McV is now LuAn

Although I've now moved my blogging over to my new blog at http://www.lunaticantics.blogspot.com/ I thought I'd better mention (for the benefit of anybody following an old link from when I was posting as McV) that I am now posting as LuAn.

Lunatic Antics

Okay, so I lied: the previous post wasn't the last one. But this one is. Probably.

I did say in the last last post i.e. the one before this one, that I was thinking I might set up a new blog, and indeed I have. It's called Lunatic Antics and in addition to blogging about my further adventures with the MacBook I'll be writing up a whole load of even less interesting crap as well!

I bet you can't wait!

Where do I go from here?

Forgive me reader for I have sinned. It's been a month since my last confession and I don't have much to say except that this could be my last entry!

I've found it useful to write this stuff. It's helped me to get thing straight in my head and a couple of days ago I found myself wondering "How did I do that thing with Automator?". Having it here to refer back to proved very useful.

I suppose the biggest issue is that I'm about to install Red Hat Fedora on an old PC because I want to learn more about the inner workings of the servers on which my various websites are hosted, and it occurs to me that a "Diary of a Fedora Virgin" might be useful. However, having just picked up yet another "For Dummies" book and observing the list of what's available in the range of titles, I'm afraid of where that might lead.

Another issue is: just how long can I go on claiming to be a virgin?

I guess it would make more sense to change the name of this blog and start using tags so I can cover the whole lot in one. But what would I call it? "Diary of [insert my name here]" might seem like an obvious choice however I prefer to maintain a certain level of anonymity (see my profile for fewer details). "Diary of a person who spends too much time worrying about minor details rather than just getting on with it" might be appropriate but it's a bit long winded.

Anyway, enough of that drivel. I guess that if this is the last entry I should finish of with some kind of summary and a conclusion about my MacBook:

Now, while I could rattle on for pages (read my blog) about the various things I like and the few things I dislike about this beastie, the fact is that as time has goes I find more and more things that I like and have gotten used to working around the very small number of things I don't like. The bottom line can therefore be summed up with a simple question and answer:

Q: If my MacBook got stolen, would I replace it, or go back to using a PC?
A: I'd want another Mac.

Putting a Spotlight on EasyFind

On 24th November I was grumbling because Spotlight wasn't going to do what I wanted it to. The problem is that I want to search for text in multiple .php files, and while Spotlight can apparently be made to do it (it doesn't index .php files by default), you can't guarantee that it will find all occurrences of what you are looking for because it might not have indexed the files yet.

I concluded that I needed something else and I found it in the shape of EasyFind from DEVONtechnologies.

It's freeware and you can get it to search for file and/or folder names and/or contents for words, phrases etc. You can't search meta-data like you can with Spotlight, but who cares. The big advantage is that it does the search when you ask so you can rely on it to find everything.

A really nice feature is that you can tell EasyFind what file types to search in not one, but five lists, each of which has a checkbox next to it. The reason that I like this so much is that I usually want to search .php files but sometimes I also want to include any .html and .shtml files that may be in the project folder (and sub folders). There are also times when I want to include .css and .tpl (template files). By grouping the files onto the five different lists I can easily control which files EasyFind is going to search when I set it in motion.

It manages to search my larger projects with two or three hundred files in a matter of seconds and displays the results as a list of file names along with date last nodified, files size, and location, sorted into whatever order I choose. All I have to do then is to drag and drop the ones I want into Smultron and I'm off.

Oolite - Too Real?

I'm not going to keep rattling on about Oolite but I had a 'strange' experience last night that's kind of interesting:

I haven't mentioned this before but the fact is that I had to give up normal work about 10 years ago when I got CFS (Chronic Fatigue Syndrome). It means that I'm unemployable because while there are days when I'm fine, there are many other days when I'm 'useless'. Working Monday to Friday would be impossible (I wouldn't be there half the time) and as I never know how I'm going to be on any given day it's also very difficult for me to plan anything or commit to deadlines. I always have to make contingency plans and/or reserve the option to back out at the last minute.

Anyway, back to Oolite. One of the new features is that you can convert some of the cargo space into passenger berths and at any given space station there are usually about half a dozen people wanting to get to other systems. The prices they are willing to pay and the times by which they need to be there vary. So, after checking the star charts to see where they want to go you can choose whether or not to take the contract to get them there.

Having spent a while running back and forth between Lave and Zaonce I'd added various upgrades to my ship and had a couple of thousand credits in the bank. I observed that there were two passengers wanting to get to systems that were about five systems away. So I decided to convert some of the cargo hold, take the contracts and plot a course that would allow me to buy and sell a few things along the way.

Suddenly, the whole thing changed because rather than flitting happily between systems trading goods in my own sweet time I was now under pressure to meet a deadline. It ceased to be fun and I nearly bit Dee's head off when she interrupted me to ask if I wanted another cup of tea. The sense of relief I felt when I dropped the passengers off (on time) at their destination was so huge that I sold the passenger berths (at a loss) and have vowed never to take on any more.

Too realistic?

Oolite until 2am

It's over two decades since I achieved Elite status on the Commodore 64 version of Elite. For the benefit of the uninitiated, Elite was a space trading game. In a nutshell, you start out on a space station with a very poorly equipped Cobra MkIII spacecraft and 100 credits. You buy some stuff and fly to a new system where you hopefully sell it for more than you paid for it. The game has two major elements, the first being the trading part with maps and data about the systems to give you all the clues you need to decide what to buy and where to go sell it to make a profit. The other element is the flying which involves docking with rotating (2001 style) space stations and doing battle with pirates who are out to steal your cargo.

There's a lot more to it than that and if it grabs you, which it did me, you end up leading a parallel life that can become strangely real. I still remember the baffled look I was given by workmates who asked what I'd been up to at the weekend when I told them, without thinking what I was saying, that I'd swapped the rear beam laser on my Cobra for a mining laser and been out harvesting asteroids.

Anyway, the point is that after a long absence from computer games - I gave up on them after a number of bad experiences with Windows 95 games that reconfigured my PCs graphics display to the extent that I couldn't do any proper work on the damned thing - I found myself wondering if anybody had ever reworked Elite for the Mac. Thus I discovered Oolite, a version for OS X written in ObjC (hence the name).

They've done a really nice job of it too. All the old charm with updated graphics (20 years ago they were wire-framed) and a bunch of new features. Consequently I was up until 2am last night shipping computers and foodstuffs between Lave and Zaonce in order to save up for a beam laser and an ECM system (don't leave your home galaxy without them).

Chances of me getting any 'proper' work done between now and Christmas: not much.

Spotlight - bright-ish... perhaps?

The blurb about Tiger makes out like Spotlight is the best thing since sliced bread but my investegatory clicks on the little magnifying glass icon up there on the menu bar left me wondering why? It seemed to offer little more than a way of finding things whose locations I should already know if I'd stored them in a sensible place.

I was a little less dismissive after the first occasion on which I found myself wondering "where the heck did I put that letter to the Inland Revenue?". Spotlight found it for me in a trice along with a couple of older letters, a spreadsheet and a .pdf that mention them. By the third occasion on which it had located something that had "slipped down the back of my digital sofa" I had warmed to it quite a bit. It looks more interesting when accessed via the Find option on Finder's file menu as this allows you to specify a number of criteria on which to search.

A big disappointed however was the realisation that Spotlight was not indexing my .php files. Back on the PC (which has now been retired) I sometimes used my programers editor (EditPlus) to search all the files in a given directory (subdirectories too if I wanted it to) to find files where a particular function was employed. Smultron, my editor of choice here on the Mac does not have this facility and sooner or later, I'm going to need it.

My 'Rough Guide' book told me that plug-ins to allow Spotlight to index the files from various additional applications are available on Apple's site, but although there are plug-ins for a number of file types, I found no mention of anything to handle .php files.

A little searching on the web came up with suggestions for modifying the info.plist of the RichText.mdimporter or the SourceCode.mdimporter (installed with the Developer Tools) to deal with php files. I also stumbled accross a suggestion that messing with these without a proper understanding of them was perhaps not a good idea. While I'm inclined to agree with the latter I figured that if this was such a bad idea then hopefully there would be fewer suggestions on the web that it is a solution - a million lemmings can't be wrong, can they?

I didn't get as far as trying it however because many of these suggestions also said that the last step was to tell Spotlight to reindex the files and that this could "take a while". There was something about that suggestion that bothered me so I did a little more searching and came across all kinds of complaining about Spotlight doing an incomplete job. I haven't really gotten to the bottom of it but: Spotlight doesn't search for things when you ask it to search; instead it indexes stuff 'Google style', in the background, ready for when you do want to find something. It appears however that while some actions will cause a file to be indexed, others do not. I've seen it suggested for example that although saving a file causes it to be indexed, copying a file does not - so the copied file will not show in a search. I also get the impression that depending on what else is happening on the computer it could take a while even for a newly edited and saved file to be re-indexed.

It would appear therefore, that while Spotlight can be very useful for finding things, you can't RELY on it to find ALL occurrences. A bit like Google: it might find what you want, and frequently does, but there are no guarantees. Thus I will continue to use it when the question that needs answering is "where did I put x?", however it appears that it is not the thing to use if I want to "find every one of my .php files that makes use of function x so that I don't screw anything up if I change it". I guess I'll have to find something else for that.