BackTrack in VMWare guide finally updated

The title pretty much says it all, after much procrastinating (read: schoolwork) on my part, I’ve gotten around to updating my guide for installing BackTrack in VMWare Fusion.

If you’ve been just WAITING to install BackTrack, but couldn’t find a guide that was correct for installing the latest VMWare tools, your time has come. Here’s the new, 100% updated guide. As a side note, in the process I’ve upgraded to the latest WordPress and NexGen Gallery plugin. Hooray :)

Battle app automation is Busted

My scripts for facebook battle apps (pirates vs ninjas & vampires vs werewolves) have been quite popular. However, due to new security features added by the developers, the script will no longer run. While it would be possible to update the scripts to the point they’d run, the developers could re-break the whole thing in two seconds, which doesn’t seem like a worthwhile way to spend time.

Apologies to those who liked the scripts. I’m still going to leave them online as examples of simple greasemonkey scripts, but they are no longer functional.

On the bright side, the game is fair again. Play for fun, and if you see ads that interest you, click on ‘em! (no, I am NOT a developer for this game, nor do I have any share in advertising revenue)

Disabling spotlight in Mac OSX 10.5 Leopard

While the new spotlight in Leopard is much more powerful than it was in Tiger, there are still those of us that would rather not have our system eating up system resources. Unfortunately, adding “SPOTLIGHT=-NO-” to /etc/hostconfig no longer does anything.

To disable spotlight (non-destructively), open up Terminal.app (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app), and execute the following two commands:

(This will disable the spotlight indexing)

(This will remove spotlight from your menu bar)

If at any time you want to re-enable spotlight, simply run disk utility, and have it fix permissions on your boot drive.

Disclaimers:
* You should probably reboot after running those two commands.
* Doing this will disable any features that explicitly depend on spotlight, such as searching mail content.
* I believe that disabling spotlight will break Time Machine. If this is wrong, or there’s a way around it, let me know!

Small amounts of content…

…have been posted, and there was much rejoicing!

I’ve posted some projects that seemed worthy of going online for various reasons, from a 6800-series motorola language plugin for BBEdit to a simple uninstaller script for legacy install logs. If you find any of them useful, leave a comment and say so =)