Torsten Curdt’s weblog

Some while ago someone posted an AppleScript to optimize the Mail.app index. I prefer bash over AppleScript. So I just dump my version here:

killall Mail
BEFORE=`ls -lah ~/Library/Mail | grep -E 'Envelope Index$' | awk '{ print $5 }'`
sqlite3 ~/Library/Mail/'Envelope Index' vacuum
AFTER=`ls -lah ~/Library/Mail | grep -E 'Envelope Index$' | awk '{ print $5}'`
echo "before: $BEFORE"
echo "after:  $AFTER"

For more details see this blog post or hawk wings.

These guys from Australia came up with something amazing. Tracing and modeling 3D objects from video. Just have a look at the demo yourself.

It reminds me a little on something I previously blogged about.

Did you know that Skype actually understand some of the IRC commands? I personally find the “alertsoff” command to be very useful for group chats. So while a direct contact gives me the usual pop up window, my group chats are now without alerts. This is much less disruptive. If you use Skype a lot it’s well worth looking into.

Available commands:
  /add [skypename]
  /help
   /topic [new topic]
  /me
  /history
/leave
/goadmin
/get creator
/get role
/whois [skypename]
/setrole [skypename] MASTER|HELPER|USER|LISTENER
/kick [skypename]
/kickban [skypename]
/get guidelines
/set guidelines [text]
/get options [text]
/set options [[+|-]flag] ...
/setpassword [password] [password hint]
/clearpassword
/get password_hint
/set password_hint [text]
/set password [text]
/get banlist
/get allowlist
/set banlist [[+|-]mask] ...
/set allowlist [[+|-]mask] ...
  /alertson [text to match]
  /alertsoff
/call [skypename[,skypename,...]]

Sometimes badges just don’t go very well with the design of a web page. So while during the overhaul of this site I was thinking of creating my own custom feedburner counter. You can easily use the feedburner awareness API with some AJAX to create your own. In the end I opted out because you lose the trust and recognition value of such a well known badge. But maybe it’s something for you.

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“April showers bring May flowers” …as you may or may not have noticed. I’ve just did a major make over of vafer.org. One part was upgrading to wordpress 2.5 and cleaning up my custom theme/design. This part triggered some thoughts that will I will bring up in some later posts.

The other part was getting some of my latest Cocoa projects released to the wild.

• UIF2ISO for Mac
  This basically started out with a blog post where I showed how to convert those proprietary UIF files into a standard ISO image. As it turned out some people really don’t get along well with using the command line. So in the end I just wrote a Cocoa version. Checkout the web site for more information. It’s open source.
• Fossi
  When on the road I always got annoyed that there was no easy way to send faxes from my Mac. I thought “This should just work over the internet!” No fax modem non-sense, no roaming charges. So I came up with “Fossi”. Fossi basically hooks into the OSX print dialog, let’s you pick the recipient and then passes on the fax to the fax online service provider. Currently only sipgate is supported but if there is interest, I am happy to add other providers as well. The screencast is still very basic, but I promise to update that soon. But please check it out. It’s currently a time limited beta.
• more to come soon…

I am really looking forward on getting some feedback on those projects. They are basically a result of me getting a bit more into Cocoa the past few months.