Classic tailing

In my day to day activities, there is one thing I do everytime and I think every developer does : I tail the logs. The problem with logs checking is that you are rapidly facing a huge file, and the classic tail -f is not enough. The sad part of log tailing is that you only have monochrome logs, without any colouring of any kind helping you identify critical lines against more common ones.

General Launchpad thoughts

I continue my tips regarding OS X Lion. As I said in my OS X Lion walkthrough, Lion come with a very iOS-ish application launcher : Launchpad. Out of the box, it is automatically populated with every application you have and application you download from the Mac App Store are added there too.
Although I keep on thinking it is a useless feature for power users, newcomers will surely find this useful, and it will help switchers to find their applications. As I was cleaning my machine I tried to rearrange Launchpad by making folders and then I discovered that you can't easily remove a shortcut to an application (except the ones coming from the Mac App Store which are uninstalled when you remove their icons).

Let me remove things !

By digging around, I found that Launchpad stores its preferences in a SQLite database, that you can explore and manipulate using the sqlite3 command line program.
Please notice that the steps described here might make your Launchpad unusable, so please backup every file you change in case something goes wrong !

Update ! Easy technique, use Launchpad-Control which is a preference pane allowing to visually hide / show icons on Launchpad. I detail here the step involved for the records.

One thing annoying in Lion is the popup appearing when you long press a key (similar to the one present in iOS showing special characters).
I found a way to disable this by issuing a simple Terminal command :

defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false

Replace false with true in this command if you want to bring it back, you might need to exit and relaunch an app for the parameter to take effect.
If you want to discover more parameters, don't hesitate to dig into built-in properties, that's the way I found this tip (the -g flag tells to lookup in the globaldomain)

defaults read [-g]