Amazingly the other day I stumbled across a webpage talking about the problems of typing a backslash character from a UK Macintosh keyboard when connected to a Windows PC via Remote Desktop Connection. This is particularly infuriating when you need to type in file paths.

The solution to this was to download and install a freeware system tray application for the Windows machine which converted the key to the left of the Z key on a Mac keyboard (which is where the backslash is on a UK PC keyboard) into a backslash.

Why is this amazing? Well the program that was available for download was written by me way back in 2005 and I’d completely forgotten about it. It seems that it is still widely in use and people are still finding it useful.

This solution works just as well if you’re running a virtual machine as well such as VirtualBox or Virtual PC – although it’s not needed if you’re running VMWare Fusion.

So I thought it was only right and proper to make it available from my own website. So here you go, you can download it below and use it to your heart’s content.

All the sparse instructions you need are in the massive 8KB ZIP file together with the executable. Enjoy.

Download Backslasher 1.0

With the release candidate of Windows 7 now available for general download and with a rumoured release date of October 23rd I thought now was a good time to start checking it out.

Now without wanting to trash a perfectly good Windows XP machine to do it, I thought I’d see if I could get the RC up and running on VMWare Fusion on one of my Macs. That way nothing gets trashed.

Then as I was downloading the RC I came across a blog post on the VMWare site with guidance on exactly how to get it up and running. Sweet.

A quick read, half a dozen clicks and bosh – ten minutes later and it was up and running like a dream.

I have to say, after the shambles they’ve made out of Vista, the first impressions are good. Even under virtualisation it runs smoothly and quickly.

Only time will tell how it holds up under serious testing, but Microsoft could finally have the XP killer they’ve been so desperately after.

So frighteningly the end of another year is upon us. Where do they go? Still what better way to start 2009 than with a burst of learning some new skills (or even re-learning some old ones), and moving my development focus in a new direction.

A couple of different things have happened recently which have brought about this post. The first one has been a few emails from people asking about the source code for my Net Yaroze game, A Dog Tale, after a video of it was posted to YouTube.

Incidentally, while I’m talking about A Dog Tale, even more bizarre and obscure than somebody posting a video of the game to YouTube, somebody also sent me a link to a Wikipedia page about it. Blimey, does old code never die?

(more…)

The best Subversion client for the Mac by far is now out of beta, and it continues to rock. And at only €39 per licence, the price is right too.

If you use Subversion as your source control and versioning, then on a Windows box you will no doubt be aware that TortoiseSVN is the best SVN client out there for your PC. I personally also use VisualSVN for its Visual Studio 2008 integration which makes life so easy when developing in the IDE, and the free VisualSVN Server taking care of the backend business.

But on a Mac the toolkit has been far from clear cut until recently. There have been numerous SVN client tools around for a while, but most of them sucked in some way or another – mostly as they were so unmac-like. Then all of a sudden Versions came around the corner and filled the empty SVN client gap nicely.

Actually about the same time Cornerstone came along as well, which looks great too, but just doesn’t flow as well as Versions for me, and it was a whole load slower. It is also a tad more expensive (but not by much to be fair). You might prefer it over Versions, but it’s not for me.

Couple the arrival of Versions with the release of Coda 1.6, which also has SVN support built in and developing on a Mac has never been better.

Versions. Get yourself a copy today http://www.versionsapp.com/

All of a sudden yesterday my MacBook decided it needed to spin the fan up to such a speed that I thought it was trying to take off. Not only did this seem a little strange, but it was also darn noisy and annoying.

I tried all the usual, like giving it a reboot and even reseting the power management controller, but as soon as it booted back up, the fan kicked back off again like Airwolf in a hurry.

Using iStat Pro I could see that the processor was running fairly warm, and the fan was booting around at close to 7000rpm – not normal.

Now, I’m running 10.5.5, which I have been for some time now with no problems, and it struck me as an odd thing to suddenly occur, so I checked over the processes to see what was kicking off.

Ordering the processes by CPU usage it was clear we had a winner – ATSServer. So here’s the obvious question, what the hell does that do, and why was it doing it quite so much?

A quick consultation with the Oracle told me the ATSServer, part of Mac OS X 10.5, is “a system daemon which provides font management and processing”. OK, but why is it working so hard?

Well apparently the ATSServer also plays a part in the Spotlight indexing, particularly when it’s indexing PDFs. Bamm! Hang on a minute, I’ve just added nearly 3GB of PDF files to my local disk, could this be the problem?

Another browse around the interweb and it seems the world is littered with people whose ATSServer process is causing havoc because of a big pile of PDFs. The long and short of it is that Spotlight was trying to index the contents of the PDF files and because there were so many of them it was causing the process to go mental.

There are two solutions to this problem. 1) leave it be, and if your Mac doesn’t take off, eventually it will finish indexing the files and it will return to normality, or 2) open the Spotlight preferences and add the directory with the PDF files in to the privacy list, meaning they will not be indexed. I opted for the later, and within a minute the fan had stopped. Magic.

A big shout has to go out to Martijn Bleeker who highlighted this very issue on his blog yonks ago, and which I stumbled upon today.