• macosxhints – 10.4: Force Spotlight to reindex a drive Something to remember
  tags: mac metadata osx search spotlight +

There were a ton of things I forgot to do before updating to Tiger. Since I chose Archive & Install, a lot of UNIXy things didn’t transfer over. Thankfully I created a full, bootable backup of my 10.3 disk before installing, so recovering the missing parts hasn’t been too difficult.

A long, long time ago, when computers had to be restarted every 10 minutes, I’d learn how to do things by constantly doing them again and again. Here in the future, I set up CVS once after WWDC last year, and it’s worked ever since.

Steps to rebuild my CVS repository:

1. Initialize the CVSROOT variable using the instructions on Apple’s Version Control with CVS on Mac OS X page.
2. Copy over all the files from the old disk into the newly initalized CVS repository (using cp in the terminal).
3. Run sudo chmod -R g+w on the CVS repository to set all the files to the correct permissions.

Everything seems to be working, file revision histories are intact and I can forget about all of this for another 18-24 months until 10.5 comes out.

Update: WordPress or my server was barfing on this post, so I’m editing it to refresh the database

• New York City Travelers With Disabilities Information and links for travelling to New York City
  tags: accessibility disability disabled handicapped newyorkcity travel +

In 10.3, I had hacked Mail.app to display a widescreen view. It really helped me get close to having a handle on my mail, and was a far better use of my PowerBook’s widescreen than the standard stacked three-view. No luck so far in 10.4. Something about Tiger Mail’s custom ‘ExpandingSplitView’ keeps expanding the splitter to fill most of the window when it’s switched to a vertical split.

update: Still not working, but I’ve found that the width of the splitter bar is tied to the height of the window.

Small Splitter (short window):

Huge Splitter (regular sized window):

update: I’m putting this away for a while. No luck and I’m suspecting the splitter is somehow glued into the application code. If so, it’s probably never going to work from an Interface Builder hack, short of re-building the whole nib (no, I will not try to rebuild the whole nib anytime soon, no no no…)

Final update There’s now a widescreen addon for mail.

I was having a problem with AppleScripts which use UI Scripting in 10.4. Something was corruping the result of System Events’ UI Elements Enabled boolean, causing script execution errors whenever that item appeared in a script. Joe’s iPhoto AppleScripts use GUI scripting, so this bug stopped them from working. Deleting the preference file “com.apple.universalaccess.plist” and restarting fixed the problem for me.

• John Siracusa’s Mac OSX 10.4 review for Ars Technica I’m only halfway through, does this count as reading a book?
  tags: mac osx review +
• Cage Fighter Un-uglify the buttons in 10.4’s Mail.app
  tags: mod osx +