Confessions of a cat

If you want to do that, you will soon find an app called ‘MacSFV’ but its PPC only and the latest update done to it is in 2003. So what to do now?

Fortunately the Mac has a BSD unix system as its underpinning with lots of good and usable command line tools. One of them is called ‘cksum’. Although it does not generate straight sfv files (which uses crc32 checksums for each file listed in them) but with a little trick you can use it. Here’s a simple example, using multi volume rar files:

cksum -o 3 *.part*.rar | perl -wane 'printf "%s %08x\n", $F[2], $F[0]‘ > checksums.sfv

It basically pipes the output from cksum to a small perl program that formats the output as in the sfv file standard (if there’s a standard like that :)). If you want to be sure that this is compatible with windows systems, use \r\n instead of \n in the printf fomratting call above.

Also thanks for Zsolt Muller for his article. Nice fella, since he uses drupal with its default theme for his blog

Well, you have tried everything to no avail. You are fed up with trying to find a proper (preferably all in one) application that lets you encode your DVDs to nice mkv files with all the chapters and all the audio tracks plus subtitles in one nice file. Or you just want to get rid of one audio track or make the just downloaded file a bit smaller so that it fits onto a DVD or DL DVD. 

Or you have a few files that you want to put onto your iPod / iPhone / iTouch, or PSP, Zune, PS3, Xbo 360, you name it.

Or maybe you have heard about Visualhub for the Mac but it costs more than you want to spend on an application that is no longer maintained (1.34 is the last one of it). You want to be sure that you use something that is being taken care of to a certain degree at least.

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The simple reason for this is: It is the only one that works well. I try to develop a small Adobe Flex app in eclipse 3.4 with the adobe flex plugin trial in it (v 3.2 of the flex sdk) - and am using OS X 10.5, Leopard.

Safari is a very nice and usually fast browser, but when it comes to debugging flex apps, and Safari being launched from eclipse it just uses whatever old cached version it still has. It also does not matter if you turn on the Developer menu, and deliberately switch off caching. I tried that, no luck, just frustration. For debugging Flex applications Safari is a sucking pig.

Also I still use Firefox -despite getting slower and slower as its newer versions come out - for debugging purposes, and reverse engineering css files (the excellent firebug tool + yahoo’s yslow comes to mind). For that it’s good. When I turn off its caching via the web developer plugin it is turned off for real (not like with Safari). However there’s one thing wrong with it when you want to debug in OSX 10.5 with eclipse 3.4+adobe flex plugin. When you set it up as the browser to use in eclipse and want to debug your app it just says “A copy of Firefox is already open. Only one copy of Firefox can be open at a time.” › Continue reading