Continue reading »]]> In my last post I described a VB Script for moving IMAP email from my inbox to an archive folder. As an interesting Apples to Oranges (or Apple to Microsoft?) comparison here is the Apple Script I use with Entourage to perform the same task. I will post two versions: one that performs the exact same task and a second version that is significantly longer that integrates with the popular Growl notification system for OS X. I would just like to highlight the overall simplicity and elegance of the Apple Script vs. the VB script. Yes I know their history is totally different and perhaps VB script is overloaded in usage these days but the point stands: the Apple Script is readable and intuitive while the VB script is neither.

Once again I apologize for the formatting but WordPress is butchering <code> posts lately and insert all sorts of uglies inside the code blocks and I don’t feel like fixing it at the moment.

tell application “Microsoft Entourage”
set acctName to “BA”
set folderName to “Archives”
set destFolder to null

set currMsgs to (current messages)
set currCount to (count of currMsgs)

if currCount is not 0 then
set folderList to folders of IMAP account acctName
repeat with x in folderList
if name of x is folderName then
set destFolder to x
move currMsgs to x
end if
end repeat
end if
end tell

And the second with Growl support:

tell application “GrowlHelperApp”
set the allNotificationsList to {“General”, “Move message”, “Error”}
set the enabledNotificationsList to {“General”, “Move message”, “Error”}

register as application “Entourage AppleScripts” all notifications allNotificationsList default notifications enabledNotificationsList icon of application “Microsoft Entourage”

if currCount is 0 then
notify with name “Error” title “Entourage Error” description “You attempted to move a message but no message was selected.” application name “Entourage AppleScripts”
delay 10
return
end if
if destFolder is null then
notify with name “Error” title “Entourage Error” description (“You attempted to move a message but the destination folder \”" & folderName & “\” is not valid.”) application name “Entourage AppleScripts”
delay 10
return
end if

– 1 Notification…
if currCount is 1 then
notify with name “General” title (acctName & ” Notification”) description (“1 message moved to \”" & name of destFolder & “\” folder of account \”" & acctName & “\”") application name “Entourage AppleScripts”
delay 10
end if

– Multi Notification…
if currCount > 1 then
notify with name “General” title (acctName & ” Notification”) description (“” & (count of currMsgs) & ” messages moved to \”" & name of destFolder & “\” folder of account \”" & acctName & “\”") application name “Entourage AppleScripts”
delay 10
end if
end tell

Continue reading »]]> The past few days people in Linux blogosphere have been bringing back up the noatime/nodiratime mount options. These options disable the updating of file and directory access times. On many standard systems when you read file a “last read,” or access time, timestamp is written to disk. Disabling the writing of access times can provide performance increases in some conditions. Probably in a lot of conditions. Disabling the writing of these access times can be accomplished with the noatime and nodiratime mount options on a typical FS on a Linux system. Well in OS X and hfs+ nodiratime doesn’t exist but noatime does.

These options are old news to some. I had used them in Linux in the past – heck I think it was even in the standard Gentoo install docs – but I had never them a second thought since I moved to OS X. If you know me personally you know I can’t leave something untweaked. And those recent discussions got me to thinking…

Be forewarned, I haven’t gone to great lengths to explain the concepts of the notes below so if you’ve never seen a terminal this isn’t going to be comprehendible.

I wanted to mount my filesystems with the noatime option in OS X to disable the updates to access times for files. Problem is that, at least in 10.5, OS X no longer honors /etc/fstab for system disks, only for automount disks.

After wrestling with it for awhile I gave upon trying to find a location where I could specify mount options for system disks. I decided to just remount the disk later with the correct options. I created a StartupItem entry to remount the disk. I created a directory:

# mkdir /Library/StartupItems/spencer_boot

Then I created the StartupItem plist. Pretty straight forward.

# cat /Library/StartupItems/\
spencer_boot/StartupParameters.plist

{
Description = “Spencer’s Boot Script”;
Provides = (“spencer_boot”);
OrderPreference = “None”;
Messages =
{
start = “Starting Spencer’s Boot Script”;
stop = “Stoping Spencer’s Boot Script”;
restart = “Restarting Spencer’s Boot Script”;
};
}

Now I needed the shell script that would be run on boot.

# cat /Library/StartupItems/spencer_boot/spencer_boot

#!/bin/sh

. /etc/rc.common

case “$1″ in
start)

ConsoleMessage “Starting Spencer Boot: remounting root fs noatime”
mount_hfs -o noatime /dev/disk0s2 /

;;
esac

exit 0

This solved the problem for the root fs but I also use Filevault. If you don’t use Filevault you can stop reading here. How would I go about this? Same problem as before, no where to add mount time options. Additionally the fs is mounted upon login, not boot. So our previous method of creating a StartupItem won’t work. We’re going to have to do it later after it has been mounted – again.

<redacted> I did have some other information here but after review I wasn’t happy with advocating the “hack” I’m using. But the gist of it is to run something like this: /sbin/mount -u -o noatime,nosuid,nodev /dev/disk1s2 /Users/spencer/ after the volume is mounted. This happens after you enter your password. So a good place would be login items if you can figure out how to run mount as root from a user’s startup scripts.</redacted>

After you login and the system has completely finished running your startup apps open a terminal and type “mount”. You should see “noatime” listed as a mount option for you system and Filevault disks.

spencer_boot shell script
StartupParameters.plist for the spencer_boot StartupItem
remount_filevault for noatime in Filevault volumes

Continue reading »]]> My favorite BASH shell completion of all time is hostname completion for all of my favorite commands:

SSH_COMPLETE=( $(cat ~/.ssh/known_hosts | \
cut -f 1 -d ‘ ‘ | \
sed -e s/,.*//g | \
uniq | \
egrep -v [0123456789]) )

complete -o default -W “${SSH_COMPLETE[*]}” ssh scp sftp rsync nmap traceroute ping nslookup dig host nmap nc

I find most of the hosts I ssh into I use for basic network diagnostics. So performing completion for traceroute, ping, etc based on the contents of known_hosts works great. Just add it to your .bashrc.

Update: 2008/11/04

I’ve modified it to support completion of SVN commands leveraging the hostnames expanded during the SSH completion above:

SVN_COMPLETE=( $(svn -h|grep -e '^ '|awk '{ print $1; }') $SSH_COMPLETE )
complete -o default -W "${SVN_COMPLETE[*]} ${SSH_COMPLETE[*]}" svn

Adding these may lengthen your shell exec tasks.

I test at work. I work from home. But I will not test from home. Fix it yourself. (trademark pending).

Continue reading »]]> Ran into a problem with Exchange. I created a server-side rule to place spam messages in a folder that didn’t exist. All spam was instead going to the root folder, the folder above my inbox. Well if you use Entourage to access Exchange you will not be able to access this folder. If you go into Outlook Web Access (OWA) you can navigate to the root user folder by clicking on “Folders”.

Unfortunately by this point I had like thousands and thousands of messages. There is no “Delete All” option in OWA. Craptacular. So moving on I mounted the server via WebDAV in finder (cmd+k). The URL to mount will look something like:
http://exchange.servername.com/exchange/username

If this folder is large navigating to it in Finder will be a horrific experience. Open Terminal.app and navigate to the mountpoint.

~/> cd /Volumes/username

Once again, if the folder is large rm *.EML will not work as the wildcard expansion done by bash will exceed the length of the command-line itself (32K by default IIRC). Try this:


/Volumes/username> SRC=./*.EML
/Volumes/username> for i in $SRC; do rm "$i"; done


This will cleanup most, if not all, of the mess. Some files will not be removed due to escape characters and escaped escaped characters etc. Open the folder in Finder and delete the rest. There are def. more elegant ways to handle this from a scripting standpoint but this was quick and worked.

Continue reading »]]> Josh’s envy has spun out of control. First he puts OS X 10.4 on his Dell:

I really don’t know why people think it is soooo hard to get OS X onto a Dell.

Josh has been running 10.4 like this for about 6 months.

Now he upgrades to Leopard:

At this point I just had to play with the hackintosh. In all honesty I think his Leopard install might be more stable. His install only crashes when he drops his laptop and it is too much for the adhesive to handle. My Leopard only crashes when I have 10 important things going on… note to self – scotch tape can prevent kernel panics.

Disclaimer: No Dell’s were harmed in the creation of this blog entry… so far. We still haven’t removed that last sticker, ahem, “we have yet to downgrade to from 10.4 to Windows”.

Continue reading »]]> I recently decided that the tried and trusted [1] personal information management tool I had been using, a G5 pen and a Levenger Circa, wasn’t doing much to manage the information on my computer. In actuality I had the paper notebook, Entourage, iPhoto, folder structures, del.icio.us, etc to manage all my information. For awhile I thought this system rocked. Then I thought it was missing something. Then I thought it sucked. Then I knew it sucked. Then I thought about how all this information was like disconnected graphs. Then I wanted to kill my discrete math professor. It was time to do something about this mess. Someone had to be connecting the disparate information centers in life. The exploration of personal information management started anew.

I hate Entourage [2] so that was out, kGTD was great but a little to “hacky”, so after looking over the options I settled on the combo of Omnifocus (aka the kGTD on crack) and Yojimbo. I can capture notes, passwords, serials, web page archives, bookmarks blah blah blah in Yojimbo. A few scripts helped any bookmarking I do get sent to del.icio.us, Pukka, and Yojimbo as both a bookmark and a web archive. Omnifocus handles organization of everything that doesn’t already reside on a computer mainly my GTD lists. I’ve been using this combination for personal information management for about a week and it is pretty solid. I have nothing but praise for both applications.

During these phases where I’m restructuring my personal information and tasks I won’t become attached for at least a month or so. This is something that really has to grow on you. Spending a few weeks with a tool that impacts so much in your day-to-day life is the least you can do… during this period you also have to continue exploring your options. You should be open to supporting multiple systems and even moving management systems during this period. Yes using multiple systems or switching systems sucks. Just be happy you have more than one fucking system to choose from and quit your bitchin. Seriously, stop.

OK so I bitched a little inside and bottled up the frustration to let out at a later, yet to be announced date. Now today I read about this new Chandler application. Completely open source, runs on Linux, OS X (including Leopard), and Windows. It also has a standalone Tomcat app that can be used for synchronization and provides a bad-ass AJAX [3] web interface.

Some may have heard of this project before. It is a rare breed in that seems to have followed some type of development process. Haven’t read the book…. yet.

Finally, it has a bit of integration with ordinary IMAP servers; it creates special folders that you can move content into from any other email application.

You can then operate on this content using the normal management techniques supported by Chandler (GTD). For example, I sent myself an email with the simple subject line “meeting on january 2nd at 10am with ken”. When it popped up in my Entourage inbox I simply moved it to the “Chandler Events” folder. Back in the Hall of Justice (Chandler) I forced a sync. This grabbed my email and immediately realized I wanted to create a meeting on January 2nd. It leaves the item in your Inbox for processing later, a GTD concept, but the appt is already there.

But apps and other scripts can do all this. The part that I’m really looking forward to, the collaborative information management possibilities. Chandler can run stand-alone, it can connect to your iMap servers, and it can connect to Chandler servers. The people at OSAF (the group behind Chandler) have kindly provided us with Chandler hub. Until I get some friends on I can’t really test out the features but two things come to mind: porn and chicken. First, the server is a Tomcat app that provides an ajaxy gooey sweet interface even if you’re not sharing information with other people. You sync from your desktop, then you can access the information remotely from anything with a browser. Mobile browser support is not provided but you might have some luck. I expect this will be remedied quickly.

But if you are someone who interacts with other people in any way, perhaps you can take advantage of Chandlers collaborative features. PIM has just gotten personal… erh um… collaborative [4].

I’ll post a follow-up shortly. I’m going to continue using Yojimbo/Omnifocus but will experiment with Chandler and possibly other collaborative tools for the next few weeks. Like I said, sometimes information management sucks but the benefits are amazing.

Inbox:

1. Fix P is for Collaboration Part 1
2. Write second article discussing for P is for Collaboration Chandler in more detail.
3. Add this to my Chandler inbox.

Continue reading »]]> I’ve been reading about webclips but was having a problem finding a real use for them. Webclips, you know, just right click in Safari and “Open in Dashboard”? I thought RSS met my needs. I just added some dynamic content to my sidebar, which may or may not still be there when you are reading this.

It’s actually not the fact that the content is dynamic that converted me to a Webclips fan. The content to the right is actually “powered by” XML and/or RSS so I could just as easily have reached the same information in other ways. There are tons of Dashboard widgets that do a great job with those tasks.

The thing that really intrigued me was that I could use the Webclip to monitor the new content. Since I’m building the content from another site I just want to keep an eye on it for awhile to ensure it behaves as expected, like preventing Enya from appearing in the Album list.

I fully expect to find other uses now that I’ve been exposed (no, not like that). Take a look at the pics below.

(it’s 1am and I don’t feel like doing proper foot noting so screw you for judging me)

Continue reading »]]> Went to burn the new Fedora 8 DVD ISO to a disc today. Opened up Toast, selected the image file, and clicked record. Got a simple “No recorder found” error. Couldn’t figure out what it was.

My first thought, one of those SoBs at work wanted to put one in their Dell. Perhaps Josh or Chris P [1]. Opened up System Profiler just to confirm – yup my Macbook Pro still has the superdrive locked safely inside. It was just a little paranoia. Following the same logic I pretty much eliminated Garden Gnomes [?] [?!] from Harry Potter as the source of the malfunction. Only one option remained; I had to look at the other running programs down in my dock.

As lunatic as the idea sounded it actually revealed the culprit. A leftover RHEL 4 VM running in Fusion. Flipping to the window quickly confirmed my beliefs. Fusion had taken control and RHEL had opened what I now consider to be the worst interface for DVD burning I have ever seen. And I’m taking into account command line apps like mkisofs and cdrecord under consideration here too. Anyways, Fusion had passed control of the device directly to the guest and the host could no longer access it, a perfectly valid requirement. I simply laughed at my stupidity – I should never have been running RHEL 4 in the first place [4].

Just thought I would share.

Continue reading »]]> You know what we be cool for Leopard developers and perhaps others? If Time Machine could start to handle backup snapshot trees. You know – like VMWare Workstation for Windows/Linux’s snapshot manager that supports branching. VMWare even supports the deletion of images in the middle to save space and perhaps enhance performance. It merges disks together when necessary.

Developers could create a branch before installing a particular software component or library and I think kernel (extension)? developers would find this invaluable. You could also think of it as an RCS for filesystems. Perhaps administrators would find it useful in their testing labs as they prepare for deployment of a new server or system. Yes I know these versioning versioning file systems already exist and one even appeared in Plan 9 back in 2002, but I just thought Time Machine could be used as a nice as a starting point for an alternative.

UPDATED 2007-11-4: I can’t believe I forgot to mention ZFS. Apple originally announced Leopard would be sporting the highly regarded ZFS and peoples mouths started drooling. Unfortunately that feature got dropped. Apple is not the only one dropping support for some interesting file system technology. Microsoft chose to drop WinFS after originally state it would ship with Vista.

UPDATED 2007-11-6: Chris has informed me that ZFS will be available for Leopard with read-only support in the relatively near future. Pending the outcome of that “beta” release, read/write support will be released as well.

UPDATED 2007-11-6 part 2: Chris dropped by to tell me that ZFS read-only support is now available. He did so with the ever so subtle “Hey, man zfs”. Thanks for making me look like a dumbass, I was doing fine on my own. Quote from 10.5′s zfs man page:

ZFS Read-only Implementation

ZFS  on OSX is implemented as a readonly filesystem by default.  This means that only the ZFS subcommands that do non write operations are permitted. Permitted subcommands are list, get, mount, unmount, and send.

A full ZFS  implementation  that  allows  all  subcommands  and  is  read/write  is  available  for  download  at http://developer.apple.com/.

To determine which version of ZFS is loaded(readonly or writable):

         # kextstat | grep zfs

com.apple.filesystems.zfs.readonly  is the readonly kext version.  com.apple.filesystems.zfs is the writable kext version.

Continue reading »]]> I’ve been having tons of wireless network issues lately. At work, which is not surprising being I work at tech company – only God knows who is running what service on their laptop or who is running the microwave in the kitchen across the hall. More worrisome, I’ve been having issues at home too.

So I get home last night and settle down write some documentation in DocBook format. I’ve been writing a custom XSLT in a valiant attempt to unify the documentation process at work. xsltproc is called to perform the transformation on the XML data and create HTML and PDFs as output. Fairly straight forward, right?

Wrong…

I start streaming from iTunes to my Airport Express. Currently, I’m using an Airport Extreme running 802.11N at 5GHz only and an Airport Express running 802.11G for my iPhone and visitors without 802.11N compatible laptops. The Express is wired to a LAN port on the Extreme and is connected via a TIP fiber cable to my stereo.

All of the sudden VPN and VNC sessions start dropping like hell. wtf mate? Long story short my xsltproc process went from 30 seconds to 5 minutes because of remote URLs being referenced as DTDs. I know, I know. My night was pretty damn exciting.

Of course I jump to conclusions and start blaming Leopard. Well after punching the wall a few times I sat down. It turns out it only happens when I have my Airport Extreme in 802.11n 5GHz mode. As a rudimentary example, my download speeds form kernel.org went from 30KB to about 700 KB when I went to 802.11n 2.4GHz only. Not sure what is wrong but I blame Apple Just kidding. If you look at this image you will see a dip in the graph in the center when the Extreme reboots to go from 2.4 GHz to 5 GHz. When it comes back online notice the distinct dip that is in the signal, communication quality, and signal to noise ratio. Not sure if the issue is hardware or interference related but given a similar amount of noise is seen at 2.4 GHz I’m guessing it is hardware related.