saulrosenbaum.com / Page 2 — ((words + pictures) / attitude) * caffiene

Recently I switched my launcher of choice to ‘Alfred’ a nifty indie project that I became aware of via Twitter, in the past I’ve been both a Quicksilver and LaunchBar user - both extremely powerful apps that although I used them religiously, each had quirks I never could really get past (QS had stability issues, LB was stable but I never wrapped my head around it’s particular method of bringing back results, and it wasn’t going to win any beauty pageants)

Alfred is in beta, but seems stable, visually pretty, and actively developed (which I really appreciate) - And has most of the features you’d want in a launcher - but I want to talk about a single feature, that I really like, Alfred’s use of spotlight comments allows you to create groups of essentially unrelated apps, it’s so simple, so obvious (and honestly it may have worked with LaunchBar too, but I never checked) just add your desired key work to all the apps you want in a group and BOOM! done - I add ‘webd’ to Transmit, Coda, Textmate, Cssedit and Espresso and evoke Alfred and it just works, you can assign as many keywords to an app as you want, for example I add ‘ftp’ to transmit as well.

It’s a simple feature I really appreciate, and we all know how hard simple actually is. So if you’re in the market for a nifty, pretty, deceptively powerful launcher that’s only going to get better - take a look at Alfred.

It was muddy out, and I was looking down, when I discovered this spoon.

If you’ve been here before you may notice the site looks noticeably different - what was once dark red, now white, the visual challenge of reading blue off red is gone - in it’s place; miles and miles of white - don’t get used to it - as I get more and more familiar with butchering, torturing and spindling WordPress (I’m a hardcore EE guy usually) - it’s libel to get very strange up in this bitch. Until them… enjoy the white :)

Just a glamour photo of Maxx!, He’s a excellent Cat, handsome, loyal and a great player of ‘fetch’…

I make no claim of being a good photographer, I think 25 years as a designer has provided me a decent eye for composition and color, I’m also really practiced at photographing cats, any magic in these shots has to be attributed to the cats - I was just fortunate enough to get the camera focussed, and to press the shutter - it’s as simple as that - Both shot with a 50mm prime lens, which the more I use, the more I love.

Always fun when a client unexpectedly sends me cool stuff - this super8 Kodak Instamatic M22 will fit perfectly in my camera collection (mostly pre-1975 consumer movie cameras) The fact that this one comes with box/instructions and unexposed film is just a bonus. Thanks Barney!

For the past 6 months I’ve had this interesting mac issue - once or twice a month my internal drive which generally has about 90GB free on it would drop to 25GB free or less, I originally thought perhaps the drive was dying because rebooting off a system dvd and repairing the drive generally fixed it - about a week ago - that fix stopped working, and I thought hmm.. maybe something just isn’t cleaning up after itself - since we’re talking about 65GB I immediately thought it must be iPhoto/Photoshop/Illustrator/Fireworks since it’s pretty unlikely coda/textmate/expresso (and YES I use all three) ever use that much of anything - so I dug deeper, I have a demo of DaisyDisk hanging around that showed me my ‘CodeEquivalenceDatabase’ (which lives in: var/db) file was 64GB - it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that it was likely that file was the problem - but I wasn’t sure, maybe that file was supposed to be that big - some more googling and that file is tied directly to 1password and keychain - I ran repair ‘keychain’ BOOM crashed/reboot/won’t restart/lovely - reboot again and it came back - some more googling led me to believe I could just delete ‘CodeEquivalenceDatabase’ and it would be regenerated, so I did - and it was, the new file was 16k UNTIL I launched Transmit, it seems that every time I launch Transmit the file doubles in size - I suppose that might shed some light on how often I launch Transmit (I’d love for someone to do that math).

Conclusion

I deleted Transmit and reinstalled, and the problem seems to have gone away, it’s important to mention that it’s highly unlikely this was a Transmit problem, it more likely that it was just a very ugly anomaly on my machine, I haven’t experienced anything like this on any other system.