SirSpanky.com :: Blog of James Pearce, Perth Australia

Killing Photoshop CS Contextual Menu Items

Sunday, July 29, 2007

Ok this is Mac OS X specific, and I think I've written something similar about Photoshop 7. You control click a JPEG to open it in PS, and you get spammed with 5556643 menu items for photoshop scripts when you just want to open the standard PS application! Why is it so hard to get rid of them?? I don't know.

What happens, is Photoshop comes bundled with a bunch of scripts. Thats pretty cool. But the Mac OS X finder is "smart" and sees that they can be used to open images. So it puts them in the contextual menu for images i.e. JPEG's etc. What we need to do is remove them from the system, and tell the finder to regenerate the contextual menu associations.

What I did, rather than remove the filters, was grab the ones I didn't want in the menu from /Applications/Adobe Photoshop CS2/Samples/Droplets/ and create an archive of them. The finder won't run applications from inside an archive, so it excludes them from the context menu. But they're still there for when you need them. By the way, there are ImageReady and Photoshop droplets in that folder.

So once you've done that, open up a terminal and run:

$ cd /System/Library/Frameworks/
ApplicationServices.framework/Versions/A/
Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Versions/
Current/Support/
$ ./lsregister -kill -r -domain system -domain local -domain user

And this deleted the database for the contextual menus forcing the finder to rebuild it. Since those pesky droplets you don't want are no longer there, they do not appear in the contextual menu for JPEG's or anything anymore :)

What Is A Winner?

I've read many books on success etc. I also had a preconceived version of what I thought a winner was before I read any. I used to think that being a winner was exactly what it sounds like: Winning at everything. Or at least, winning at what you put your mind to. But what exactly is winning? Think of that movie Driven, or Cars, where it's about racing, so the objective is to come 1st right? Well what about when one of your friends crashes on the track and no one can get to them to help them - do you stop to go back? Does that mean you "lose"? Or is keeping a friend more important?

If all winning is, is being better than everyone else, then it's just being an elitist I think. Sure it's good to win, but if your friends and the people you care about arn't "winning" as well, then what's the point in the first place? Maybe we are trying to win at the wrong game. I think winning is best when it is being successful at life, however you define that :)

New Samsung Color Laser

Thursday, July 26, 2007

I was in the market for a laser printer, and Samsung have a baby color printer that has a network option: The CLP-300N. Looking at the price of the mono laser printers that have the network option, the Samsung was only about $100 more. It also has drivers for Linux (CUPS) / Win / Mac OS X so I was sold :)

I tested it on Mac OS X and it was awesome. Great print quality. A bit slow to warm up, but it does work and it was cheap.

I tested it on Linux and got some different results. Printing color is pretty good. That goes for text and images. But black text...black text looks really bad. It doesn't matter if I change the resolution from Draft / Normal / Best - the black text just bleeds. I took some photos and enlarged parts of them so that people can see.

The full photo

Block color / some black text

Color photos / color text

Color text / black text

Note that the blurriness is simply because of the way I took the photo. The text / photos are all quite sharp except for the black text. I guess if I'm printing pages with text that other people need to read I'm going to use the Mac to print it...either that, or use my Canon Inkjet (IP5200 that ONLY prints text because the LPD support for CUPS isn't so hot).

Rescuing GRUB After Windows Reinstall

Saturday, July 21, 2007

Actually, you can do this to rescue GRUB after you wipe the MBR for any reason.

Windows will install the NT loader in the root of the drive, not the partition, so we need to tell GRUB to install there. Also, the typical method of chroot'ing often does not work, because the devices will not map (/dev breaks). Of course, this depends on which devfs you are using.

Anyway, the most reliable way I have found is too boot any linux LiveCD, open a terminal, and just do:

$ grub --no-floppy
> GRUB Version 1.0
$ root (hd0,0)
$ setup (hd0)
$ exit

That's it! The --no-floppy means don't look to the floppy for a boot sector (makes GRUB a little faster to load). Also, you may need to sudo the initial grub command depending on your live CD.

The mapping for hd0 to the linux devices, is it is the 1st hard drive i.e. hda or sda. The partition numbers are 0 based, so instead of hda1-4 you have hd0,0-hd0,3. Make sure you get the device correct!

Jackie Chan in Mandarin

Tuesday, July 17, 2007

I'm looking at learning Mandarin, and I know a good way to pick up a language is to immerse yourself in it. I'm a Jackie Chan fan too, and I know he started by doing films in Cantonese and Mandarin. So I sorted out the movies of his that are in Mandarin. I've omited films where he wasn't the star / director (1983+ in my opinion).

Here's the list:

San wa (2005) .... Jack/General Meng-yi
... aka Shen hua (Hong Kong: Mandarin title)
... aka The Myth (International: English title)

Chin gei bin (2003) .... Jackie
... aka Qian ji bian (Hong Kong: Mandarin title)
... aka The Twins Effect (Hong Kong: English title)
... aka Vampire Effect (USA: DVD title)

Dak miu mai shing (2001) .... Buck Yuen/Jackie Chan
... aka Te wu mi cheng (Hong Kong: Mandarin title)
... aka The Accidental Spy (International: English title)

Dak ging san yan lui (1999) .... Poor Fisherman
... aka Gen-X Cops (Hong Kong: English title) (International: English title: literal title)
... aka Te jing xin ren lei (Hong Kong: Mandarin title)
Hei kek ji wong (1999) .... Famous Movie Star
... aka The King of Comedy (Hong Kong: English title)
... aka Xi ju zhi wang (Hong Kong: Mandarin title)
Boh lee chun (1999) .... C.N. Chan
... aka Gorgeous (Hong Kong: English title) (International: English title) (UK)
... aka Bo li zun (Hong Kong: Mandarin title)
... aka High Risk (Philippines: English title)

Hung faan aau (1995) .... Keung
... aka Rumble in the Bronx (Hong Kong: English title) (USA)
... aka Gong fan ou (Hong Kong: Mandarin title)
... aka Red Bronx
... aka Zizanie dans le Bronx (Canada: French title)
Pik lik feng (1995) .... Chan Foh To (Alfred Tung in US version)
... aka Thunderbolt (Hong Kong: English title) (International: English title) (USA)
... aka Pi li huo (Hong Kong: Mandarin title)

Jui kuen II (1994) .... Wong Fei-hung
... aka Drunken Fist II (literal English title)
... aka Drunken Master II (Hong Kong: English title)
... aka Legend of the Drunken Master (USA)
... aka Sui ken 2
... aka The Legend of Drunken Master (USA: new title)
... aka Zui quan II (Hong Kong: Mandarin title)

Sing si lip yan (1993) .... Ryu Saeba
... aka Cheng shi lie ren (Hong Kong: Mandarin title)
... aka City Hunter (Hong Kong: English title)

Fei ying gai wak (1991) .... Jackie Condor (Jackie Chan)
... aka Armour of God II
... aka Armour of God II: Operation Condor (Hong Kong: English title)
... aka Fei ying ji hua (China: Mandarin title)
... aka Operation Condor (USA)
... aka Operation Eagle
... aka Project Eagle
... aka Superfly (Philippines: English title)

Ging chaat goo si juk jaap (1988) .... Chan Ka Kui
... aka Jackie Chan's Police Story
... aka Jing cha gu shi xu ji (Hong Kong: Mandarin title)
... aka Kowloon's Eye
... aka Police Force II
... aka Police Story 2 (UK: DVD box title)
... aka Police Story Part II (Hong Kong: English title)
... aka Police Story Sequel (literal English title)

Fei lung maang jeung (1988) .... Jackie Lung
... aka Dragons Forever (Hong Kong: English title) (International: English title)
... aka 3 Brothers
... aka Cyclone Z
... aka Fei long meng jiang (Hong Kong: Mandarin title)
... aka Flying Dragon Fierce Challenge (literal English title)

Ging chaat goo si (1985) .... Chan Ka Kui
... aka Jackie Chan's Police Force
... aka Jackie Chan's Police Story
... aka Jing cha gu shi (China: Mandarin title)
... aka Police Force
... aka Police Story (UK)

Fuk sing go jiu (1985) .... Muscles
... aka Fu xing gao zhao (Hong Kong: Mandarin title)
... aka Lucky Stars Superior Shine (literal English title)
... aka My Lucky Stars (Hong Kong: English title)
... aka Winners & Sinners 2: My Lucky Stars (Europe: English title: DVD box title)

'A' gai waak (1983) .... Dragon Mi Yong
... aka 'A' ji hua (China: Mandarin title)
... aka Jackie Chan's Project A (USA)
... aka Mark of the Dragon (Philippines: English title)
... aka Operazione pirati
... aka Pirate Patrol
... aka Project A

More Archive Post Conversions

Friday, July 13, 2007

Well I modified my news2blogger Perl script to convert a blog entries from blogger Blog page
s to email and post them onto my blog. I've been porting the material from jamespearce.blogspot.com. Unfortunately, I messed it up the 1st time (it stripped too much text because I broke the regex when it stripped the HTML tags), so it's taking longer than it should have to put them all up on here. Still, some of them are done, and it is still quicker than doing it all by hand :)

At least, for the text ones it is...when there are a lot of pictures, the script breaks. The reason being, when you email a blog entry to blogger, it accepts it as the text, and escapes all the HTML tags...so the img tags are escaped :(

Oh well, I'll get it all up eventually! I might post the modified script up sometime too :)

The Best?

Wednesday, July 11, 2007

I heard a quote the other day - "Good is the enemy of the best". It does make sense. To me anyway. But I thought, if I was "the best", then it would be hard for me to get anyone to do anything for me, since I know I could do it better. That makes a huge problem in business. I believe it's called micromanaging. I think it's a terrible way to run a business, since it breeds fear (since people are constantly worried if they have lived up to your expectations), and it wastes time when you double check their work.

Stephen Covey talks about empowerment in organizations. Training employees to think for themselves and entrusting the work to them...allowing them to take pride in their work.
They might not do "as good" of a job as me...but a lot more gets done. From a client's perspective, 0% of nothing is still 0% (i.e. they see nothing complete). I think I would rather structure my business on Covey's idea of principles, rather than the methods that I think are "right". That way, I can leave my business in the hands of someone I trust, and know that while they may not do it the way I would, the business will still flourish. That's successful to me.

So, to be the best, or to be successful? You choose.

Fun With Linux Part 1

Thursday, July 5, 2007

Ok so you're trying to use Linux in a networking environment as a desktop PC. So you've got that work share mounted off the file server. You're working away with OpenOffice 2.1 and after 5 minutes of work it comes up and bails with some error about being unable to save.

Now, you're no newbie to Linux, and you know it's a remote share, so you check the permissions first. They look ok when you do an ls -la, your UID is the owner. You think the problem might lie with the file, so you copy it locally, and saving works fine. You check your /etc/fstab, and the remote share is an SSHFS over the FUSE driver. Looks like the mapping to the file system is broken for some applications. Now you know the file server is exporting over NFS also, so you think, maybe that will work since it's legacy. So you mount that, and it doesn't work because your IP is not permitted because the DHCP gave you the wrong IP. So you drop to the command line and do an ifconfig on the device to get the right IP and it's sweet. NFS mounted. And it works with saving files.

Unfortnately, OpenOffice crashes on you. It restarts ok. You go to unmount the SSHFS file system since you're not using it, only to find it won't unmount because it's "busy". Oh yeah, OpenOffice. You close it but it's still "busy" when you try to unmount it. Nothing else is open. You check the process listing and there isn't anything that should be accessing that file system unless...yep, OpenOffice forgot to unhook a file handler. So you do an unmount -l so that it umounts properly in the background, and start using Abiword instead. Now you go to open your files, and Abiword is nice and remembers where the last file was opened from - the SSHFS mounted drive. It tries to open that, but that is unmounted, but not properly...so Abiword hangs. And since GNOME is using fancy pop-up windows, you can't actually put anything in front of Abiword. So now half your desktop is taken up with a program that is waiting to timeout. The only way you know to fix it is to reboot.

So sure, Linux is ready for the desktop...if you want it to be like Windows (i.e. things still break). But Linux is easier to fix right? Sure. But when I'm using it as a desktop, I want to be using it for productivity...not
messing with the system to make sure my "stable" opensource app doesn't crash because the filesystem breaks! Come on, just give me an error instead of a 300000 minute timeout! :)

Go Fast = Feels Good :)

Well Winter Conference was on the weekend just been, and listening Leigh & Cathy McCulloch was certainly a good. They've been on quite a few trips on their own and with their kids through the finances provided by their business, and they've taken many photos. It was amazing to listen to them describe the trip looking at the photo, made it much easier to picture how fun it must have been :)

Post-conference I've been snowed under with a backlog of things-to-do (work and otherwise). I've found that one of the reasons why I stop working completely sometimes, is because I just feel like I'm getting nowhere. That is, there is no perceivable momentum. I mean, when the backlog is just so big that no matter how much effort you put in, you see no dent! At least as an IBO, the team members can usually see activity from an external point of view, and take time to point out that you are moving forward. Outside of that, I hate the feeling of a backlog that I cannot shift!

I'm starting to see results now though, after working for so long on the infrastructure in a couple of other projects in my life. Kinda like when I drive a car, I like the car to accelerate FAST when I put my foot down!

'Our' Rules

Wednesday, July 4, 2007

On the weekend I received one of those typical joke emails, this one a
parody of girls 'rules' for guys - the parody being that it was guys
'rules' for girls. There was a line in it that I believe is very
truthful, for everyone:You can either ask us to do something Or tell us how you want it done.Not both. If you already know best how to do it, just do it yourself.

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