Michael Henley

My seat in @bodleianlibs Bod straddles the weather

My seat in @bodleianlibs Bod straddles the weather

A little while ago I posted about hanging in Alfred.app, the awesome launcher and keyboard control app that I have replaced Quiksilver with. Back then I noticed hanging and rebuilt Spotlight, which seemed to fix the problem.

However, it quickly returned and a rebuild didn’t seem to have the same effect. I had noticed that sometimes it would happen and sometimes it wouldn’t, but couldn’t spot a good pattern to it. It was potentially something to do with me being connected to the Internet.

Yesterday I noticed that the hanging came when my computer connected to box.net by WebDAV. I had set this up a few months ago to try out box as an alternative to Dropbox. I had never made the change but had left it connected in the background. I’m lazy. Go figure. Removing the box WebDAV connection from ‘Finder: Connect to Servers’ seems to have fixed the issue.

One of the reasons I never really liked box as a Dropbox replacement was the lack of a nice syncing app and how sluggish the WebDAV connection seemed to be. Perhaps Alfred.app was including this server in its searches? I’ve since done some tests turning the WebDAV connection on and observing the sluggishness, and then off and it resolving itself. Since I can’t find a way to specifically exclude a folder from Alfred’s scope this is as far as I can test it.

Nice example of one underperforming service dragging down another. Sorry Alfred, for calling your good name into disrepute.

Excellent idea. With @NathanRawle

Car has eye-lashes

Thesising

I used to be a heavy user of Quicksilver but since it was effectively abandoned I moved over to using Alfred. For the most part it goes above and beyond what I was able to do with QS and I love it. There are a few things I miss (or, at least, can’t figure out how to do) like displaying phone numbers and messages in big type as an overlay.

In the last few days I noticed that the dialogue box would hang on my first search after invoking it. Subsequent searches (if I didn’t dismiss it, but instead cleared the text and started a new search) were as quick as I would expect. Some googling didn’t reveal much, so I decided to rebuild my Spotlight index using these instructions. Seems to have cleared up the problem.

[UPDATE: This issue has since been resolved and addressed in another post]

Weird..

Weird iPad UI bug

At Africa Debate at @OxfordUnion. @james_lester speaking