Design Stencils - Yahoo! Design Pattern Library

I occasionally search for design stencils and keep an eye out for them via Google Alerts and so on. Yahoo has a library of stencils available at Design Stencils - Yahoo! Design Pattern Library which has a set available in Visio, Photoshop, Illustrator and OmniGraffle format. For OmniGraffle stencils, there is also GraffleTopia.

If you are not familiar with the concept, design stencils are an illustration that is made available in a design or illustration application, so that you can just quickly drag the illustration from a picker menu, to your drawing canvas. That way, instead of reinventing the wheel and illustrating an office chair every time, you can just drag a stencil in and Voila! you're done. Makes life easy, and makes you look good.

Large 450MB Upgrade to Leopard 10.5.3

This AM I upgraded my two macs, a first generation MBP and a G5 iMac, to Leopard 10.5.3. Please note, the upgrade is large, at 450 MB, and when you finally restart it seems to cause Mail and iCal to freeze. You need to allow it to perform its processing on those apps, because it apparently does some kind of check on the mail and calendar contents.

After the upgrade, I noticed that Option-Cmd-Eject (sleeps the system) works more smoothly, and that opening the laptop from the sleep state is quicker. Perhaps that is a coincidence, but this update is said to have covered a large number of bugs.

How to - Remove Leopard Wiki Mailing List Spam

If you have group mailing lists set up in Leopard Server, these conveniently link to the Leopard Wiki page for the group. However, spam can sully the look of your page, so you may need to perform some routine maintenance at some point. Here's how you can do this.

SSH to your Leopard Server as admin, then "sudo bash" to log in as root. Navigate to group mailing list folder:

bash-3.2# cd /Library/Collaboration/Groups/itsystems/mailinglist

Use grep to find the mailing list pages with spam. In our example, let's say we have a lot of "spam" messages coming from the FileMaker server - announcement-type messages that have a limited usefulness by nature. These all have, say, the string "FMServer" in them, so we grep this way:

bash-3.2# grep -R "FMServer" *

cb90d083b749806821e589295fa79609.page/page.plist: FMServer Information...
...

Copy the results to the clipboard, then search and replace in a text editor to remove the "/page.plist: " bit. Put "rm -rf" in front of each line, with no double quotes of course, then copy this block of commands to the CLI to execute. Grep again to confirm that the result is nothing:

bash-3.2# grep -R "FMServer" *

Remove the index.db file then restart:

bash-3.2# rm -rf /Library/Collaboration/Groups/itsystems/index.db
bash-3.2# serveradmin stop teams
bash-3.2# serveradmin start teams

You can also do "sudo serveradmin stop teams" if you are not logged in as root. The index.db is created after a few seconds, which you can confirm.

bash-3.2# pwd
/Library/Collaboration/Groups/itsystems
bash-3.2# ls -la
total 6704
drwxr-x--- 12 _teamsserver _teamsserver 408 May 8 12:37 .
drwxr-x--- 6 _teamsserver _teamsserver 204 Apr 1 12:47 ..
-rw------- 1 _teamsserver _teamsserver 3040287 May 8 10:55 backup.mbox
drwxr-x--- 25 _teamsserver _teamsserver 850 May 8 06:42 discussion
-rw-r----- 1 _teamsserver _teamsserver 2074 May 8 08:53 extrainfo
-rw-r----- 1 _teamsserver _teamsserver 377856 May 8 12:37 index.db
drwxr-x--- 18 _teamsserver _teamsserver 612 May 8 12:30 mailinglist
-rw-r----- 1 _teamsserver _teamsserver 1278 May 8 12:37 metadata.plist
drwxr-x--- 2 _teamsserver _teamsserver 68 Apr 1 12:47 public
drwxr-x--- 2 _teamsserver _teamsserver 68 Apr 1 12:47 resources
drwxr-x--- 3 _teamsserver _teamsserver 102 May 8 06:25 weblog
drwxr-x--- 23 _teamsserver _teamsserver 782 May 8 06:42 wiki

Hope this how-to is helpful to someone.

Linux and DOS Command Comparison

When systems engineers are just beginning to learn, or are faced with a situation of having to change from one OS to another, it is good to have a comparison of commands or methods to ease the transition. Thinking of one such situation, I put together Linux and DOS Command Line Equivalents, and hope it is useful for some.

The technology behind the page is interesting, and it's such a pleasure to have tools like this. The page uses a Google Spreadsheet as its data source, and the GTable macro from Loghound's PlusKit. In a styled text page in RapidWeaver, I inserted commands like the following (without the space between @ and gtable):

@ gtable((pRjiYF5QI6j4rHxaJXP7rRQ, id:sysadmintable1, theme:lab-report, header:true, search:section="Entering Commands",ignore:section))

This feeds the ID of the Google Spreadsheet and other query parameters to the Google Docs API, and several of these commands resulted in the nicely-formatted page within the confines of my site. The best thing is, when I update the Google Spreadsheet, my site's page updates automatically.

The page itself is admittedly imperfect, but it is a start. Hope you enjoy it.