a P2P client for OS X, I highly recommend Poisoned. It's a free, open source application that works seamlessly with both the FastTrack & Gnutella networks, and there's OpenNap & eDonkey support in the works. It's got a slick, fast interface, and integrates nicely with iTunes, importing downloaded files and (optionally) deleting the original.
There's no installer, and the 1.66 MB download expands to a mere 5.3 MB footprint, so give it a whirl.
2003-11-17 14:23:46
cronnix
Checking out CronniX:
CronniX is a Aqua frontend to the powerful Unix tool "cron". Cron is a Unix system service that allows scheduled execution of scripts, programs, applications - in short anything that can be started from the command line. This includes OSX applications and AppleScripts
It's surprisingly full-featured, including the ability to import & export existing crontabs and a 'Run Now' command to test tasks, along with fairly robust documentation.
2003-11-14 10:35:02
tar/gzip shell scripts
As part of my never-ending quest to eliminate keystrokes, I wrote two simple shell scripts:
The first tars & gzips a given directory:
#!/bin/sh
tar cf - $1 | gzip - > $1.tar.gz
And second does the opposite:
#!/bin/sh
tar -zxvf $1
I named them 'tz' and 'utz', respectively, but you can call them whatever you'd like - just remember to put them in your path, and make them executable.
2003-11-13 17:01:27
whitehouse robots
Todd Dominey notes that whitehouse.gov has quite a restrictive robots.txt file. Wondering what's left?
ksmith$ wget -r -l inf -nv http://whitehouse.gov
16:03:15 URL:http://www.whitehouse.gov/ [36587/36587]
-> "www.whitehouse.gov/index.html" [1]
FINISHED --16:03:15--
Downloaded: 36,587 bytes in 1 files
The home page. That's it.
2003-11-12 16:29:34
bash commands in os x
Interesting tidbit from macosxhints:
While running bash, pressing escape for a few seconds brings up the following prompt:
Display all 1081 possibilities? (y or n)
(That number would obviously vary from system to system.)
Entering y displays a list of (presumably) every available command.
For comparison:
ksmith$ find /usr/share/man/man* -type f -print | wc -w
3287
ksmith$ find /usr/share/man/man1 -type f -print | wc -w
661
So, on my workstation, there are 3287 man files, with 661 of them in Section 1, traditionally reserved for user commands.
2003-11-12 13:04:27
dictionary domains
In the market for a new domain?
I've located several sources of expired domains that are to be released by Verisign and have setup scripts that aggregate those sources, check each of the domains for inclusion in the dictionary bundled with FreeBSD and then make those found in the dictionary available via this RSS feed for your use.
Go forth and register. But for the love of God, not with Verisign!
2003-11-12 00:08:54
dhtml image navigator
More DHTML goodness at slayeroffice: Steve's Image Navigator manipulates background-position to emulate
Photoshop's navigator palette. The first practical application that
comes to mind would be a replacement for (or supplement to)
Mapquest's nav tools,
but I'm sure there are others.
2003-11-11 17:20:53
adium 2.0
I've been running the latest alpha build of Adium 2.0 (2003-11-11), and so far, I'm impressed. It seems to be quite stable, and a good bit peppier than 1.6. The interface has changed a bit: brushed metal, with tabs borrowed from Safari & iCal-ish rounded rectangles containing the messages, but it doesn't seem as 'cartoonish' as iChat.
If you're not squeamish about testing unstable software, I recommend checking it out.
2003-11-11 11:05:19
banjo boy
As it turned out, though, there wasn't much demand in Hollywood for banjo boys.
2003-11-11 09:29:41
