mac clutter on windows – getting rid of ds_store and resource fork files

If you work on a Mac in one place and on Windows in another, and use the same remote file server, you may have noticed some pesky little files getting in the way on the Windows side. Does ._DS_Store and ._myfilename look familiar to you? If not, no need to read further.

If you have seen files like that, then maybe you know what a pain they are. They’re invisible on a Mac, but on a non Mac they are very visible. And very useless. (Some would argue that they’re useless on a Mac too, but that’s a different bar brawl.)

Here’s what happens: let’s say you work on a Mac and connect to a file server via, say WebDAV or SMB share, and you move some files from your Mac to the server. Then the next day you go to the other office, connect to the same server from a Windows computer. Then you see a bunch of files that look kind of like duplicates: little 1KB files with a name like ._therealfilename magically appeared in the directory where you moved some files from your Mac.

These pesky little files are called resource forks. The other clutter bugs show up as one file per folder named .DS_Store. Apple has a solution that prevents those from getting copied over, requiring a very simple one-liner in the Terminal (necessary for each user account on the Mac, if desired):

defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true

Apples’s “solution” for getting rid of the resource forks (._myfilename files) is, well, get rid of them. That is, they suggest you delete them from the server. Gee thanks.

Blue Harvest cleans up the clutter

Another option is Blue Harvest shareware, which uses a preference pane to get rid of the pain. (Sorry.) I’m really looking forward to checking that out and getting rid of this problem.

Thanks to Low End Mac for the info!

Update: BlueHarvest does the trick!

open winmail.dat files on your mac

Do you have friends who send you emails announcing the next big party, but you can’t see the invitation because there’s only a winmail.dat thingie? And on your mac you can click it, but then you get a message about how you and all your mac programs can’t open it?

No need to miss the party! There’s a handy little freebie called TNEF’s Enough that will dig into that weird winmail.dat attachment and let you save whatever your Windows-challenged friends send you. I just discovered a .doc file hiding in my latest winmail.dat, and a lovely invitation to an upcoming party. This time around I get to go too.

Thanks so much to Twister Mc for the great tip.

Update…

If you read the comments to this post, you’ll see that I got another tip for solving this problem: OMiC, a plug-in for the Mail application itself.

OMiC is shareware, so you can use it “for free”. But hey, pay the $29.95. After all, you get a big jump in convenience over TNEF’s Enough. Because OMiC works right in Mail, you don’t have to open up any other program to see into those mysterious winmail.dat files. Automagically, you just see the original file that your friend sent using Windows and Outlook: In the body of the Mail message, I saw a link to the .doc file, clicked it, and Word launched to open it. Very nice.

And OMiC’s developer appears to be pretty active.

macintosh maintenance basics from typical mac user podcast

Just listened to a very informative podcast about maintenance for your mac from Victor and Steve on the Typical Mac User Podcast (TMUP). What’s great about this episode is that you don’t need to take notes – it’s all in the show notes! Very nice.

Victor and Steve go over the things you need to do every month and every 6 months, with a bit of background on why you need to. The details are over at TMUP, but here’s the very short version that I scribbled down. I’ve downloaded MainMenu, a freebie app that makes it really easy to actually do the necessary maintenance. Close all apps first (of course you knew that ).

Monthly:

• Update your OS
• Update your apps
• Run daily, weekly and monthly scripts (as in MainMenu)
• Repair disk/file permissions (also before and after installing system updates)

Every 6 Months:

• Zap PRAM (also counts as finger agility training ) *
• Rebuild Launch Services
• Delete and rebuild system, user, internet and font caches (don’t do this more often)

This is of course not the same as doing backups, which you should be doing regularly anyway. I recommend Victor’s Typical Mac User Podcast for learning about how to use your mac; once a month you get this special episode with both Victor and Steve, called “maintenance Sunday”, where you learn about keeping your mac healthy. Good stuff.

* The Zap Your P-RAM Digital Agility Exercise:

1. Press and hold the COMMAND, OPTION, P and R keys during startup
2. Continue holding down all four keys until you hear your Mac reboot fives times or so
3. Release COMMAND, OPTION, P and R

svnX: nice subversion gui for mac

Just tried out a gui application for subversion on mac called svnX. This might be especially interesting for windows users who have switched over to the mac but are missing their TortoiseSVN.

svnX gives you an attractive cocoa interface for an easy to use wrapper for subversion. (Subversion should already be installed before you use svnX – if you need to do that still, check out this nice subversion package from Martin Ott.) It didn’t take long to get it up and running, to take advantage right away of the convenient windows for your working directories and your repositories.

Here’s a screenshot of the repository view (as provided by La Chose Interactive, Paris-based makers of svnX):

Some days you might just not be in the mood to use the command line. Open up svnX instead.

update: no more blue screen of death

As described in an earlier post, I had a problem (with Tiger 10.4.9) getting the blue screen of death when starting up. It occured when the MacBook Pro was not plugged in, and when an external monitor was attached that wasn’t powered on either.

Today I did more than 10 startups under the same conditions as when the blue screen problem happened, and no more blue screen!

Two things have changed since: I repaired the hard disk’s permissions with Disk Utility and I updated to 10.4.10. Not sure which of those actually did the trick as I didn’t test in between. There was a little strangeness when I did the restart after the 10.4.10 update: the bsod happened once, but a forced shutdown and another startup brought the MBP back. Since then no problem (fingers crossed, knock on wood!).

It seems like the MBP is recognizing the external USB drives and keyboard more reliably too.

Yeah!

macbook pro blue screen at startup: monitor and power problem?

It happened again today: came in, pressed the power button for the MacBook Pro and instead of a login screen I got a blue screen. Two blue screens actually, since I’m using an external monitor and keyboard. Argh. The one year guarantee is just days away from expiring, so I thought it worth the time to find out at least whether I could reproduce the problem before taking it in. Sigh.

It goes like this: grey screen, apple appears, gear shows up and turns, blue screen. Game over.

I don’t know exactly when this behavior started, let’s say a very unscientific “lately”. And more often recently, already twice this week.

61 starts and shutdowns later…

There are a few peripherals attached to the laptop so I took the time to do a bunch of starts and shutdowns to try and see if any of them were the problem. The time seems to have been worth it (not only because I cleaned up my desk in the process).

It looks like the one condition when I can count on the blue screen to show up (not every time, but eventually for sure) is when I have the monitor plugged into the laptop *without* the MBP power adapter attached. The battery is charged, maybe not 100% but definitely not even close to empty. It happens whether or not the monitor is already powered on at startup.

I suppose a workaround would be to just make sure I have the power plugged in before starting up the MacBook Pro with the monitor attached. A pain, maybe, but for now it may have to do. I will talk to the friendly tech guy at the Apple store to see if there’s risk of more problems later, especially since the guarantee period is almost over.

Off to googleland to look for others with a similar problem, maybe even post in a forum or two. Argh.

Anyone out there experiencing this?

Just for the record, the culprits:

MacBook Pro, 10.4.10 (all updates as of today), 2.33 Core 2 Duo, 3 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM

Apple Cinema HD Display 23″

Apple 85 W Portable Power Adapter (guilty by absence)

extracting audio out of an mp4 movie

This is the next step from the previous exercise, where we converted a dvd into ipod movie format, chapters and all. Great for the other part of we that has a video ipod. Those of us with “only” a nano that doesn’t play video need an audio-only file. So the next step is to get the audio part out of that. (Handbrake unfortunately doesn’t offer an audio only option, at least not that I can tell.)

So we could go back to the dvd probably, but for now I wanted to try to get the audio out of our freshly baked mp4 file. It’s not too difficult after all, and many tools exist out there. A quick test with ffmpegX worked fine, pulling out the audio into several formats (mp4, aac, ac3), taking only minutes each time. (I fumbled with the different formats looking for one that included chapter marking.)

Problem is, those didn’t seem to bring in the chapter marking. Picky picky picky. But chapters would make listening to individual lessons on the dvd much, much easier: there are parts that really are not necessary to hear repeatedly, so skipping around to specific chapters would be nice.

So we got audio. One big hour and a half chunk of it. Next challenge will be to pull out just the audio but this time with chapters. It might be necessary to go back to the dvd for that one… stay tuned. So to speak.

macbook pro not waking from sleep

Argh. This has happened often enough lately to get me to consider bringing in my macbook pro for service before the 1 year guarantee runs out.

Apparently plenty of other people have had sleep issues with MB Pros, either not going to sleep or not waking from sleep. What’s really annoying about it not waking up is that in the end you have to do a hard reboot, which means you lose whatever you were working on when you decided to give the machine a nap, a *big* interruption in workflow when you return from the kitchen.

First thing I’ve decided to try (before running down to the Apple Service folks) is to uncheck “Put the hard disk to sleep when possible” under the Energy Saver System Preferences. I did this for both battery and power adapter settings (usually I have the mb pro plugged in).

Others have decided to disable Deep Sleep mode using the Terminal (thank you Mac OSX Hints). I think I’ll try that too. Not a scientific approach, alas, but this problem is irritating enough that I’ll try 2 things at once – if it’s OK afterwards, I’ll forfait finding out which worked/didn’t work.

I also decided to recover the hard disk space that deep sleep uses.

Since this problem happens occasionally (haven’t reproduced it, don’t know if it’s reproducable), time will tell if these changes work.

actionscript 3 and flex without flexbuilder on mac os x with trace()!

It was time to play with flex, but the price tag of flex builder was a little too high. And eclipse seemed too feature rich, a hurdle in itself, and a simple editor solution was more fitting for starting out. Fortunately others have done the work of getting their favorite editors to compile to the Flex SDK compiler (mxmlc, included in the free flex download).

Josh Buhler’s great description of how to get XCode and the Flex SDK set up on Mac OS X. So far so good. That was all I needed to get up and running, fumbling around with Flex.

Then I missed trace( ), the ActionScript developer’s best debugging friend. After looking around and around, I got the simple solution I needed in FlashTracer, a Firefox plug-in made by Alessandro Crugnola, aka Sephiroth. Simple plug-in installation. You need to install the debugger Flash player, which is located at [your flex sdk install location]/player/debug/Install Flash Player 9 UB.dmg. (It’s an older version, 9.0.28.0, but it’s what you need for outputing trace statements.)

I vaguely recall a way to get the trace output displayed using features of Mac OS itself somehow, but it’s been months since I heard how that works, and this works so, all is OK. Yes!

—-

PS

What I’d really like is a Mac version of FlashDevelop, my most very favorite ActionScript editor, recently updated for AS 3. But it’s Windows only, and running it in Parallels is a pain, because my brain just doesn’t switch quickly enough between Windows and Mac keyboard layout. Lazy me will have to dig into remapping the keyboard in Windows. Yuck.

use quicksilver dictionary plugin for quick lookups

MacApper explains how to make Quicksilver your dictionary. If you’re used to the at-your-fingertips coolness of Quicksilver, you’ll appreciate how fast you can look up (English) words with the familiar shortcuts of Quicksilver. Especially nice if you’re used to using online dictonaries and you happen to be offline.

http://macapper.com/2007/08/19/tutorial-make-quicksilver-your-dictionary/

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