Okay as much as I like OSX and apple I have to admit, Leopard is not quite ready for consumption. Not unless you’re willing to do a “Erase Install”. After the weekend fun session of “Archive installing” 5 machines, I have found another bug/feature/headache. Here is how it happens:

Well, not quite. It might seem like everything is transfered, until you start wondering about WINS Servers and Windows WORKGROUP/Domain settings. You see under Tiger these two were stored under directory utility, but under Leopard they’ve tried to pack everything under Advanced  Network settings (Preferences/Network/Advanced…). The problem is that if you’ve had your Network locations transfered from tiger, the advanced WINS panel will NOT let you enter/add new WINS servers or change the WORKGROUP field. You can try and change them, but as soon as you press OK  followed by Apply on the next screen, the fields reset to blank. 

Try it and you’ll see if you go back the field wil be blank. The only way to fix this is to create “New” Locations and re-set them up, then you can fill in the WINS and WORKGROUP entries and they’ll stick. Apple are you listening, not only are the Network panels a mess — just compare the 3 different widgets used under Network settings……must be some new Leopard crack they’re sniffing……consistency people — but the network configuration screens refuse to take into effect the changes you put in if you’ve done a “Upgrade” or “Archive” install. This only wasted three hours today, I’m sure someone in Cupertino is having a good laugh.

Just noticed that if you place your dock on either side of the screen you get a flat dock, instead of that floating 3d look. As much as I like the 3D look, I liked the flat look even more, so after poking around I found out how to disable the 3D look. Open a Terminal window and type in the following two commands:
defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES
killall Dock

To get the 3D floating dock back you open a Terminal and type the “opposite” two commands:
defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean NO
killall Dock

Keep coming back…..there will be more soon :-)

For all the Nokia N800 fans out there……this is what happens if Nokia was sponsoring your High school :-). Seriously though, this is a fantastic example of what kids (and adults) can do using the opensource N800 platform for robotics control. Now who’s gonna stick one of these things on a gas powered RC car…..Dibs on the Remote :-)

Came across a pretty good write up on OpenMoko  project and Neo1973 opensource Cell phone over at wired. It sounds like the Hardware is pretty good (well aside from the promised bits that are still coming), the software though seems to have some problems. The author seems to think the partially open source Qtopia software is much nicer. We’d covered this device before and think that once it matures a bit more it could give others a run for their money.

Like many of you, I picked up Leopard Family pack last night. You see I have 4 mac’s and for $199 the family pack allows me to install leopard on up to 5 machines (in the same household). Anyways I did run into some troubles so I figured I’ll let you guys know about the gotchas:

Okay so this all started with our users not being able to share files on our webserver. We use SSH only for upload/download and interactive access (ie: no ftp). Through trial and error we found out that the default umask (under OSX Server) for sftp uploaded files are 0033 (ie: rwxr–r–) and directories are 0022 (ie: rwxr-xr-x). This creates a problem when one user uploads a file and another user downloads/modifies and tries to re-upload it — they simply can’t because the group permissions are wrong.

If we were using ftp (which we are not) there are some solutions on the net that allow you to modify the startup parameters for the ftp server so that the default umask for all files is 0013 — which would allow a group of people to share/overwrite each others files — but we are using ssh only.

So we came up with two other solutions — a shared upload account and/or a cron job that would modify the group permissions on the website directory to allow group sharing. We went with the second solution and that’s where I ran into so many problems that I decided to create this post. You see normally Unix users know that spaces (and strange characters) in filenames are a no-no. Well that’s not true for Windows and Mac users, they use spaces and other odd characters in their filenames/folders all the time.

I started writing — what I thought was — a simple “for loop” script to go through the website folder and change the group permissions. Of course on the first try things didn’t work nicely because of spaces, so I started compensating for that and came up with:
for i in `find /Path/to/www -type d -print0 |xargs -0 -n 1`
This kinda worked, but the for loop would still split the lines when it hit spaces in filenames. I tried to mess around with it and gave up. After RTFMing a bit more I tried:
for i in `find /Path/to/www -type d -exec echo \"{}\" \;`
The thinking behind this was that the exec would echo the filenames quoted and it should work….well it didn’t, the for loop still split the input lines at spaces.

Finally after a latenight RTFM session (and lots of cursing), I think I’ve found the ultimate file handling loop statement:
find /Path/to/www -type d ! -perm -g=wx -print0 | while IFS= read -rd $'\0' filename
Okay so this version uses “while” rather than “for” but it works like a charm and chews through spaces and all other kinds of weird chars and creates a output stream that’s ready to be used by your choice of commands (chmod in my case).

After trimming and optimizing the script a bit, here is the final product:
# The following find will search for
# all files under /Path/to/www, that
# are NOT symlinks, and do NOT have
# group write permission. The list is
# "\0" seperated and the while portion
# will loop around this character and
# ignore everything else in the path.
find /Path/to/www ! -type l ! -perm -g=w -print0 | while IFS= read -rd $'\0' filename
do
# We've found a directory with no group
# write permission, so fix it.
if [ -d "$filename" ]
then
chmod g+rwx "$filename"
# echo Directory changed
stat -l "$filename"
fi
# We've found a file with no group
# write permission, so fix it.
if [ -f "$filename" ]
then
chmod g+rw "$filename"
# echo File changed
stat -l "$filename"
fi
done

Hopefully you’ll find this code (or portions of it) useful for your own day-to-day hack-and-slash solutions to annoying problems. Let me know if you come up with an even better solution :-)

Well today’s been full of good news for developers and users alike. Steve J. announced that the Ipod/Iphone SDK will be released in February 2008 and if that wasn’t enough Nokia announced their next generation Internet Tablet….the N810. It’s basically the N800 on steroids, a slider keyboard plus builtin GPS…..wohoo :-). From the Press Release….

The Nokia N810 is powered by maemo Linux based OS2008, updatable also on the Nokia N800, the previous internet tablet generation hardware. The Nokia N810 features a highly customizable user interface and contains various novelties such as a Mozilla based browser with Ajax and Adobe flash 9, Bluetooth headset support as well as enhanced video and audio features. The refreshed Video Gizmo, Skype and Rhapsody highlight some most popular downloads available while Boingo Wireless, Earthlink and The Cloud enable Wi-Fi connectivity, across thousands of different locations globally.

The Nokia N810 has an integrated GPS receiver which allows you to pinpoint your position and find a wide variety of points-of-interests using the pre-loaded maps. Upgrade to Wayfinder’s voice-guided navigation for turn-by-turn directions and explore the world on foot or in the car.

So get ready and start saving up. Ipod (or if Rogers gets it’s act together) and Iphone first, N810 with all the sweet tech inside plus the ISDK in Feb…..Next year will be a busy Dev. year :-)

This one has been bugging me for so long that once I figured it out today I had to let other know as well. If you’ve been using Windows on your mac using bootcamp you’d know how frustrating it is not to have the right mouse button — you can remedy this with a mouse of course — and no DEL key. This makes deleting files/directories a pain in the ‘nads, let alone trying to right click with the single button on the pad.

I think I’ve found the solution. It’s a windows utility called AutoHotKey and it’s free. Grab it, reboot into WinXP (or whatever Windows) natively and continue on with the tutorial below:

1) Okay so assuming you’re in windows and have AutoHotKey downloaded, go ahead and install the application.
2) Once it’s finished, go to your menu and run the program. It will ask for your permission to create a default script under “My Documents”. Say Yes and let it do this.
3) Go to your “My Documents” folder and find the file AutoHotkey.ahk and edit it.
4) Comment out everything they have put in there using the semicolon “;” at the beginning of those lines.
5) Add the following three lines to the bottom of the script:
NumpadEnter::NumpadDel
LWin::RButton
RWin::RButton
6) Save the file in “My Documents”, go to your icon tray (bottom right), right click and reload the script. Now you should have a proper DEL (small Enter Key) and a proper right mouse click button (the Apple Keys).

You can tweak the script and reload it if you like. The script in the My Documents directory is the default script that gets loaded (you can have others saved in different folders). So now you can add AutoHotKey to your startup folder so it’s started everytime you boot into windows.

I came across FotoFlexer a couple of months ago and I thought I would do a write-up at some point. Now with the addition of advanced morphing tools and image carving, I think I have to. If you haven’t heard of FotoFlexer go to their site and signup for an account. Trust me you’ll be sorry you didn’t. Their editing application is way up there in terms of advanced functionality and they integrate with pretty much any photo/social site (Facebook, myspace, photobucket, flickr, picassa, yahoo photo and even your own website). Below you’ll find some of the tools available to you when you login:

Have a look at their demo page first if you want to get an idea of the functionality. Below is a nice video tutorial on image carving, which we had covered earlier.

Well did you know google has been around for 200 years. If you don’t believe me have a look, they’ve got actual footage of it in motion :-).

So after hearing from people at work how great the “screen” command was (yeah welcome to gnuland boys and girls), I decided to do a short tutorial on screen. This way I can stop telling them to RTFM and instead tell them to RTFB (Blog). Anyways, What is “screen” first of all….From the pages of wikipedia:

GNU Screen is a free terminal multiplexer developed by the GNU Project. It allows a user to access multiple separate terminal sessions inside a single terminal window or remote terminal session. It is useful for dealing with multiple programs from the command line, and for separating programs from the shell that started the program. GNU Screen can be thought of as a text version of graphical window managers, or as a way of putting virtual terminals into any login session. It is a wrapper that allows multiple text programs to run at the same time, and provides features that allow the user to use the programs within a single interface productively.

Think of screen as a Virtual Machine (I know it’s not but bear with me). Once you run the command, the ‘virtual machine’ takes over and allows you to create multiple interactive command line sessions. In each of those sessions you can run commands that are either interactive (menu based) or serialized. Once you’re done you can disconnect the session — keeping in mind that the session is actually alive and running, including all the programs that were spawned inside that session — go to another computer and ‘restore’ the session with all the programs still running. By far one of the coolest things about screen is that it automatically allows you to nohup your commands, by just disconnecting the session and reconnecting to it later. So without any further due here is screen:

Obviously you need to run it, so first step is to type screen at the command line. When you do that you get a new shell window and the adventure starts. Remember that pretty much all screen commands start with Ctrl-a followed usually by a character (ie: you press Ctrl button and c together, let go, and follow it with the character).

So now you have a new shell, run a command (ie: pine, vi or something). Okay so now we can simulate you leaving your machine and detaching your session.

- To Detach : Ctrl-a d (this will detach the session but your command is still running inside that screens shell….you’ll see)
- To Reattach : screen -r (without the quotes. You should get the session back with whatever command you were running in it).

So now you’ve got the very basics of screen. Detaching allows you to run commands, leave them halfway, detach and go somewhere else and use Re-attach to restore the session.

Now, how about multiple sessions. Yeah you can do that too, one screen process with multiple sessions inside it.

- Use screen -r to reattach to your process (If you haven’t done so already). Note that your program is still running (say vi). If you now want to run lynx for example you can use the Ctrl-a c command to create another session (c for create). So now you have two sessions inside your “screen virtual machine”.
- Use Ctrl-a n and Ctrl-a p to flip between sessions (n for next and p for previous). You can also create more screens with Ctrl-a c. Lets create 2-3 more sessions.
- Use Ctrl-a followed by a number between 0-9 to switch between up to 10 recently created sessions.
- Now use Ctrl-a d to detach from the session, logoff (don’t reboot, that will kill the screen process) and log back in. Now reattach to the process using screen -r. Note that all your sessions are still there (you can check using Ctrl-a n and Ctrl-a p to cycle through the sessions).

One last thing before I take away the training wheels, to kill your screen process (and all sessions running inside it) use Ctrl-a Ctrl-\.

Okay, so here is a small list of the many screen options and commands:

- Ctrl-a “ : gives you a full screen list of all your sessions and you can scroll down to the one you want to switch to and press Enter (remember to get “ you have to use Shift-’ and ESC gets you out of the list).
- Ctrl-a A : (that’s a shift-a) allows you to give a meaningful name to your session window.
- Ctrl-a k : allows you to kill your current session (not all sessions spawned inside a screen process, just the current session).
- Ctrl-a S : will split your current session screen in half. It is easy to confuse Ctrl-a S, which uses a capital ‘S’ with Ctrl-a s, which uses a lower case ‘s’. The upper case command causes screen to be vertically split (that is, with one region on top of the other), while the lower case command causes the parent terminal to freeze (Scroll Lock). To unfreeze the parent terminal, use the Ctrl-a q command.
- Ctrl-a : will jump between the regions in a split session. Keep in mind that the new region will have nothing in it until you designate another open session to pop in there using Ctrl-a p and/or Ctrl-a n which will cycle the next or previous session into the new split region.
- Ctrl-a X : (that’s a shift-x) will close a region (ie: split region goes back to full).
- Ctrl-a + : will enlarge the current region (and shrink the other).
- Ctrl-a - : will shrink the current region (and enlarge the other).
- Ctrl-a M : (that’s a shift-m) allows you to monitor the current window for output. I use the MSN command line client pebrot occasionally, and always set its window to notify me when something happens (ie: a join message).
- Ctrl-a _ : does the same thing as above, but in a opposite way. It switches into the monitoring mode for 15 seconds of silence, which triggers a notification in xterm’s status area. So when our compile finishes, we will be told so even in another session.
- Ctrl-a [ : will place you in copy mode. Use this when you need to copy some text from one session to another. Do Ctrl-a [ in the source session to enter copy mode (you can exit copy mode using ESC). Move around using cursor keys to the beginning of where you want to start copying and press Spacebar to mark the beginning. Now move to the end and press Spacebar again to mark the end of your copy block. You can now switch to another session, move to where you want to paste the block and press Ctrl-a ] to paste what was put in the buffer.

Here are a couple of more useful startup screen commands:

- screen -ls : will list all the screen processes running under your userid (yes you can run multiple screen processes with multiple sessions inside each).
- screen -r screenname : restores a specific screen process.
- screen -R : will try to reattach if there is a detached process, if not it will start a new process.
- screen -D -RR : this is the “I want control now” command. It will detach already attached clients and attach to the first session listed.

As usual screen is controlled via .screenrc file for configuration parameters (there is a system wide file in /etc/screenrc and the personal one in your home directory, under ~/.screenrc). You can add the following commands in your personal .screenrc to make life a bit simpler:

#kill startup message
startup_message off
# define a bigger scrollback, default is 100 lines
defscrollback 1024
# An alternative hardstatus to display a bar at the bottom listing the
# windownames and highlighting the current windowname in blue. (This is only
# enabled if there is no hardstatus setting for your terminal)
hardstatus on
hardstatus alwayslastline
#hardstatus string "%{.bW}%-w%{.rW}%n %t%{-}%+w %=%{..G} %H %{..Y} %m/%d %C%a "
#hardstatus string "%{= mK}%-Lw%{= KW}%50>%n%f* %t%{= mK}%+Lw%< %{= kG}%-=%D %d %M %Y %c:%s%{-}"
#hardstatus string "%{= kG}%-Lw%{= kW}%50> %n%f* %t%{= kG}%+Lw%< %{= kG}%-=%c:%s%{-}"
#hardstatus string "%{= kG}[ %{G}%H %{g}][%= %{= kw}%?%-Lw%?%{r}(%{W}%n*%f%t%?(%u)%?%{r})%{w}%?%+Lw%?%?%= %{g}][%{B} %d/%m %{W}%c %{g}]"
hardstatus string "%{gk}[ %{G}%H %{g}][%= %{wk}%?%-Lw%?%{=b kR}(%{W}%n*%f %t%?(%u)%?%{=b kR})%{= kw}%?%+Lw%?%?%= %{g}][%{Y}%l%{g}]%{=b C}[ %m/%d %c ]%{W}"


As usual there is a lot more to screen, so once you’ve got the basics nailed, take a peek at the man pages for more goodies and don’t forget…..Command line is your friend :-).

So here it is, the web2.0 app you’ve all been waiting for. We’d covered Content-Aware Image Resizing before in two of our articles here and here. Now it looks like there is rsizr is actually the working 2.0 app that can do this type of Seam Carving. Try it out…..it’s magic.