a glob of nerdishness

I’ve got a folder containing thousands of files, mostly PDFs and webarchives. I’d like to burn them on DVD so I can get them off my computer, but when I stick the disc back in I want to search them in a jiffy with the OS X Spotlight utility introduced in Tiger. Fortunately, it is possible to burn a Spotlight index onto a CD or DVD disc.

Create a disk image in Disk Utility

Open Disk Utility and make a “New Image” of appropriate size for what you intend to burn. The following instructions work with both “read/write” and “sparse” disk image formats. After Disk Utility creates the disk image, it will automatically mount it on your desktop, ready to use.

Copy files into the new image, leaving some space

Now you can fill your new image with the files you want to burn. But wait! Leave some space free for the index itself. My first test on about 250MB of PDFs and web files yielded about 12MB of data. Depending on how that scales, that could mean around 200MB for a DVD. This will vary based on what’s in your files, and Spotlight does seem to be able to prune its index to fit into lesser free space if necessary.

Use mdutil and mdimport to index disk

Open up Terminal for the juicy part of this whole how-to. Type sudo mdutil -i on , with a trailing space. Don’t hit enter just yet, there’s still one more piece to add. Let’s go over what we have so far first. To run Apple’s metadata utility, we need administrator rights, so we start with ’sudo’. (For more information about these tools, you can open a new Terminal window and type man sudo or man mdutil.) The ‘-i on’ tells mdutil to turn Spotlight indexing on for the path we’re about to add.

The easiest way to add the necessary volume’s path is to drag the mounted disk image icon (the white device with the slot on the front, not the document with the silver hard disk) into the Terminal window. You should end up with something like this: sudo mdutil -i on /Volumes/Image\ Name. Now you can hit return on this command, and enter your password to enable administrator rights.

To ensure that your disk image gets indexed right away you can should enter mdimport /Volumes/Image\ Name and then sudo mdutil -p /Volumes/Image\ Name. The first command forces an index-while-you-wait. The second makes sure the index data is actually on the drive.

Burn the disc

At this point you can unmount (eject) the disk image. If it’s not open anymore, open the image file (the one with the silver hard drive this time) with Disk Utility. Select the image file in the source list on the left, and click Burn. In a few minutes you should be enjoying a Spotlight indexed archive disc!

I just finished skimming Micro-ISV by Bob Walsh. I wish it had merited a closer reading.

I’m hoping to bootstrap an indie software company, and Walsh has some great advice in that vein. Unfortunately, the good parts are surrounded by fluff: screenshots of ugly webpages in every other spread, glowing reviews of the author’s favorite Windows applications sprinkled liberally throughout, and wandering interview transcripts atrociously typeset(1). Perhaps a co-author would help a second edition. In the author’s own voice, “My editor, Jonathan Hassell, rightfully pointed out the first time I submitted this chapter that I had neglected to come to a conclusion in this book.”

Those warnings aside, I found Walsh’s market segmenting questions in Chapter Five most useful, with practical questions like “How do people in this market segment define success?”. Chapter Four’s comparison of company types from sole proprietorships to C corporations was also helpful, as it contained commentary specific to independent developers. The same chapter provides a section on Getting Things Done, which he backs with a crash course on the strategy. Several of the interviews contained worthwhile nuggets, like Google’s Emily White on AdWords and Joel on Software’s Joel on…software. Most everything else seemed to be either a) irrelevant or b) only relevant to Windows developers, circa 2005.

I would love to see the best fraction of this book extracted and rewritten, providing room for advice less bound by time and platform. As it is, it reads like a first draft, leaving the reader to cull the worthwhile paragraphs from raw material. Micro-ISV is a book I’m thankful I borrowed, but can willingly return.

1. I understand the ink is calling the press black when it comes to typography. I’d love to dump this template, but whim and window have not yet had their rendezvous.

If you don’t have an iPhone but want to see what an RSS feed would look like on one, take a look at this hint from MacGeekery. The short, easy version is to change the general.useragent.extra.firefox value in Firefox’s about:config to be “iPhone”. If you try this and to see this site’s RSS feed as seen by an iPhone, here’s a convenient link.

Ok, so I’m not getting an iPhone (and don’t plan on even getting a cell phone anytime soon), but it is kinda fun to see what some people do the instant a new Apple product (or other hyped-up gadgets, not just Apple’s) comes out. For example, Think Secret has a gallery of their disassembly project, and AppleInsider has an article summarizing the take-apart job that the folks at iFixit did very soon after acquiring an iPhone.

Finally, for anyone who wants to see what it’s like to open up an iPhone box for the first time, CNET has been so kind as to post a video of the unwrapping of their iPhone.

Global Resource Corporation (GRC) has a finely tuned microwave which takes plastics and turns them back into oil, gas, and a few leftovers. There’s a video showing the results of putting old tires through this process.

I don’t know if this is necessarily “better” than just recycling plastic the way we do currently, but it certainly provides an alternative as well as a way to reclaim oil that we’ve already used.

[via Slashdot]

I came across Philip Greenspun’s Mobile Phone As Home Computer at about the same time as Apple revealed a guided tour of their expensive (and hopefully excellent) new cell phone.

If Pilot/Photographer/Peregrinator/Professor/Philip Greenspun was on the right track in late 2005, Apple is on the right track now. The iPhone already has most features on Greenspun’s “What must it do?” list: Web browsing, email, calendar, contacts, digital photos, music and movies. Further, as he hopes, none of the desktop applications the iPhone syncs with (Address Book, iCal and iTunes, plus services on the Web) rely much, if at all, on the files/folders paradigm. Even the iPhone’s main menu focuses, arguably, less on applications and more on organizing documents into categories of appointments, photos, entertainment and the like. This could have been more revolutionary — Bruce Tognazzini rightly berates the “hard separation of email, SMS, and voicemail”, which also turns up in the separation of “Photos” and “YouTube” from the other multimedia accessed via “iPod” — but regardless, there is no visible hierarchy of endlessly-nested folders containing files and other files that open those files and more files to tell those files where the other files are. I digress…

There are other more disruptive/revolutionary ideas in Greenspun’s article which Apple has chosen to forego in lieu of what is, in undistorted reality, simply an evolutionary device done well for a change. I think, though, that users will appreciate being able to take smaller steps away from the familiar into the future via subtle changes in the computer interfaces they already know.

The iPhone contract rates have been announced. Take a mandatory 2 year contract at a minimum $59.99 a month, plus a $36 activation fee and the $499 phone. All together? An obligation to pay US$1974.76 (plus tax?) by July 2009 if I were to get the iPhone this weekend.

I’m guessing my wife won’t let me, though I don’t blame her.

Last night, at a farewell party for a teacher my wife worked with, the iPhone came up in conversation. I asked some of the teachers if they thought any of their highschoolers would show up next fall with the $.5K + $XX/month device in their pocket. Yes, “there’s always at least one kid who shows up with the latest and greatest”. The end of June is a great time to release a phone for students with summer jobs — late enough to have some cash, early enough to not save it all for winter.

During the summer, what more technology does the average highschooler want to use than their cellphone, iPod, email, and Web? A few highschool haunts like MySpace and eBaum’s World might not work, as Apple seems to have decided that Flash only belongs to the “watered down, kinda-sorta looks like” version of the Internet (Jakob Nielsen would agree). However, there are plenty of gathering sites that don’t make prominent use of Flash, to say nothing of the dedicated YouTube client that comes installed. With all the features and fashion of the phone — and with credit card companies always eager to take on new victims — the iPhone could easily be a big hit among students.

“When the people gathered together on one of the great trial days, they never knew whether they were to witness a bloody slaughter or a hilarious wedding. This element of uncertainty lent an interest to the occasion which it could not otherwise have attained.”

Sounds like television ratings explained, but “The Lady, or the Tiger?” predates the first televised game show by almost sixty years. I wonder if there was advertising around the gladiators’ Colosseum in ages past?

I can see it now: “Hey everybody, let’s play telephone! Except, let’s link arms and see how well the message transmits. We can form the largest human network!”

Bones could allow data swaps via handshake

[via Slashdot]