What the heck are you doing Spotlight?

Filed Under Apple | 2008-04-20, 14:52

I don’t use Spotlight at all thanks to Quicksilver. But I’ve noticed in my system.log that I’m getting the following messages over and over again:

Apr 20 14:44:40 egads com.apple.launchd[102] (com.apple.Spotlight[4906]): posix_spawnp(“/System/Library/CoreServices/Spotlight.app/Contents/MacOS/Spotlight”, …): No such file or directory
Apr 20 14:44:40 egads com.apple.launchd[102] (com.apple.Spotlight[4906]): Exited with exit code: 1

Anyone have any idea what’s happening here? I looked at “/System/Library/CoreServices/Spotlight.app/Contents/MacOS/Spotlight” and it has no size, so I’m guessing it’s leftover from something? Anyone have any insight?

Update:
hmmm weird.. When I check the file through a console I have:
sh-3.2# pwd
/System/Library/CoreServices/Spotlight.app/Contents/MacOS
sh-3.2# ls -l
total 1384
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 704720 Feb 5 22:30 Spotlight

But if I browse to it in the Finder, I see Spotlight (I’m assuming that’s Spotlight.app) with a zero KB size. If I try to open it it says it’s not supported in this architecture.

So confused.

SOLVED! Kudos go to Justin for hooking me up with the full copy of Spotlight.app. I backed up the old (apparently corrupt) one and the copied the new Spotlight.app from him into /System/Library/CoreServices. So far, so good and no more errors in system.log. Woohoo!

13 Comments

Full Screen Firefox and Safari on OS X

Filed Under Apple | 2008-04-11, 20:51

Anyone that has talked to me about what I don’t like about OS X has heard me complain about the inability to maximize an application to take up the entire screen in one easy step. Sure you can drag the corner out, but that’s an annoying “work-around” in my opinion. But thanks to Todd Dailey I have a more acceptable work-around for Firefox and Safari at least.

All you do is add a Bookmark to the Bookmark Toolbar (commonly called a Bookmarklet) that has this snippet of JavaScript instead of the URL that normally goes there:
javascript:window.resizeTo(1440,900);

Of course you’ll want to set the values to the same size as your screen resolution. You can check your screen resolution in System Preferences -> Display. And on Safari you can make it even simpler if you make this bookmarklet the first one in the list. Then you can just hit Command+1 and have a full screen web browser instantly.

This is also handy for web developers on all platforms. Want to see what your site looks like at 800×600, 1024×768, etc.? Make a toolbar button for each resolution! Quick and easy site previews while you’re working on pages.

18 Comments