dfbills.com blog

This week, Facebook opened up their chat service to an industry standard protocol- XMPP, otherwise known as Jabber.  This means that Facebook chat can now be used directly from within iChat. 

Here’s how to set it up-

Go to iChat’s Preferences

Click the “Accounts” tab and add a new account

Select “Jabber” from the options

Type your screen name (.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)) and password.

Set “Server Options” to chat.facebook.com at port 5222 (do not check SSL)

Facebook also has instructions posted now on their site.

In MacOSX, there are two simple ways to make files invisible from the command line: (both methods do require the installation of Apple’s Developer Tools)

Method 1:

Make invisible:

/Developer/Tools/SetFile -a V ~/Desktop/MyDoc.txt

Make visible:

SetFile -a v ~/Desktop/MyDoc.txt

Method 2:

Make invisible:

chflags hidden ~/Desktop/MyDoc.txt

Make visible:

chflags nohidden ~/Desktop/MyDoc.txt

In Snow Leopard, Apple modified the behavior of Remote Desktop and Screen Sharing to send system level commands to a remote computer by default.  This change has made working with remote computers much more difficult for me. 

At long last “MacNoggin” has posted the solution over on MacOSXHints.

Quit Remote Desktop or Screen Sharing, then open Terminal and paste the following codes to toggle these hidden preferences:

defaults write com.apple.RemoteDesktop DoNotSendSystemKeys -bool YES

defaults write com.apple.ScreenSharing DoNotSendSystemKeys -bool YES

If you would like to reverse, re-enter the code, but change YES to NO at the very end.  And of course, you can always send these “System” commands while in fullscreen mode.

Apple has ever so helpfully removed ODBC Administrator from MacOS 10.6’s Utilities folder.  The software is now a standalone download from Apple’s website-

http://support.apple.com/downloads/ODBC_Administrator_Tool_for_Mac_OS_X

From Apple:  The ODBC Administrator Tool for Mac OS X enables database administration of ODBC-compliant data sources.  Features include connection pooling, trace log creation, and ODBC driver management, among other administration features.

Several years ago, I settled on Chat Transcript Manager from Unsanity to archive and search through my extensive iChat log files.  I conduct extensive meetings and have fully integrated IM into my workflow and Chat Transcript Manager was really well designed and easy to use.

Unfortunately, the tool was broken when Apple changed the format directory structure for the iChat log files in Leopard.  It doesn’t see the new logs in which are in subdirectories.  Unsanity hasn’t updated the software since the end of 2006, but luckily the fix is simply to flatten the logging directory structure.

The chats are stored here: 

~/Documents/iChats/

I suggest coping the logs rather than just simply moving just in case something blows up.  Don’t for get to set an actual path to your_destination.

find . -name ‘*.ichat’ | xargs -i cp {} /your_destination

After flattening, Chat Transcript Manager has no trouble indexing the files and I was able to pinpoint the conversations I wanted.

Somehow I lost the ability to sync my Transmit bookmarks via MobileMe.  Not a big deal but as passwords began to change, I was getting frustrated that my bookmarks were breaking. 

The fix is quite simple:

~/Library/Application\ Support/Transmit/TransmitSync.app/Contents/MacOS/TransmitSync—registerClient

This will register the Transmit Sync Client in MobileMe and you should see it immediately appear in the Sync tab of the MobileMe preference pane.

If you’re having trouble printing under 10.6 to Fiery-powered printers:

Go to http://www.efi.com and download the “Fiery Print Driver update for OS X v10.6”

It’s located on the website in Support/Downloads/EFI Software.

This corrects issues with drivers already installed on your previous 10.5 system.

Here’s how to re-enable the Locate database in Snow Leopard (MacOS 10.6).  Once this LaunchDaemon is loaded, locate services will continue to work- no need to reload.


sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.locate.plist

update: Here’s the error I was getting prior to re-enabling: (so that search engines can find the tip)

WARNING: The locate database (/var/db/locate.database) does not exist.

Note to self:

A few ways to count files in a directory under UNIX:

ls | wc -l

For recursive:

find . -print | wc -l

Using filename matching:

find . -name \*.jpg -print | wc -l

For some reason this error has crept up on several of my machines recently when starting Adobe Photoshop CS 4 on the Mac:

“One or more files in the Adobe Application Support folder, necessary for running Photoshop, are missing. Please run the Photoshop installer and re-install Photoshop.”

Surprisingly, the solution was both quite simple and posted on Adobe’s website:

Solution 1: Copy the Adobe Unit Types file to Library/ScriptingAdditions.

Copy the Adobe Unit Types file in the Previous System folder to /Library/ScriptingAdditions.

Solution 2: Create a new ScriptingAdditions folder, and then reinstall Photoshop.

Create a new folder in /Library and name it ScriptingAdditions.
Remove and reinstall Photoshop.

Solution 3: Make sure there is not a space in the ScriptingAdditions folder name.

On two of my Snow Leopard machines, the ScriptingAdditions folder was missing.  I restored from another computer and the error was gone.  On my third machine, the file and folder were there, but the Adobe Unit Types file was created in 2005.  After replacing with a more recent copy, I was back in business.

Update 02.03.10: Adobe has posted a new 64bit clean version of Adobe Unit Types.osax (version 2.1.0) in a TechNote titled “Error about unit type conversion occurs when running an AppleScript in Photoshop (Mac OS X 10.6).”  This updated version works great for me on 10.6.2.