Stop Spotlight From Indexing External Drives

Posted on 28/02/2010 under Computing

Spotlight in OS X annoyingly indexes external devices like USB pen drives and cameras when mounted. You can block spotlight by using the ‘privacy’ setting in preferences, however once unmonted this seems to get forgotten. To make sure spotlight never indexes a drive you can add a hidden file to the root folder of that device to prevent it getting indexed forever. Create a file called .metadata_never_index For example to block my camera all I did was :

touch /Volumes/CAMERA/.metadata_never_index

Now if only there was a setting to block all external drives…

Getting Text Back From All Caps In Photoshop Elements (Not CAPS LOCK!)

Posted on 08/02/2010 under Computing

After getting rather confused as to why my text layer in Photoshop Elements 6 would not budge from being in all caps (no not because of CAPS LOCK!) I discovered that to get it back to normal you need to do : Mac :

Command ('Apple Key') + Shift + Y

Windows :

Ctrl + Shift + Y

This will put the text back to sentence case or lower case (whatever it should be before it was being forced into all caps)

moreHawes Through Time

Posted on 04/02/2010 under Web Development

Since I have been working on updating this site recently I thought I would delve into the history books (not really that far back) and look at the previous versions of my website.

Although slightly pointless, I have spent a fair bit of time making these so it's nice to remember.

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Nochex Steal Your Money

Posted on 25/08/2009 under e-commerce

For a client recently I had to test osCommerce was accepting Nochex payments. Having never used it before I went through the lengthy and painful process of signing up for a Nochex account.

Well now I know why no one used Nochex. It's rubbish. It's the only thing that would make me recommend Paypal (and I hate Paypal) to anyone but at least their service does what it is supposed to with minimum fuss.

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Web Usability – Even The Big Boys Get It Wrong

Posted on 28/04/2009 under Web Development

At work recently I have been looking into usability principles and in particular our checkout procedure. This consists of streamlining the process by reducing the number of hoops the user must jump through whilst trying to build confidence in the customer.

Whilst booking flights to Australia the other day I was surprised that even the big boys can get it wrong! Although the checkout procedure was smooth - this screen was the first thing I saw after I clicked the "pay" button:

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Easily Generate Javascript and PHP Error Checking For Your Forms

Posted on 10/04/2009 under Web Development

I wanted a quick and easy way of adding Javascript and PHP error checking to my form elements. The benefit of this is that errors can be caught using Javascript before the form is submitted, but if JS is disabled in the users browser then the error is still caught using PHP.

The method I came up with to solve this is very simple and can be easily added to form elements with little extra code. The error checking is done by checking input against regular expressions.

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