Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010
Homebrew: a retake on Fink and MacPorts
The Homebrew Mac OS X package manager sounds like it might be worth a try.
home > mac
Saturday, January 23rd, 2010
Index Source Code with Spotlight
I was frustrated that Spotlight wasn’t indexing any of my source code. What’s the point of Great, instant, system-wide search that doesn’t look in files I care about most? What’s going on?
Thanks to the article Terminal commands for improving Spotlight on Mac OS X Tips (which, by the way is a nice tips site I never knew about) for showing me the way.
The method I used was to edit the info.plist file in RichText.mdimporter (found in /System/Library/Spotlight/), adding <string>public.python-script</string>. Then, I told Spotlight to re-index the RichText file format via:
mdimport -r /System/Library/Spotlight/RichText.mdimporter
Saturday, January 23rd, 2010
While experimenting with /etc/sshd_config settings on Snow Leopard (10.6), I had disabled PAM (by setting UsePAM no). This had an unintended side effect of making launchctl behave poorly for periodic tasks I run from the ~/Library/LaunchAgents folder. I turned PAM back on (set UsePAM yes) and all was happy.
launchd must use the Pluggable Authentication Module interface as part of the mechanism that allows user agents to run.
If you see something like the following error message when trying to run launchctl commands, you may also have this problem:
Bug: launchctl.c:2325 (23930):13: (dbfd = open
(g_job_overrides_db_path, O_RDONLY | O_EXLOCK | O_CREAT,
S_IRUSR | S_IWUSR)) != -1
launch_msg(): Socket is not connected
Thanks to these threads for getting me thinking along this solution path.
Sunday, January 10th, 2010
Is Microsoft Security Essentials Good?
Is the free anti-virus tool now available directly from Microsoft any good? Any one out there used it? Ars Technica reviewed it positively. When I need to run Windows, I’ve never loved Norton or the free AVG. I have been using ESET NOD32 lately and it is ok. But next time I set up a Windows machine, I think I’ll give Microsoft Security Essentials a try.
Thursday, March 13th, 2008
Installing IPython, SciPy, and Matplotlib into Apple’s Python on upgraded Leopard
Start by reading this reference and some tips at MacResearch.
Because it obscures the nice Leopard python that includes Numpy and Dtrace, remove your old Python completely.
sudo rm -rf /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/
Check that NumPy is already installed and working.
python
import numpy
numpy.test(1,10)
Install latest IPython, version 0.8.2. Note that I always alais untar='tar xvzf' in my bash setup.
wget http://ipython.scipy.org/dist/ipython-0.8.2.tar.gz
untar ipython-0.8.2.tar.gz
cd ipython-0.8.2
sudo python setup.py install
Install a fortran compiler binary because it is needed to compile/install Scipy. I get the PPC version of gfortran. You can also find the Intel version at HPC Mac OS X.
wget http://internap.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/hpc/\
gfortran-ppc-leopard-bin.tar.gz
sudo tar -xvf gfortran-ppc-leopard-bin.tar.gz -C /
Edit a disttools file in Apple’s NumPy distribution so it is more lenient in allowing the use of the above gfortran compiler when building SciPy. Inspired by this note.
cd /System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/\
Extras/lib/python/numpy/distutils/fcompiler
sudo cp -p gnu.py gnu.py.bak
And edit the following lines as follows (I use mate gnu.py to edit in TextMate).
- version_match = simple_version_match(start=r'GNU Fortran (?!95)')
+ version_match = simple_version_match(start=r'GNU Fortran')
- version_match = simple_version_match(start='GNU Fortran 95')
+ version_match = simple_version_match(start='GNU Fortran')
Build and install SciPy 0.6.0. Source available here.
wget http://internap.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/scipy/\
scipy-0.6.0.tar.gz
untar scipy-0.6.0.tar.gz
cd scipy-0.6.0
sudo python setup.py install
This installs SciPy here: /Library/Python/2.5/site-packages/scipy, which isn’t seen by Python at first. I added the following to my .profile.
export PYTHONPATH="/Library/Python/2.5/site-packages"
Test it after closing your terminal and re-opening. I actually have 2 failures and 3 errors, but they are things I don’t care about at the moment.
python
import scipy
scipy.test(1,10)
Install matplotlib binary.
wget http://internap.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/matplotlib/\
matplotlib-0.91.2-py2.5-macosx-10.3-fat.egg
sudo easy_install -N matplotlib-0.91.2-py2.5-macosx-10.3-fat.egg
Test it out and be happy that you’re done!
ipython -pylab
plot([1,2,3])
Wednesday, October 17th, 2007
Clean up your Contextual Menus
Thanks to this TidBITS article, I was tipped off to find this Mac OS X Hint about how you can rebuild the Launch Services database that determines which applications show up in your “Open With” contextual menu. My Open With had a huge amount of cruft accumulated over time with Classic apps, apps on my backup hard drive, and an annoying number of image droplets in the Photoshop/Samples/Droplets folder.
So I rebuilt my Launch Services database to make my Open With much cleaner and faster. Here’s how I did it.
Eject my backup hard drive so that the database doesn’t include duplicate copies of all my applications.
Archive the
Photoshop/Samples/Droplets/folder (right click, Create Archive, then delete the folder).Add the following line to my
~\.profileso typing the lsregister command is easier. (alias ...should all be on one line)# make launch services register easy to find alias lsregister='/System/Library/Frameworks/ ApplicationServices.framework/Frameworks/ LaunchServices.framework/Support/lsregister'Save a description of the old database (out of curiosity, not necessary).
lsregister -dump | less > lsregDumpOld.txtRebuild the database. (all on one line)
lsregister -kill -r -f -domain system -domain system -domain user "/Applications"Save a description of the new database (again just curious).
lsregister -dump | less > lsregDumpNew2.txt
The new database is now about 1 MB, down from the original 6 MB. There sure was a lot of junk in there!
Saturday, October 13th, 2007
Hack the iPhone is the best site that collects iPhone hacks, how-to’s, and downloads. Installer.app is a package manager that lets you install, update, and uninstall a great variety of 3rd party iPhone software. Awesome. Finally, iFuntastic lets you change your icons, backgrounds, and install apps.
Update: The iPhone Dev Wiki gives the most updated info on current hacking status, including a list of working native apps.
Also, iPhone Alley has some great news and guides.
Also also, iPhonegoboom has good warnings.
Monday, September 3rd, 2007
I was having trouble mounting, reading, or writing to an external USB hard drive on my Mac. Trouble was it is formatted with NTFS and I didn’t want to reformat. Solution: install macfuse and ntfs-3g then go to Terminal and type
diskutil list | grep Windows_NTFS
to find your NTFS disk matching /dev/disks, then mount the disk
mkdir /Volumes/ntfs
ntfs-3g /dev/disk3s1 /Volumes/ntfs -ovolname="Fuse Drive"
Also, if you’d like to graphically mount a SSH or FTP share as a drive, install MacFusion. Now I wish MacFusion worked with NTFS too …
Sunday, November 5th, 2006
Restarting TiVo Desktop Automagically Using Launchd and AppleScript
For some reason, TiVo Desktop version 1.9.3 (008) for Mac OS X is a processor hog for me. Especially after I’ve committed the crime of actually running iTunes or iPhoto on a given day.
I’ve noticed that stopping and starting TiVo Desktop improves this situation, but I’ve also gotten personally tired of doing this, so now I offer you a way of automating an escape from this monotony. Use the plist file here:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN"
"http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>Label</key>
<string>com.dailyburrito.restartTiVoDesktop</string>
<key>ProgramArguments</key>
<array>
<string>/Applications/restartTiVo.app</string>
</array>
<key>ServiceDescription</key>
<string>Restarts TiVo Desktop periodically.</string>
<key>StartCalendarInterval</key>
<dict>
<key>Hour</key>
<integer>3</integer>
<key>Minute</key>
<integer>18</integer>
</dict>
</dict>
</plist>
saved in the /Users/uname/Library/LaunchAgents/ folder with a name something like com.QuickSilverWatch.plist in combo with these launchd instructions. Or, just use lingon as described is this Mac OS X Hint. Either way, you’ll need this applescript to actually reboot TiVo Desktop:
-- open Sys Prefs and wait for it to open
tell application "System Preferences"
activate
end tell
-- stop/start TiVo Desktop w/10 trys
repeat 10 times
delay 1
try
tell application "System Events"
tell application process "System Preferences"
-- set frontmost to true w/10 trys
repeat 10 times
try
click menu item "TiVo Desktop" of menu ...
"View" of menu bar 1
delay 1
tell window "TiVo Desktop"
click button "Stop"
click button "Start"
end tell
exit repeat
end try
end repeat
end tell
end tell
exit repeat
end try
end repeat
-- quit Sys Prefs
tell application "System Preferences"
quit
end tell
You must have GUI Scripting enabled to run this AppleScript.
Sunday, April 23rd, 2006
Commands necessary to make squid run as a proxy for ME not as admin
Assumes squid installed via fink.
Useful for debugging:
squid -NCd1
top -l 1 | grep squid
sudo squid -k shutdown
Making squid have no cache — I just want it to be a proxy — add the following to /etc/squid.conf:
acl AllIncomingIps src 0.0.0.0/0.0.0.0
no_cache deny AllIncomingIps
Getting the permissions right (make owner me and open up permissions):
sudo chown -R myusername /sw/var/log/squid/
chmod -R u=rwx,g=rw,o=rw /sw/var/log/squid/
sudo chown -R myusername /sw/var/cache/squid/
chmod -R u=rwx,g=rw,o=rw /sw/var/cache/squid/
sudo chown -R myusername /sw/var/run/
chmod -R u=rwx,g=rwx,o=rx /sw/var/run/
Now, I can run squid instead of sudo squid and that makes me happy.
Of course, I actually don’t run it manually, I use launchd thanks to Steve’s instructions.
Sunday, March 19th, 2006
GUI for real-time file usage info in Mac OS X
Robert Pointon has written the GUI analog to fs_usage in fseventer. It shows a very nice graphical display of all file system events.
Sunday, March 19th, 2006
I installed Broadband Optimizer, a program that aims to increase network speed on Mac OS X by increasing TCP memory buffers, effectively making data come in bigger chunks.
I used 3 online bandwidth testers to quantify the improvement (clearing Firefox’s cache between each test). I took the best of three runs of each test.
c|net test
1350 -> 1586 kbps (17% increase)
bandwidth speed test
2300 -> 2500 kbps (9% increase)
beeline
1104 -> 1488 kbps (35% increase)
On average, that’s about a 20% increase in download speed compared to the default Mac OS X settings. I like it.
Sunday, March 19th, 2006
Simple, Free Mac OS X RAM Disk
Michael Parrot offers a freeware RAM Disk creator (Esperance DV) that works great. Get it.
Wednesday, February 1st, 2006
Essential Mac OS X Applications
Mac Specialist provides a very nice list of essential Mac Apps.
Monday, January 9th, 2006
Sandvox looks to be a very promising tool for creating websites that look great and comply with standards. You can download the public beta now and try it out.
Wednesday, November 9th, 2005
While my normal computing platform of choice is Mac OS X, I do end up using Windows at work. On OS X, I really love the quick-launching abilities of LaunchBar and QuickSilver, so naturally I’m always on the look-out for similar launcher utilities for Windows.
Launchy is a promising start. It was written for fun by a guy who just wanted it for himself, then shared it with friends, then shared it with the world. Despite being so young, it has three of the best features I deem necessary in this strain of program:
- blazing fast speed
- almost non-existant UI (it only shows up with a keyboard command, Alt+Space)
- partial pattern matching (typing “mword” matches “Microsoft Word”)
I would be very happy if only someone could add a bit of:
- manual match tuning
- learning (remember manually tuned matches)
- custom matching (I want to launch stuff that is not in the Start menu)
As for now, I ran it for a few days, but ultimately turned it off.
Friday, September 9th, 2005
Setting bash command history expansion to use the up arrow like MATLAB
This is one of those simple once you know it but annoying to figure out settings. Via google, I found the solution — add the folling lines to “.inputrc” in your home directory:
"\e[A": history-search-backward
"\e[B": history-search-forward
For extra fun, you can make the command line cycle through options instead of printing them all when you press TAB. Try adding the following line (via macosxhints):
TAB: menu-complete
The jury in my head is still out on if I prefer this behavior. I wish they would just hurry up and decide so I can get used to it.
Update: Note that this takes effect in new terminal windows and new logins, not your current command line session.
Update 2: Steve suggested an alternative approach is to add the following lines to “.profile” or “.bashrc”:
# make bash autocomplete with up arrow
bind '"\e[A":history-search-backward'
bind '"\e[B":history-search-forward'
# make tab cycle through commands instead of listing
bind '"\t":menu-complete'
Tuesday, August 30th, 2005
This saga was enabled by my recent upgrade to Mac OS X 10.4 (the upgrade itself went very smoothly). I decided that I should setup squid to run automagically via launchd. Luckily, faithful reader Steve wrote a tutorial that explaines exactly how this should work.
It’s all working great now, but that took a little doing. I followed Steve’s commands exactly but ran into trouble because of a permissions problem with the cache. Steve recommended changing the permissions (sudo chmod -R 755 /sw/var/cache/) and I now realize that following his advice would have fixed the problem right away.
Instead of listening to the Wise Words of Steve, I decided it would make sense to do a sudo killall launchd. Oops. If I would have read this more carefully, I might have remembered that launchd is now responsible for starting the window manager on Tiger, but alas, I was driven to figure it out without thinking.
So, you might ask at this point: what happens after you sudo killall launchd? As happens often in scientific inquiry, I have stumbled upon the answer to this oft-pondered quandry by chance.
Here’s what happened:
- Apps that were already running continued to run, minus network connections
- New apps wouldn’t launch — the app would bounce in the Dock forever
- Couldn’t Shut Down, Restart, or Log Out
I guess the lesson is: typing sudo killall whatever on stuff you don’t know anything about is probably a bad idea.
Tuesday, August 23rd, 2005
How to see if someone is trying to guess your ssh passwords
Tipped off by this Mac OS X hint I went looking to see if anyone might be trying to break into my computer via scripted ssh login/password guessing attacks. After reading some of the comments on macosxhints and doing some digging, I figured out a nice way to check for attacks by using grep to search the system.log files.
zgrep 'Illegal' /private/var/log/system*
zgrep (a variant of grep) searches the archived log files in
addition to the current ones. On my system, this produced a long list
of breakin attempts that look like they are coming from an automated
script running through user names.
I’m not sure if disabling the ssh password, as the hint suggests, is the best idea to counter this attack (and, I admit, I’m too lazy to setup the crypto keys thing for now).
For my own home computer, I thought it would be better to only allow
login for myself and keep my password very strong. To accomplish that, I
edited the cooresponding settings in /etc/sshd_config to to the
following:
# Enable only SSH2 protocol (not the less secure SSH1)
Protocol 2
# Don't allow any remote root login
PermitRootLogin no
# Make sure only a particular user (dorkuser) can SSH
AllowUsers dorkuser
That’s it! Much more secure. dorkuser is, of course, not my real
username.
For fun, here’s a look at a processed (minus IPs and my user name) snippet from the log:
08:38 sshd: Illegal user wwwrun
08:40 sshd: Illegal user wwwrun
08:42 sshd: Illegal user wwwrun
08:44 sshd: Illegal user wwwrun
08:46 sshd: Illegal user wyoming
08:48 sshd: Illegal user wyoming
08:50 sshd: Illegal user wyoming
08:52 sshd: Illegal user 0002593w
08:54 sshd: Illegal user 001
08:56 sshd: Illegal user 1
08:58 sshd: Illegal user 123
09:00 sshd: Illegal user 1234
09:02 sshd: Illegal user 127
09:04 sshd: Illegal user 16
09:06 sshd: Illegal user 1a4
09:08 sshd: Illegal user 1dd
09:10 sshd: Illegal user 22b
09:12 sshd: Illegal user 2a
09:14 sshd: Illegal user 3e
09:16 sshd: Illegal user 4ct
09:18 sshd: Illegal user 511
09:20 sshd: Illegal user 561
09:22 sshd: Illegal user 587
09:24 sshd: Illegal user 72
09:26 sshd: Illegal user 75
09:28 sshd: Illegal user 9ia
09:30 sshd: Illegal user a
09:32 sshd: Illegal user a
09:34 sshd: Illegal user a_kirchner
09:36 sshd: Illegal user a1775b
09:38 sshd: Illegal user a4
09:40 sshd: Illegal user aaaa
09:42 sshd: Illegal user aabraham
09:44 sshd: Illegal user aadriano
09:46 sshd: Illegal user aaghie
09:48 sshd: Illegal user aagt
09:50 sshd: Illegal user aahie
09:52 sshd: Illegal user Aaliyah
09:55 sshd: Illegal user aaltje
09:57 sshd: Illegal user aandjstructural
09:59 sshd: Illegal user aando
10:01 sshd: Illegal user Aaron
10:03 sshd: Illegal user aaron
10:05 sshd: Illegal user aaron2
10:07 sshd: Illegal user aart
10:09 sshd: Illegal user aatef
10:14 sshd: Illegal user aba
10:16 sshd: Illegal user aba
10:18 sshd: Illegal user Aba
10:20 sshd: Illegal user abaintelkam
10:22 sshd: Illegal user abawah
10:24 sshd: Illegal user abby
10:26 sshd: Illegal user abc
10:28 sshd: Illegal user abculp
10:30 sshd: Illegal user abe
Tuesday, June 21st, 2005
The folks at FlyakiteOSX have created a very cool web site that acts exactly like Mac OS X. Very impressive.
Tuesday, June 21st, 2005
Real-time file usage info in OS X
Jonathan Rentzsch describes the details on how to use the command
line tool fs_usage to discover what files a program is opening, reading,
writing, saving, and so on. This could be is quite useful for figuring out
where a program is storing information or what might be going wrong with
a mis-behaving app.
Update:
For example, the following shows filesystem activity for Safari (-w forces a wide
detailed output and -f filesys shows only file system related output instead of
including network related output too).
sudo fs_usage -w -f filesys Safari
See also:
sc_usage(system call usage statistics)latency(monitors scheduling and interrupt latency)vm_stat(virtural memory statistics)
Monday, May 30th, 2005
Windows Freeware that is Useful
When you’re forced to use Windows, here a good list of freeware that you might consider installing.
Thursday, January 20th, 2005
A while back, I read In the Beginning … Was the Command Line by Neal Stephenson and I think it eventually led to overcoming my fear of the command line and learning to value a text-based interface for some tasks.
Garret Birkel wrote an interesting update and response to Neil’s work that I enjoyed reading. This update brings the discussion to 2004 is presented interspersed with the original essay: the format works well.
Wednesday, December 15th, 2004
I came across an interesting web portfolio created with an iPod-like interface. It even plays music and switches songs while you’re viewing it. Check out a screen shot.
Friday, September 10th, 2004
Some Possible Free HyperCard Substitutes
I miss the old days of HyperCard stack tinkering, but PythonCard looks like it could be interesting. Also, if HyperSense ever gets its OSX version done, it might be good.
Friday, September 10th, 2004
Westwind computing describes all of Mac OS X’s hidden files and directories very nicely. This is a good reference when using the command line because it tells where to expect all of the command line applications to be stored.
Wednesday, September 1st, 2004
Hey Steve, we should try Skype. It’s a voice chat program that supposedly has higher quality than iChat and allows Windows-to-Mac chatting.
Read a good explanation of the P2P telephony technology that powers skype.
Thursday, August 26th, 2004
Apparantly there is now an anti-spyware program out for macintosh called MacScan. Is there a need? Has anyone used it? Steve, are you there?
Monday, August 16th, 2004
Parlay of the iTunes Music Store and the iPod on iTunes
John Gruber, the creator of the wonderfully simple writing syntax Markdown, has written an insightful article explaining his view that Apple’s current “licensing” situation with the iTunes Music Store (iTMS) is not similar to thier Macintosh OS platform licensing decisions two decades ago.
I agree. Licensing is little related to the value of the iPod — ripping all of your CDs to your computer and using iTunes/iPod to organize and listen to them is the most compelling use of the iTunes/Pod combination. iTMS is just icing on the cake.
Tuesday, June 15th, 2004
I was excited to have my simple hint posted at macosxhints today. It’s just a convenient way to quit Mail.app remotely so that I can check email using pine.
