So we have loads of copies of Office x (and 2004). But no one knows what serial is on what mac. And you cant view what serial you have. And you cant change it… and we lost the list of who had what

So, we were going to delete and reinstall everyones copy, but it turns out you can get Office to ask for the serial by deleteing a load of stuff like this:


rm /Applications/Microsoft\ Office\ X/Office/OfficePID
rm ~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/Carbon\ Registration\ Database
rm ~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/Office\ Registration\ Cache\ X
rm ~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/Microsoft\ Office\ Settings\ \(10\)


This also works for 2004 – just change the paths accrodingly.

Mac OS does something weird with some font files. Basically it stores the data in two separate places which means that copying using scp or rsync tends to fail. This use of resource forks makes it incredibly difficult to copy these files without using the Finder.

RsyncX HFS is one option, its a version of rsync that supports resource forks.

Another option though is to use the command line utility ditto. This comes with OS X and essentially allows you to compress all of the files into a single copyable file. You can use it like this, but you could rtfm.

Create an archive:

ditto -c --rsrc SourceDirContainingFonts AnyOldFileName


You could then zip that (although ditto may support compression… rtfm), scp it to another location. To unarchive simply:

ditto -x --rsrc AnyOldFileName DestinationDir


You can do the archie-copy-unarchive in one go too:

ditto -c --rsrc SourceDirContainingFonts - | ssh user@host 'ditto -x --rsrc - DestinationDir'


Obviously, you can use this for anything, not just fonts. But its fonts that caused me the grief!

Photoshop used to have problems saving ‘proper’ png files. They used to be silly large and have color-space problems. Well, it seems Photoshop is probably getting this right now but it still tends to create silly large image files which, when used in a web template, are a bit of a pain in the arse.

We found Pngcrush seemed to do a rather better job of compressing (and fixing) the PNG. You can download this from sourceforge for windows/linux  here: Pngcrush

I use a Mac, so finding it for Mac OS X isnt easy, but here isa version compiled by a colleague. Its quite an old version. pngcrush for mac os x

And heres how I use it:


unzip and move to /usr/local/bin

cd to the directory containing some PNG images.
pngcrush -rem gAMA -d fixedpngs *.png

(This command creates a directory called ‘fixedpngs’ and puts the processed png’s into it)

 

(Eddie: If you happen, like me, to be a heathen and use a windows based machine there is also awindows command prompt version of pngcrush which is very easy to use with the  command [pngcrush.exe infile.png outfile.png])