There’s a few ways you can screen lock a mac but I wanted to not just lock the screen also put a message in the login window.

Using ScreenLock from handymacapps.com and Quiksilver you can quickly launch the lock and then by running the following you can neatly add a message to the login window.

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow LoginwindowText “If you need me, call me.”

Just do “” to blank it again or ditch the file.

Easy!

I had a need, a need to change some tables in MySQL from MyISAM to InnoDB. I did a few via regular SQL and then thought there must be an easier way and indeed there is.

Maatkit (which if you haven’t heard of go Google it) can help. The following one liner will neatly switch all the tables in one go. Lovely.

mk-find -uroot wld --engine MyISAM --tblregex '^payment' \
--exec "alter table %D.%N engine=InnoDB" --print

FYI you can get this from a “yum install maatkit” as well.