To avoid Spotlight from indexing an entire volume, create an empty file named .metadata_never_index in the root folder of the volume. If your volume is called MYDATA, for example, open up Terminal and type:

$ touch /Volumes/MYDATA/.metadata_never_index

Spotlight should now skip indexing this volume – as long as this file exists.

If you want to share an external drive between a Mac and a Windows machine, you typically format the drive with a FAT32 partition. One problem you’ll run into, however, is that you can run into a file size limit if you’re dealing with really large files. NTFS gets around this limitation, but unfortunately the OS X NTFS driver only supports reading from NTFS partitions.

Thankfully, there’s a NTFS Fuse driver which you can use with the MacFUSE userspace filesystem driver. It supports full read/write capability, so you can use an external disk to swap large files between your Windows and Mac machines.

Link

Microsoft recently unleashed their latest Office version, 2007. It introduces some new goodies, like an improved UI, some cool tab action, live previews, and- ah, yes- the new “Microsoft Office Open XML Formats”. Open XML format, aye? What does this mean to us Mac users? It means we have entered a new era of Office: the era of .docx.

.docx is the new default extension for Microsoft Word. The simple way to avoid any complications would be to simply make sure everybody is saving it in an older format until we’ve all upgraded. Actually, I’m just dreaming. Most people will give you a blank stare the moment you start discussing their extension preferences. So, if we can’t prevent the dreaded .docx from popping up in our everyday life, how can we deal with them?

Link

Most Mac OS X users prefer to use GUI tools to make Installations of software. By providing GNU software ported or built for the Apple Installer we are providing a needed service for the OS X community. Our Goal is to produce Tools for the OS X Package Installer/Maker and to port all Free/Open source software to the OS X Installer system as is possible.

Link

Bert Altenburg, author of “AppleScript for Absolute Starters”, in co-operation with Alex Clarke and Philippe Mougin, has released a new book for newcomers to Cocoa programming using Objective-C and XCode.

This tutorial is for non-programmers, and is aimed at levelling the learning curve as much as possible. In the best tradition, the tutorial is being released as a free booklet in pdf format.

Get it here

Have you ever felt that although Mac OS X’s built-in disc authoring is nice, it is at times rather limiting? Have you ever wondered what to do when a client requested a custom hybrid CD that required all the Mac-specific files to be hidden on the disc when viewed on a Windows PC? Enter shadowBurn, the painless CD/DVD authoring solution that is as straightforward as anything on Mac OS X.

shadowBurn is a CD/DVD authoring solution for Mac OS X 10.4 and later that uses Apple’s powerful DiscBurning APIs to ensure all disc authoring functionality provided by your system are handled perfectly and adds such much sought-after features like custom hybrid disc creation and disc overburning support for projects that just might fit on a disc, even though the official disc size does not allow the project to fit on it.

Get it here

If you already have a DMG and want to convert it to an ISO, you can use hdiutil to do so:

hdiutil convert discimage.dmg -format UDTO -o output.iso

• The response has been very strong, and the test has illustrated its point.
• Traffic to the host spiked at over 30 Mbps.
• Most of the traffic, aside from casual web visitors, was web exploit scripts, ssh dictionary attacks, and scanning tools such as Nessus.
• The machine was under intermittent DoS attack. During the two brief periods of denial of service, the host remained up.
• The test machine was a Mac mini (PowerPC) running Mac OS X 10.4.5 with Security Update 2006-001, had two local accounts, and had ssh and http open with their default configurations.

• There were no successful access attempts during the 38 hour duration of the test period.

Some snippets from today (7 March 2006):

• The site received almost a half a million requests via the web.
• There were over 4000 login attempts via ssh.
• The ipfw log grew at 40MB/hour and contains 6 million events logged.

• More test results and information will be published here at a future date.