Cool OSX (Leopard?) Shortcut

OK - so I'm waiting for people to yell at me saying that this is completely old news, but I found a really cool (and useful) shortcut recently. Completely by accident.

Holding down the Apple key while clicking on an application in the Dock will reveal that application in the Finder. This is really useful - and guess what? It even works in spotlight! The only reason that I was keeping quicksilver around was so that I could quickly "reveal" items in the finder, but now, all that's needed is to activate spotlight, type in the item you want, and hold the apple key when pressing enter on the item.

I think it's cool, at least...that's all that matters, right?

Dojo Book Dashboard Widget (for Mac OSX)

I have been wanting a dashboard widget that indexes the pages for the Dojo Book so that I can quickly access items without needing to pull up the pages...well, I finally caved and wrote one myself. You can get it from http://www.toonetown.com/projects/downloads/DojoBook.zip

This was thrown together, quite literally, in about an hour - using Dashcode. I even used a custom-built version of dojo to generate the tree widget in the dashboard widget. I was pretty impressed with how easily it all came together - the biggest pain was getting the list of links in to the tree.

Now, the hard part will be keeping it up to date.

Let me know if you find this useful - and if you have any suggestions for improving on it.

Telecommuting

I just read an article which talked about benefits of telecommuting - for the telecommuter...but not for the ones left behind.

I can't agree with this more. I have been telecommuting for nearly 2 years now, twice per day - and I can totally see the benefits. Many of the others in the office are also starting to telecommute (I am proud to say I was among the first in our office to do it, though!)

At first, I was afraid that it would be *me* who ended up being "left out" - but once more and more of us have been working at home, it has not been as bad as at first imagined.

One thing that is vital to being able to successfully telecommute is having everyone available at all reasonable times via some kind of instant messenger. This includes those who are in the office as well as out of the office. I can't count the number of times that I needed to get a hold of someone, and they weren't online. Email is just too slow!

Another thing is a reliable VPN connection and a fast Internet connection at home. On my mac, I have found that the best thing to do is to set up some ssh tunnels...and I have written a couple of scripts to automate that process. One day, when I'm feeling particularly ambitious, I might build it into a "real" application instead of a bunch of shell scripts. I have just found that the Cisco VPN doesn't quite work as advertised...and it messes up a bunch of other things when your network connection gets dropped. In the spirit of the "Mac way" of doing things, I expect things to "just work".

10 steps to a multi-protocol iChat.

Problem:

I know that setting up iChat to communicate with MSN, Yahoo, AIM and other users has been discussed in many other places. There are a couple of issues, however, that I have with this process:

1. Security - you are trusting 3rd-parties with your login information


2. Stability - the transports many times go up and down


3. Consistency - sometimes, you're required to sign up for transports from different servers - I don't like that

Up until now, my solution on Mac has been to use Adium for chat. It is an excellent program - and I love everything about it. However, there are a couple of things that I think iChat does a bit better. Since it's integrated with the OS, it has a more consistent look-and-feel across all the other applications. I also like the way that it integrates with Mail.app (you can see who is online from within your mail messages). It's just a more "polished" solution, in my opinion.

I've always thought that the way to go would be to run a jabber server locally, and connect to it with my own transports. This would solve all my issues (Security, Stability, and Consistency), and at the same time, allow me to access all my contacts via iChat (giving me the nice integration). However, up until now, I have not had time, and setting up a jabber server is not the easiest thing to do.

Enter Openfire. I don't know where this program has been - it's by far the easiest jabber server to set up - and it has excellent Mac OS Integration (It uses LaunchDaemons and has a PreferencePane). Below, I list instructions on how I got my iChat to communicate multi-protocol, using Openfire.

These instructions are taken from my installation process on a MacBook Pro running OSX 10.5.1 (Leopard). It should work for previous versions - but the prompts may be somewhat different.

Instructions:

1 - Install Openfire

Download Openfire for Mac from here. The version I used is 3.4.1. Mount the disk image and run the installer. It's really that easy!

2 - Configure Openfire

Open your System Preferences and choose the Openfire preference pane. Make sure that Openfire's status is listed as "Running". Check the box to "Start Openfire When System Turns On". Then click the button to "Open Admin Console".

The Admin Console for Openfire is web-based - it is very easy to use, and very powerful. The first time you open the console, it will ask you some initial setup questions.

• Choose the language you want


• For server settings, set your "Domain" to be "localhost". This will simplify adding contacts later. You can leave the other settings as they are.


• Choose to use the "Embedded Database". Since we will not be exposing our server to other users, we don't really care about the performance level - there will generally be just a single user logged in at once, and it greatly simplifies the setup process.


• Keep "Default" selected for how to store user and group profiles. We don't want to set up LDAP.


• Enter in a valid email address and an admin password. REMEMBER THIS PASSWORD

Setup is now finished - you can go ahead and log in to the admin console (the username is "admin" - the password is the one you just set up).

3 - Secure Openfire

We don't want to let other people connect to our jabber server - just those who are on the computer we are setting this up on. That is one of the reasons (security) that we wanted to run our own jabber server.

Under "Registration & Login" set "Inband Account Registration" and "Anonymous Login" to "Disabled". Then click "Save Settings"

4 - Create a jabber user (or users)

You now need to create a user for your jabber server. This is the user that you will use to log in to the jabber server. I suggest you create an account for every account that exists on your Mac. Do the following:

Click on the "Users/Groups" tab at the top of the management console. Choose "Create New User" on the left. Enter in a username and a password (Name and Email are optional). It is called your "JID" (Jabber ID), and is the username and password you will use in iChat. I use the same username as my Mac user name. Then Click "Create User"

5 - Install the IM Gateway Plugin

In order to communicate with other services, we need to install the "IM Gateway Plugin". Do the following:

Click on the "Plugins" tab at the top of the management console. Choose "Available Plugins" on the left. Click on the "plus" sign under "Install" for the "IM Gateway". You can ignore the other plugins - they are more useful for a "real" jabber server. We are only using our server for the transports.

6 - Configure the IM Gateway Plugin

We want to secure the services for our IM Gateway plugin. For each of the third-party services you want to connect to (AIM, MSN, Yahoo, Google Talk, etc.), you need to do the following:

Click on the "Server" tab at the top of the management console. Choose "Settings" under the "Gateways" section on the left. Check the services you wish to use. For each one of them, you can choose "Options" and uncheck mail notifications if you like. Mail notifications BOTHER ME! Under the "Permissions" for each of the services, select "Manual registration only". This will simplify the registration process (and eliminates the need to download or use Psi, as other tutorials have you do. Remember to click "Save Permissions" after each one you change. You can also test your connection to the services, if you want.

7 - Register for your "multi-protocol" services

We now need to enter in your login information for the various multi-protocol services. This information is stored locally on your computer, so it's somewhat secure, but you should be aware that anyone who has physical access to your computer and enough know-how can still find out your login information if they dig enough. This is, however, not any less secure than storing your passwords in your keychain for iChat or Adium anyway. Do the following for each service:

Click on the "Server" tab at the top of the management console. Choose "Registrations" under the "Gateways" section on the left. Click on "Add a new registration". Enter in your "user (JID)" that you use to connect to jabber, the gateway you want to use (MSN/AIM/Yahoo/etc), the username and password that you use to log on to that service, and an optional nickname. Click on "Add". NOTE:On my system, clicking "Add" says that the registration was added, but it doesn't show up in the list until I refresh the web page. I found, however, that you can add all your registrations at once (even if they aren't showing up in the list) and then hit "refresh" at the end to verify that they are all there. After logging in to iChat (below), you can come back here and verify that the "Last Login" reflects that you have correctly logged in to the service.

8 - Set up iChat

Now we have all the information that we need. You can now set up iChat to connect to your jabber server. Do the following:

Open iChat and set up a new jabber account. For "Account Type" choose "Jabber Account", "Account Name" should be jid@localhost - where jid is your jabber ID that you set up above. The password is the password for your jabber id.

9 - Connect!

The first time you connect to your jabber server, you will get a certificate error - this is because the certificate that Openfire uses is a self-signed certificate. You will probably want to click "Show Certificate" and choose to "Always trust localhost when connection to localhost" so you won't get that warning every time you connect.

10 - Add Contacts

OK - so this really isn't a step - but I thought that "10 steps" is better - and it's a bit odd how you need to add contacts. When you want to add a contact to iChat, you need to format it in a way that jabber will know what service to add that chat with. Add your contacts in the form serviceusername@service.localhost - where serviceusername is your contact's name, and service is one of "aim", "gadugadu", "icq", "irc", "msn", "yahoo", "gtalk", "sip", or "xmpp". If your contact's name contains an @ sign (as do MSN and GTalk accounts), you need to replace the "@" in the username with "\40" - so, user@hotmail.com on the msn account would be added as user\40hotmail.com@msn.localhost .

Suggestions/Comments:

I would love to hear feedback, suggestions, and/or comments. Please leave some below!

Optimizing Virtual PC for Mac

I haven't really found a single "good" repository for details on how to optimize Windows XP for running within Virtual PC for Mac - so I thought I'd create my own list here (for future reference) This will make windows as ugly as possible (but who needs "pretty" when running OSX?, and "potentially insecure" (but, then again, you're running windows...so no big deal, right?). I also don't care about sound or printing from within my VM - so you may not want to trim as hard as I do... I do the following after a clean install of Windows XP:

1. Deactivate sticky keys - this drives me nuts! Under accessibility Options, shut off sticky keys, filter keys, toggle keys, and everything else annoying.


2. Uninstall everything that is not going to be used - this includes all components and accessories that are atuomatically installed with windows. You don't need to use a calculator within a virtual machine... :)


3. Install VPC additions


4. On Start | Run... | Sysdm.cpl, do the following:
   
   1. Advanced | Settings | Performance - set "Adjust for best performance"
   
   
   2. System Restore - turn off system restore
   
   
   3. Automatic Updates - turn off Automatic Updates
   
   
   4. Remote - uncheck remote assistance invitiation
   
   
   5. Hardware | Device Manager - disable the sound card (Sound Blaster 16), Standard Game Port, COM1, COM2, and LPT1 (I don't connect anything to my VM, and I don't like sound coming from it - so why burden it?)
   
   


5. Under Start | Run | Desk.cpl do the following:
   
   1. Themes - Choose "Windows Classic"
   
   
   2. Desktop - Choose "None" for the background
   
   
   3. Screen Saver - choose "None"
   
   
   4. Screen Saver | Power - Set to never shut off
   
   
   5. Appearance | Effects - Uncheck everything except to underline letters
   
   
   6. Settings - Set resolution as low as you can handle - I personally think that 1152x768 works really well on my PowerBook G4...


6. Right-click start menu and choose "Properties", then:
   1. Start Menu - Select "Classic Start Menu
   2. Start Menu | Customize - Uncheck "Use Personalized Menus"
   3. Toolbar - Uncheck "Hide inactive icons"


7. Start | Run | Wscui.cpl and do:
   
   
   1. Shut off firewall
   
   
   2. Resources | Change the way security center alerts me - uncheck everything


8. Under c:\ | Tools | Folder Options:
   
   
   1. View - Uncheck "Automatically search for network folders" and "Remember each folder's view settings"
   
   
   2. Click "Apply", then "Apply to all folders"


9. Open "My Computer" | Search | Change Preferences and turn off animated assistant


10. Turn off fast user switching and welcome screen


11. Start | Run | Services.msc, and stop and set to manual each of the following:
    
    
    1. Application Layer Gateway Service
    
    
    2. Automatic Updates
    
    
    3. Cryptographic Services
    
    
    4. Distributed Link Tracking Client
    
    
    5. IPSec Services
    
    
    6. Logical Disk Manager
    
    
    7. Network Location Awareness
    
    
    8. Print Spooler
    
    
    9. Protected Storage
    
    
    10. Remote Registry
    
    
    11. Secondary Login
    
    
    12. Security Center
    
    
    13. Shell Hardware Detection
    
    
    14. Task Scheduler
    
    
    15. TCP/IP NetBIOS Helper
    
    
    16. Themes
    
    
    17. WebClient
    
    
    18. Windows Audio
    
    
    19. Windows Firewall/ICS
    
    
    20. Wireless Zero Configuration


12. Cleanup and defrag c:\


13. Backup this VM - it's a good starting place

I also allocate as much RAM as possible to my VM, and shut off all the extras (sound, network, etc) in my VPC settings.

It works for me. Now VPC is usable...

GLib Universal Binary Framework

OK - so in the spirit of "If you can't find it, build it yourself", I finally got around to setting up a universal binary build of glib. It builds into a mac os framework.

Just download the file http://www.toonetown.com/projects/downloads/GLibFramework-2.12.3.zip, as well as version 2.12.3 of glib from gtk.org. Unzip the framework file and you will have a "macos" folder. Place that folder at the top level of the untarred glib sources and open up the file macos/GLibFramework/GLibFramework.xcodeproj in xcode and build!

This is the first step to my ultimate goal of getting WireShark to compile natively - as a universal binary. :)

Archiving AND compressing Mail.app messages

OK - so I was wanting to compress and archive my old messages - but I wanted to still have fairly easy access to them. I think I found a really nice way of doing this. I just put all the messages that I wanted to archive into their own folders (I did it by year - messages from 2000, 2001, etc). Then, for each folder I wanted to archive, I did the following:

1. Open ~/Library/Mail/Mailboxes/[ARCHIVEFOLDER].mbox in BOTH finder and terminal


2. In the Finder window, I copied the "Messages" folder to the desktop - and renamed it something a bit more descriptive (ie. "MailArchive-2000" or "MailArchive-2001")


3. In the terminal window, I entered: ln -s /Volumes/[DESCRIPTIVENAME] Messages, ie. ln -s /Volumes/MailArchive-2000 Messages


4. I opened DiskUtility, and created a New disk image from the folder on my desktop (File | New | Disk Image from Folder...). I made sure it was compressed.

Now, what this ended up doing was put all my messages in a compressed disk image on my hard drive. In Mail, the folder still shows up, and the message headers are all there cached - so I can even still search for messages based on "From", "To", or "Subject"... When I try to open a message in an archived folder, I get a message saying that I need to take the account online in order to read the message. When this happens, I simply double-click the corresponding image file, and it gets mounted, and I can access my messages easily.

Pretty Slick! If it weren't for Mail's smart way of handling offline folders, I think it would have been quite a bit harder. In addition, since I use compressed disk images, my old email messages end up taking up less than 50% of the original space on my disk....emails - being plain text - compress very nicely!

Maybe one day, if I'm REALLY ambitious, I'll write some kind of applescript that can do the whole thing for you....shouldn't be too hard. But I just don't have the time for it right now.

Converting kmail messages to Mac Mail.app messages

I wasn't able to find an easy way to convert Kmail messages to mac os Mail.app - without having to export to mbox format. For me, that wasn't an option.

I did, however, find a workaround.

1. Create a new mailbox in mail.app (ie "Import"


2. move your mail messages from kdemail/cur into ~/Library/Mail/Mailboxes/Import.mbox/Messages


3. run the following: let num=9999; for i in `ls`; do cat $i | wc -c | sed -e 's/\t//g' | sed -e 's/ //g' > $num.emlx; cat $i >> $num.emlx; let num=$num+1; rm $i; done in a terminal window within the new "Messages" directory you have


4. in Mail, choose to Rebuild the mailbox (Mailbox | Rebuild)

This seems to work because mail just stores its information in a modified maildir format (I'm guessing this only works for Tiger).

Mac Java = Messed up computer :(

My java got corrupted - so I had to reinstall my mac... :(

One thing I found - expat is already installed with X11 - so installing XML::RSS just requires running these two commands previous:

cpan> o conf makepl_arg 'EXPATLIBPATH=/usr/X11R6/lib EXPATINCPATH=/usr/X11R6/include'
cpan> o conf commit

Pretty nice.

Java-Readline on Mac OS X Update

EDIT 11-30-2006: The binary files linked below are now compiled as Universal Binaries. I have no access to an Intel machine, so I would appreciate it if someone could test it and post a comment on how it worked. In order to compile as universal binaries, you must have the latest version of XCode installed, and follow the instructions in red below

DarwinPorts is a great project, but I hate using when I don't have to. Mac OS X (at least Tiger does) comes with a readline compatibity already installed - so I have updated these instructions so that you can create a java-readline installation WITHOUT installing DarwinPorts.

The steps are a bit more involved...but here they are:

Download the libreadline-java source from the project site.

Unpackage.

In the source root, edit Makefile and make the following changes:

• Add JAVA_HOME = /Library/Java/Home below the line # Operating system dependent
• Make the JAVANATINC variable read $(JAVA_HOME)/include
• Change LD_LIBRARY_PATH to be DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH

Now, edit src/native/Makefile and change the following:

• Change the LIBPATH variable to be empty
• Change the CFLAGS to -isysroot /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.4u.sdk -arch i386 -arch ppc -fno-common -DMAC_OS
• Change $(CC) -shared (OBJECTS) $(LIBPATH) $($(TG)_LIBS) -o $@ to $(CC) -bundle -flat_namespace -isysroot /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.4u.sdk -arch i386 -arch ppc $(OBJECTS) $(LIBPATH) $($(TG)_LIBS) -o $@
• change the JavaReadline_LIBS variable to be -lreadline -ltermcap

Now, you need to edit src/native/org_gnu_readline_Readline.c and make the following changes:

• On lines 98, 114, 213, and 224, change #ifdef JavaReadline to #if defined JavaReadline && !defined MAC_OS
• On lines 216, 235, and 475, change #ifdef JavaEditline to #if defined JavaEditline || defined MAC_OS

Now, you can run make, and you will end up with libJavaReadline.so and libreadline-java.jar.

Rename libJavaReadline.so to libJavaReadline.jnilib.

Move libJavaReadline.jnilib and libreadline-java.jar to /Library/Java/Extensions to install it and have it available to all java processes.

To test, run java test.ReadlineTest from the command line.

Have fun! Now, you can install HenPlus on Mac OS X easily!

If you are lazy, you can try out the pre-compiled binaries that I have available here - after unzipping, just move the two files (not the entire folder) into your /Library/Java/Extensions directory. NOTE: these *may* only work on OS X 10.4 and up - I have only tested them on that platform, and they are *not* universal binaries - PPC only.

Java-Readline on Mac OS X Howto

EDIT: I have updated these instructions so that you can build using the already-installed readline libs that come with OS X (at least Tiger). See the new instructions here.

I have been trying to get java-readline compiled on mac os, and there were references to a blog entry on it, but the entry is now gone.  I found it on archive.org, and here are the instructions I used to get it running:

Using darwinports, do: port install readline

In the source root, edit Makefile and make the following changes:

• Add JAVA_HOME = /Library/Java/Home below the line # Operating system dependent
• Make the JAVANATINC variable read $(JAVA_HOME)/include
• Change LD_LIBRARY_PATH to be DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH

Now, edit src/native/Makefile and change the following:

• Add -I/opt/local/include to the end of the INCLUDES variable.
• Change the LIBPATH variable to be -L/opt/local/lib
• Change the CFLAGS variable to -fno-common
• Change $(CC) -shared $(OBJECTS) $(LIBPATH) $($(TG)_LIBS) -o $@ to $(CC) -bundle -flat_namespace $(OBJECTS) $(LIBPATH) $($(TG)_LIBS) -o $@

You should now be able to run make and get libJavaReadline.so and libreadline-java.jar. You'll need to rename libJavaReadline.so to libJavaReadline.jnilib.

I put both of these in /Library/Java/Extensions, which makes the library available to all Java processes that are started as you. Make sure everything works by running java test.ReadlineTest from the command line.

Syncing iTunes library between Mac and PC

I searched around quite a bit on Google to try and find a way to sync my iTunes library between my laptop (Mac) and my desktop (PC).  After reading quite a bit about messing with the Library.xml file and stuff that I didn't want to deal with (I just wanted it to work quickly - something that I could script, and maybe use something like rsync), I decided to just play around a little bit...

What I found was really interesting - it's quite easy to sync your iTunes library, if you have things set up just right.

If you have both your Mac and your PC set to "Keep iTunes Music Folder Organized", then most of the work is done for you.

All you need to do is copy the "iTunes Music" folder from the Mac to the PC, and copy the "iTunes Library" file from the Mac to the PC, but rename it as "iTunes Library.itl"

To make things even easier, you can rename the "iTunes Library" file to "iTunes Library.itl" on your mac, and it will work just fine - then you can do a simple rsync and get everything you need synced across.

The rsync command I use is:

rsync -avz --force --delete --stats --size-only -e ssh --exclude="iTunes Music Library.xml" --exclude=".DS_Store" ~/Music/iTunes/* user@desktop:'~/My\ Music/iTunes/'

You can modify your rsync command yourself.  Of note, DO NOT copy the xml file (it's "--exclude"ed), because iTunes on Windows will just recreate it based off of the .itl file.  Also, I didn't want to mess up my Windows file structure with all the .DS_Store files (so they are "--exclude"ed as well)

Since I don't care about two-way synchronization (I just want my Windows machine to be a clone of my Mac), this works for me.  Hopefully, it's helpful for someone else as well.

New blogging application

OK - so I was poking around Google Labs, and found a dashboard widget that allows blog posting to blogger.  I thought I'd give it a try.

I might not be using BlogWorkz anymore - this seems to be working pretty well...

Mac Development

OK - so I just have to say that developing on the Mac is actually quite an enjoyable experience. It's very easy, and XCode is quite a decent IDE.

I also like how it seems to be a perfect blend of stability and flexibility.

BlogWorkz

OK - so I guess that I'll plug a cool little program for Mac that I've been using to set this up. It's called BlogWorkz and it's written by someone named Andre Garzia.

At first glance, it seemed a little rough around the edges, but after using it a bit, I found it to be very simple and intuitive. There are a couple of bugs with the program, but all-in-all, it was a pretty good one, and - to me, at least - seemed deserving of the $10 registration fee.

There are quite a few features that I feel it is missing - most of them are UI and usability features, so who knows how long I'll keep using it. Maybe when I'm feeling ambitious (which never seems to happen), I'll take a stab at writing my own client for Mac. I did it for my linux machine before, I'm pretty sure I could handle it. :)