johnluetke.net

Im sure that many other people out there are annoyed by many things in Mac OS X Leopard, myself being one of them. So, here is my simple solution for fixing one of them: the Dock.

If you don’t like the 3D view of the Dock when its placed on the bottom of your screen, fire up the Terminal and execute these commands:

defaults write com.apple.Dock no-glass -bool yes;
killall Dock


That will make your bottom-placed Dock appear just like when its placed on the side of the screen. But lets take it one step further, shall we?

If you’re like me, then you might have found the Dock’s white outline annoying. Here’s a solution for removing it.

1. Open the Terminal, and type the following: cd /System/Library/CoreServices
2. Type this command: sudo cp -r Dock.app Dock.original.app This will backup the original Dock in case you decide to revert back later
3. Enter your administrative password when prompted
4. cd Dock.app/Contents/Resources/
5. Here’s the lengthy part: sudo mv bottom1.png bottom1.png.bak; sudo mv bottom2.png bottom2.png.bak; sudo mv bottom3.png bottom3.png.bak; sudo mv bottom4.png bottom4.png.bak; sudo mv bottom5.png bottom5.png.bak; This will remove the border from the Dock when it is along the bottom of the screen.
6. killall Dock If after executing this the changed are not reflected, you will need to log out and log back in or restart your computer.
7. Repeat the last 2 steps, replacing ‘bottom’ with ‘left’ or ‘right’, depending on what sides you’d like to have the border removed on.

Happy Docking!

Please welcome the newest member to my software collection…ul-title! ul-title is a WordPress plugin that displays wp_title() as a hierarchical <ul> (unordered list) instead of a single string. Check it out in action on any of the pages here or get a copy of it for yourself.

So I was just setting up my heavily hacked Apache installation on Mac OS X Leopard when I ran into a little foo-pah. Since I was unable to get the mod_userdir to work correctly, I dumped all the files I needed into the default directory for the integrated webserver, and set an “alias” in my home folder to link to them for easy access. Next, I head into the terminal and try to ‘cd’ using my newly created alias when alas, it doesnt work. WTF, right? Isn’t it supposed to take me to where I wanted to go? Well, that when I looked at the ‘ls’ output. This is what I got with the Finder-created alias:

jBook-Pro:~/Sites john $ ls -l
total 1024
-rw-r--r--@  1 john  admin     0 Oct 30 00:23 SMI
drwxr-xr-x   6 john  staff   204 Oct 24 20:09 images
-rw-r--r--   1 john  staff  2628 Oct 24 20:09 index.html
drwxr-xr-x  39 john  staff  1326 Oct 26 21:35 johnluetke.net

See the line for the alias “SMI”? It’s a file, not a true alias. C’mon Apple, OS X is supposed to be UNIX, not some bastardized imitation. Why are you storing the path to the desired location in a file that only the Finder can interpret, and not as a soft link? Why doesn’t the Finder create a “ln -s” type alias. Jeez…

jBook-Pro:~/Sites john $ ls -l
total 1024
-rw-r--r--@  1 john  admin     0 Oct 30 00:23 SMI -> /Library/WebServer/Documents/SMI
drwxr-xr-x   6 john  staff   204 Oct 24 20:09 images
-rw-r--r--   1 john  staff  2628 Oct 24 20:09 index.html
drwxr-xr-x  39 john  staff  1326 Oct 26 21:35 johnluetke.net

One week until Mac OS X Leopard launches! Woohoo! I’ll be at the Apple Store in Wauwatosa, WI way before 6pm on Friday the 26th!

Finally! My site is back! My apologies for the extremly long downtime, but over the past few months, my priorities have been shifted around so many times I started to get dizzy. Anyways, where was I? Oh yes, the site. Here it is, it all its glory. Everything hasn’t quite been ported over from the old one, (users, comments, all of the pages) but they are coming