I’m a huge fan of google desktop for OS X. I have hoards of pdf documents scattered around my hard drive (mostly docs for TeX macro packages installed with my TeXLive distribution) and google desktop is an awesomely useful way to look for whatever documentation I need. Frankly I think this is what spotlight should have been¹.

Unfortunately one problem many people have with google desktop for mac is that it sometimes uses a bunch of system resources while indexing. I’ve seen lots of complaints about this on various mac sites but no solutions so I’ll post what I found made a big difference in case it helps anyone else.

Go to /Library/LaunchDaemons and open com.google.Desktop.Daemon.plist in Property List Editor (you probably need to change the permissions first so you will be able to save it). Now add two new keys at the Top level.

Nice

Number: 19

LowPriorityIO

Boolean: Yes

When you reboot the slowdown from indexing should be a lot less bothersome. Unfortunately what inspired me to make this post was I just had to repeat this modification when desktop upgraded itself and overwrote this plist. I’m not sure why google desktop doesn’t do this by default but it seems to work for me.

In addition to the cost I usually find closed source text editors and similar utilities to be lacking in features and insufficently extensible. Textmate for OS X, however, is a glaring exception. It is well worth the cost and I’m constantly surprised by the many useful bundles and customizations available (for instance convienient remote editing with Cyber Duck or easy blog posting using the MetaWeblog API). So when Texmaker started slowing down on large complex files¹ I resolved to switch over to using textmate to write up my mathematics in LaTeX.

However, textmate’s prompt syntax highlight combined with the depreciated use of ‘$$’ to start displaymath mode was really annoying. Each time I would start to add inline mathematics by typing ‘$’ textmate would automatically provide the closing ‘$’ leaving me a line like this:

every $g \fungeq f$ that is ‘close’ to $f$ can compute $$

Of course textmate now interprets the remainder of my file as part of a displaymath block started by the ‘$$’ consequently changing the syntax highlighting. Since writing up theorems involves lots of inline mathematics this quickly became very annoying.

Anyway in case anyone else runs into the same problem let me share the quick fix I used. Go into your bundle editor and in the Latex bundle edit the language TeX. Find the following section

name = 'string.other.math.block.tex';
   begin = ‘\$\$’;
   end = ‘\$\$;

and change it to:

name = 'string.other.math.block.tex';
   begin = ‘\[';
   end = '\]‘;

Of course this is something of a dirty hack since it disables the correct syntax highlighting for the ‘$$’ abbreviation. But since that is depreciated you always use ‘[' and ']‘ right?

If anyone knows the ‘right’ way to do this I’d love to hear.

So after I went to a great deal of effort to compile a custom version of php on dreamhost to support GMP (long integer library) and jumped through several other hoops just to get openid support working I forgot to change the trust_root after I changed the URL. Anyway long story short openid logins are now working.

If you don’t know what that means check out a site like myopenid.com which will explain all about it. However, if you have a livejournal or other sixapart hosted blog you may already have your own openid. Google will reveal all if you ask.

I’ve been avoiding doing anything with my blogs for a long time. I’d come to dislike the look of my blogs and the nasty fragile hacks that held my movable type system together so I started putting off doing things with my blog until I could change the system. After my experiences hacking movabletype to support threaded comments (version 4 might be better) I decided I wanted an open source blogging system written in a more appropriate language than perl¹ with a well designed extension system. Ruby on rails still seems like the right way to go but I didn’t like the typo codebase and mephisto just isn’t mature enough yet to have the extensions I need, e.g., openid, and it’s API still seems to be in flux.

The fact that I’m going to be applying for jobs soon finally inspired me to do something about my web presence and despite being written in php I settled on wordpress based on it’s ease of modification and the amazingly comprehensive list of open source plugins availible. Someday I may still switch to mephisto² or my own custom code but at the moment wordpress can’t be beat as a practical blogging solution for those of us who want extensive customizations and non-standard features.

For anyone who is interested in the code I’ve written to customize this blog or other related issues I’ll be posting them on my wordpress page.

Obviously I no longer use this since switching to wordpress. I’ll post the source code I used for anyone else’s benefit but I probably won’t be able to help you much getting it to work. Unfortunately a limitation of the hooks I used to avoid patching the source code mean that this will not work for registered commenters.

You may have thought I abandoned my blog over the thanksgiving holiday. Not so! Instead I wrote up a plugin to enable threaded comments (and comment subjects as well). Sure there was already a modification of MT code which let you do something like this but rather than modify it to work with movable type 3.2 I decided to write my own version as an actual comment.

If anyone wants they can take a look at the alpha version of the code. In order to make things work correctly you need a bit of DHTML magic for the comment form. If you know what you are doing you can see this on my comment pages by viewing the source and edit it to be specific to your site.

When I get the code a bit more cleaned up and move some of the hardcoded stuff into options I will submit it to the MT plugins directory. Until then I advise anyone who isn’t ready to dig deeply into the source to wait.

UPDATE: There seems to be an incompatibility between my plugin and typekey login. Hopefully it is just an issue with the page js but I’m afraid it may be because a typekey login somehow short-circuits the CommentFilter callback I’m using. Further testing is needed.

UPDATE2: Problem with typekey logins fixed with a hack! I can’t trust any commenters lest I disable the callback I use to grab extra info. What a bitch. Now I understand why people trying to come out with a nice really robust system to do this same stuff are taking so long. Makes me think I should just clean up my code to provide those who want it with a workable hack so they can wait for someone to build a whole package.