The character you click will automatically get copied into your clipboard, thanks to the flash technique mentioned here. However, I wrote my own JavaScript class to handle the clipboard and the buffer of clicked characters since you can hold down ‹alt› to copy multiple characters at once.

Here’s the source for the copy buffer class in case anyone’s interested.

By default, Spotlight will index all your mail Mail.app messages and attachments, even those in your Trash and Spam folders. To exclude these folders from the Spotlight results you can add the folders to the “Privacy” section of the “Spotlight” pane in “System Preferences”.

I’m using IMAP on Gmail so your path may be a little different if you’re on another setup. The paths I choose to exclude are

~/Library/Mail/IMAP-user@imap.gmail.com/[Gmail]/Trash.imapmbox
~/Library/Mail/IMAP-user@imap.gmail.com/[Gmail]/Spam.imapmbox
~/Library/Mail/IMAP-user@imap.gmail.com/[Gmail]/All Mail.imapmbox/Attachments

You might not want to use the last one if you tend to keep attachments in the mail message but I usually save the important ones to a real folder.

First, I found a SIMB plugin for Terminal that’ll show the tab’s title in the tab instead of the running process. I use the plugin with a simple title helper in my .bash_profile to set the title simply.

function title () { 
  unset PROMPT_COMMAND # more on this later
  echo___ -ne "\e]0;$1\a"
}

# Usage:
# title 'my title'

Second, I use a technique I saw on how to automatically set the title to display the current working directory as title, but since I use the plugin and helper function above, I could simplify the PROMPT_COMMAND a bit:

function set_window_and_tab_title {
  local title="$1"
  [[ -z "$title" ]] && title="root"
  echo___ -ne "\e]0;${title}\a"
}

PROMPT_COMMAND='set_window_and_tab_title "${PWD##*/}"'

That’s why I unset PROMPT_COMMAND in my title function, so it won’t auto update when I choose to set it manually using the title function.

The last piece is an updated version of my old Rails Term-script for iTerm which has been updated (and improved) for the Terminal in Mac OS X Leopard instead of iTerm.

It will open the tabs I usually use when doing Rails development and set the title of each tab using the above mentioned functions. You need to enter you projects root directory and the projects you want to have easy access to. I’ve added some comments to the AS code to help you out.

Download a zipped version of the AppleScript. Just drag the script to the Script Editor (/Applications/Utilities) to edit it.

All source code for these scripts can also be viewed on Pastie. Let me know if you have any improvements.

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

DEFAULT_PORT = 3000

puts (`ps aux | grep [r]uby | grep script/server`.split("\n").map { |l| 
  server = l.split(/\s+/)[11..-1]
  (port = server.index('-p')) ? server[port.next].to_i : DEFAULT_PORT
}.max || DEFAULT_PORT - 1).next

I aliased it to ss in .bash_profile like this:

alias ss='./script/server -p `~/bin/available_rails_port`'

(Btw, Happy 2008! I haven’t updated this site for a while)

Tired of see the the soooo 1999-ish font “Verdana” every time you get a local error page in Rails?
Now you don’t have to. With this plugin the error pages will use Arial or Helvetica instead—finally!

./script/plugin install http://burnfield.com/svn/martin/rails/plugins/verdano

./script/plugin install -x http://burnfield.com/svn/martin/rails/plugins/verdano

git clone git://github.com/haraldmartin/verdano.git

Happy new year!

The results turned up pretty good (at least compared to the first test), or perhaps I just like recursing functions.

var sortOrder = {
  'cat-no': ['cat-no', 'name', 'type', 'year'],
  'name':   ['name',   'type', 'year', 'cat_no'],
  'year':   ['year',   'name', 'type', 'cat_no'],
  'type':   ['type',   'name', 'year', 'cat_no']
};

function sort(order) {
  var ordering = sortOrder[order], length = ordering.length;
  $$('#projects > li').sort(function(left, right) {
    left = Project.find(left), right = Project.find(right);
    return (function(index) {
      var a = left.getSortValue(ordering[index]), 
          b = right.getSortValue(ordering[index]);
      return a < b ? -1 : a > b ? 1 : 
        index < length ? arguments.callee(++index) : 0;
    })(0);
  }).each(function(project) {
    project.parentNode.appendChild(project);
  });
}

After trying almost every possible solution I found in various forums and google, I finally came up with a fix that works for me. Like many others, I suspected the subscribed calendars were the problem and the iPhone synced fine after removing the subscriptions (including the built-in Birthdays calendar). But I have some subscribed calendars I want to have in iCal and found out that the cannot live in a group. I used to have a calendar group (File → New Calendar Group) for my “noisy” calendars so I could hide them easy with just one click. Looks like iCal/iPhone/Sync/OSX/whatever doesn’t like this and syncing stops working when using the group.

Doesn’t work:

Works:

“You cannot use the application ‘Safari 2.0.4′ with this version of Mac OS X.”

Luckily, I’ve found a workaround. Just launch Safari from the command line (Terminal.app that is) and it should work for you:

/Applications/Safari\ 2.0.4.app/Contents/MacOS/Safari &

Ajax.CachedRequest = Class.create(Ajax.Request, {
  initialize: function($super, url, options) {
    options = options || {};
    var onSuccess = options.onSuccess || Prototype.K;
    if (!Ajax.CachedRequest.cache[url] || options.reload) {
      options.onSuccess = function(transport) { 
        Ajax.CachedRequest.cache[url] = transport.responseText; 
        onSuccess(transport);
      }
      $super(url, options);
    } else {
      eval(Ajax.CachedRequest.cache[url]);
      this.dispatch.defer();
      [onSuccess, options.onComplete].each(function(m) { m && m() });
    }
  },
  
  dispatch: function() {
    Ajax.Responders.dispatch('onComplete', null);
  }
});

Ajax.CachedRequest.cache = {};

Of course this assumes you’re using the brand new Prototype 1.6

Read more in the OmniGroup forums and/or download the latest version here.

Update: On request, here are some screenshots of how the todo list looks like: