Rage Against The Mac

I’m loving iSquint for converting videos to formats that are QuickTime and/or iPod friendly, but was frustrated with the inability to open videos with it from the Finder (right-click, “Open With”). A little hacking of the Info.plist and a rebuild of LaunchServices and I’m in business.

First, make a backup of iSquint.app/Contents/Info.plist and then open the original with either Property List Editor or your favorite editor (TextMate, in my case). Now, modify the CFBundleTypeExtensions array (reference) so that it has the video extensions you wish to handle. Looking at VLC, I came up with the following (for the entire CFBundleTypeExtensions key):

    <key>CFBundleDocumentTypes</key>
    <array>
        <dict>
            <key>CFBundleTypeExtensions</key>
            <array>
                <string>3gp</string>
                <string>avi</string>
                <string>mov</string>
                <string>mp4</string>
                <string>mpeg</string>
                <string>mpg</string>
                <string>wmv</string>
            </array>
            <key>CFBundleTypeName</key>
            <string>DocumentType</string>
            <key>CFBundleTypeRole</key>
            <string>Editor</string>
        </dict>
    </array>

I’m not sure how long it would take for this to appear in the Finder normally, but I had to rebuild the LaunchServices database anyway. Once that was done, I was in business!

4372962:—Discovered a combination that crashes Safari

The following page, which I’ve been hacking on in my spare time, crashes Safari every time. You’ve been warned.

Please comment below if you’re brave enough to try, and let me know what the result was. Safari 2.0.2 dies a horrible, screaming death on OS X 10.4.3.

update
Ok, so someone from Apple’s tried this with a build of Safari newer than what’s been released in the latest security patch. My question is, did it work?

update 2
This bug still exists in Safari 2.0.3 (417.8) released with OS X 10.4.4. Boooooo!

My PowerBook is once again untethered. I just finished replacing the 2nd hard drive to go to the great electronics junk yard in the sky in as many months. On the next to last day of our vacation in Hawaii in September, the 80G Toshiba I’d put in last year (completely voiding any and all warranties, mind you, AppleCare be damned) died, taking a day’s worth of pictures with it. Last week the original 40G drive crapped out. I could actually hear the spindle freeze. Creepy. I was somewhat lucky to find that my last backup was only (!) 3 weeks old. When I got back home on Monday, however, I found the frozen drive had resuscitated itself and that allowed me to make one more backup. Divine Intervention, indeed.

Maybe now I’ll figure out some kind of backup scheme…

Bah, I’m running into enough bugs that I’m not gonna wait ‘til Fridays.

Today’s bug: 4265089: Spotlight image importer stores incorrect dates

I’ve noticed that Spotlight isn’t importing the actual EXIF date in my images; it’s just using the file date. Not good enough. There are some other reports of the importer doing The Wrong Thing™ with regard to EXIF data, as well. I’m thinking about modifying the Creative Commons mdimporter importer (‘cause its guts are written in Python) to do the EXIF thing properly. Maybe in my copious free time…

If the behavior of the Image importer bugs you, too, please report this bug!

20-Sep-2005 11:15 AM Brian Lalor:
Summary:
The Spotlight image importer for JPEG files (/System/Library/Spotlight/Image.mdimporter) fails to properly index the EXIF date and time for images.

Description:
1. Copy a JPEG file (like the one attached) that has valid EXIF data to the computer.
2. Force Spotlight to reindex the file, by running “mdimport -r /System/Library/Spotlight/Image.mdimporter”
3. Wait for mdimportserver to settle down
4. using a tool like jhead, examine the EXIF data in the image; the “Date/Time” tag should show “2005:09:07 12:04:34”
5. look at the output of “mdls /path/to/image”. At least one timestamp should be the same as the Date/Time tag from jhead.

‘STA_3921.JPG’ was successfully uploaded

[tagged]

Well, I’ve had OS X 10.4 (Tiger) running on my G4 PowerBook for about 18 hours now. I’m feeling slightly underwhelmed. Performance isn’t what I feel it should be, but I opted to perform an “upgrade” instead of doing an archive and install or fresh installation. I intend to backup and do a clean install in the next day or so to try to clean up some weirdness. That and it gives me that freshly showered feeling, reinstalling my OS from scratch.

Lots has changed in Tiger, and it’s been reviewed out the wazoo, so I won’t try to repeat what’s already been done so well elesewhere, but I am going to point out some of the things that are already bugging me…

• The popup Safari presents you with when it unarchives a DMG or ZIP file with a possible “application” in it is maddening. There should be a way to turn that off. (Apple bug id #4107374)
• Spotlight is cool, but it isn’t as fast on my PB as I was lead to believe it would be. Getting search results pointing to an in-progress iChat definitely rocks, however. I’m also irritated by the magical moving search results; I’ve opened the wrong file a couple of times, now, when the one I’m about to click on jumps down a level as another match is found.
• The weather widget is too honkin’ big.
• No way to disable inline viewing of PDFs in Safari (Apple bug id #4107371)
• gcc4 breaks stuff. So far, I’ve been unable to build mysql4 or rrdtool 1.0.49 with Darwinports. Apparently gcc_select is used to choose a different compiler. Having just discovered this after building a bunch of other packages, I’m really hoping there won’t be problems with linking binaries compiled with different versions…

Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger : Page 3

I don’t know about you, but I like the Panther look a heck of a lot better. The first time I saw the new Mail toolbar, I filed a bug on it. (Radar 3968093: “Toolbar buttons in Mail 2.0 are hideously ugly.”) It was immediately closed as a duplicate, so at least one other person agrees with me.

I’m hoping Amazon delivers my copy tomorrow…