• There is some technical stuff in the other Read Me if you're interested •
We just shifted over to using At Ease to limit students' access to copying things, etc... in our academic computer lab, and to make things at lease marginally easier for the kids, we've got At Ease automatically creating aliases for files as they're saved.
This leads to an amazing number of files and aliases building up on the hard drive.
Me being the poor shmuck who had to go from machine to machine deleting all these things in a dull, mindless, repetitive way said, "Hey... these are >computers<... and computers are really good at dull, mindless, repetitive tasks. I'll have it do my work for me." And thus PsychoKiller was born.
Right now, PK comes in two parts: a Control Panel (PsychoKiller AE) and an application to put in your Startup Items folder (PsychoStartup).
The Control Panel is pretty straightforward. The list contains the list of files that you want to stay in the At Ease Items folder, no matter how old and decrepit they may get. The "Get At Ease Items" button will allow you to read in the current contents of the At Ease Items folder in the System Folder. The "Remove Items" button is obvious. When you click on it, whatever's selected in the list will be removed from the list. THIS WILL NOT DELETE ANYTHING FROM THE DISK!!! The "Add Item to List" button will provide you with the standard Open dialog with a difference: this one has a "Select…" button on the bottom. You'll figure it out, it's pretty obvious. You can use this to add a single item to the list of permitted files.
Bear in mind... The "Add Item to List" button will allow you to add files to the list from anywhere in the hierarchy of the drive; however, PsychoStartup will only work on aliases that are in the "At Ease Items" folder of your hard disk.
When you close the cdev, a file called "PKAE Prefs" will be created in your Preferences Folder. This has to live there, and be named that, so don't mess with it. This contains the list of permitted files that the PsychoStartup application uses to go through and get rid of the undesirables from the At Ease Items folder.
PsychoStartup will first read in the list of files that are permitted on the hard drive from the 'PKAE Prefs' file in the Preferences Folder. It will then step through each file in the 'At Ease Items' folder, and compare its name to the list. If it's in the list, it'll move on. If it isn't in the list, and it's older than two days, PsychoStartup will try to resolve the alias. If it finds the original file, it will delete it permanently. If it can't, it will then move on to destroy the alias file, which it would have done anyway. Voilá! The 'At Ease Items' folder is considerably less cluttered.
The reason for the two day hardwired delay is simple: Say you're working along, and you've saved your work, so you've got your alias all set up. Then, "Sorry, a system error occurred." (On a Mac? Never...) When PsychoKiller fires up, it'll kill off that alias and the original file on restart. So, in a situation where some of the work should have been recoverable, now none of it is. Eventually, the delay will be user configurable.
Also, I hope to move the PsychoStartup code into an INIT resource, because I think that At Ease firing up, then PsychoStartup launching and exiting looks bad. I'd like it to be a quiet, unobtrusive INIT, but I'm not sure what's loaded before At Ease or the Finder, and after.
If you like it and use it, send me $5. I'm not greedy, yet. Send it to:
Chris Parker
The Green (yes, The Green. It's a small town. Mail gets there.)
Middlebury, CT 06762
If you have any questions, bug reports, etc.... you can write me SnailMail, or at one of the following Email addresses:
