onidle(…)

The questionable Leopard dock “shelf” has been on a few mac users minds of late. Personally, I’m not a fan of the 3D glass shelf so I was quite relieved to see that there is a plist hack to fix it

Cut to the chase, here is a quick Applescript to toggle the dock from “shelf” to traditional bar and back:
Toggle Dock Appearance code

download a pre-complied Applet here

I have a couple of rails sites running on an Xserve at work. There are ways to rotate rails logs using Logger. While it would be nice to just let rails take care of it, it seems that that technique will fail when you’re running a cluster of mongrels. Those puppies write to the same log, so if you pull it out from under them it will surely result in dreaded 500 errors. That’s embarrassing.

Mongrel FAQ advises us to use something like logrotate. That’s a Debian package and it does not come with OS X. I spent way too much time looking for a binary to use. If you’re not a sysadmin this dark art of rotating logs can be deucedly tricky to nail down. In the end, MacPorts to the rescue (again). I <heart> MacPorts. BONUS: I can use it to rotate my Apache logs too.