Have GNU, Will Travel.

Creative Suite 5.5 refuses to accept a serial number to end trial mode

2012-01-22T21:21:00.000-08:00

My wife recently upgraded to a MacBook Air, and when I went to install CS 5.5 on the MBA it accepted the serial number during installation but then would bring up the Adobe Application Manager screen when you started any CS application asking to either run in trial mode, or enter a serial number. And it wouldn't take the serial number that it had just accepted during installation. Yay!

So to spare anyone else the multiple chat sessions with Adobe support, with multiple escalations per session, here's how to fix it.

Quit all your CS applications
Open a terminal window.
sudo -s
cd '/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Adobe PCD'. You'll see a cache directory in there. Don't delete it like the tech support guy tells you to (Out of paranoia, I renamed mine instead), that'll trigger a message when you try to start a CS app telling you to reinstall CS.
cd cache - you'll find a file named cache.db rename it to cache_broken.db.
Open one of your CS applications. It'll ask you for the serial and this time, it'll accept it.

Weird Lion audio issue with headphones

2011-12-21T22:26:00.000-08:00

My wife was having a weird audio problem on 10.7.2 - she'd be listening to iTunes, plug in her headphones, then get silence. Restarting iTunes would make the audio work on the headphones, but then if you unplug the headphones, silence until restarting it again. Same symptoms with watching YouTube videos in Safari.

Poked around a bit, finally found a corrupt preference file - com.apple.BezelServices.plist - deleted it, logged out and back in, and sound is working right again.

Automate removing Diginotar CA certificate

2011-09-07T13:01:00.000-07:00

Ed Marczak posted how to delete the untrustworthy Diginotar CA cert on his blog. Read about why you want to trash it at ComputerWeekly.com.

To make it easier for you to do the right thing and delete it on the machines you manage, here's a quick how to on automating it.

If you're using puppet to manage your Macs, just add this exec to one of your manifests.

exec { "Eliminate untrustworthy DigiNotar CA.":

    command => "/usr/bin/security delete-certificate -Z C060ED44CBD881BD0EF86C0BA287DDCF8167478C /System/Library/Keychains/SystemRootCertificates.keychain",

    onlyif => "/usr/bin/security find-certificate -c Diginotar  /System/Library/Keychains/SystemRootCertificates.keychain",

}

If you're using another system management tool, here's how to make a package with the luggage that will delete the Diginotar cert when you install the pkg.

Download the luggage from github.

Create a Makefile with the following contents:

#

# Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");

# you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.

# You may obtain a copy of the License at

#

# http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

#

# Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software

# distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,

# WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.

# See the License for the specific language governing permissions and

# limitations under the License.

#

include /usr/local/share/luggage/luggage.make

TITLE=nuke_diginotar_certificate

REVERSE_DOMAIN=net.unixorn

PAYLOAD=pack-script-postflight

Create a postflight script with the following contents:

#!/bin/bash

#

# Trash untrustworthy Diginotar root ca cert.

#

# See http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2011/08/30/247730/Microsoft-warns-of-fraudulent-digital-certificate-issued-by.htm

#

# and

#

# http://radiotope.com/content/remove-certificate

#

# for why.

/usr/bin/security find-certificate -c Diginotar /System/Library/Keychains/SystemRootCertificates.keychain

if [ $? -eq 0 ];then

logger "Deleting Diginotar root cert from SystemRootCertificates.keychain"

	/usr/bin/security delete-certificate -Z C060ED44CBD881BD0EF86C0BA287DDCF8167478C /System/Library/Keychains/SystemRootCertificates.keychain

fi

The Makefile and postflight can be downloaded from the luggage-examples repo on github.

Drop the Makefile and postflight script into a new directory and sudo make pkg.

Now you have a pkg you can push with whatever system management software you're using for your Macintoshes.

Edit for clarity: This only deletes the Diginotar CA cert from the System keychain. It doesn't update Firefox/Opera/Chrome's caches, you'll need to update them separately.

Easy Script-Only Packages with the Luggage

2010-05-11T14:27:00.000-07:00

Saw a post today on MacEnterprise from someone looking for an easy way of making a package that doesn't install any files, just runs a script during installation. Payloadless packages are quite easy to create with the Luggage - here's how:

1) Make a new directory. cd into it.
2) Write your script, call it postinstall.
3) Make a new file named Makefile with the following contents:

include /usr/local/share/luggage/luggage.make

TITLE=name_of_your_package_with_no_spaces_or_punctuation
REVERSE_DOMAIN=com.example.corp
PAYLOAD=pack-script-postinstall

4) make dmg.

make dmg will create a dmg file named TITLE-YYYYMMDD.dmg containing the package TITLE-YYYYMMDD.pkg.

Read knob files with facter for puppet

2010-02-14T15:52:00.000-08:00

I found myself recently writing yet another fact to read the contents of a knob file, so I generalized one to read all the files found in /etc/knobs and return the contents as facts named after the files found.

Caveats: read_knobs.rb returns only the last line it finds in the file. This is on purpose. It also skips all lines beginning with # so you can use shell-style comments. Files that are empty create facts with the value true, and files containing just a t or f are normalized to true or false respectively.

Here's the source, and it's also available on github.

#!/usr/bin/ruby
#
# fact returns knob values based on contents of /etc/knobs.
#
# Author: jpb@ooyala.com
#
# Copyright 2009 Ooyala, Inc.
#
#   Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
#   you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
#   You may obtain a copy of the License at
#
#       http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
#
#   Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
#   distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
#   WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
#   See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
#   limitations under the License.
#
require 'facter'
def logger(message)
  system("/usr/bin/logger -t read_knobs #{message}")
end
# facts can only have one value. We ignore lines with shell style comments,
# and return the last valid line.
def read_knob(filename)
  knob_name = filename.split('/')[-1]
  knob_file = File.open(filename)
  # an empty knob file must have been created for a reason, so set default
  # value to true
  value = true
  knob_file.each { |line|
    if line[0,1] != "#"
      if (line.downcase.chomp == "true") or (line.downcase.chomp == "t")
        value = true
      elsif (line.downcase.chomp == "false") or (line.downcase.chomp == "f")
        value = false
      else
        value = line.chomp
      end
    end
  }
  knob_file.close
  value
end
def load_knobs(knob_d)
  logger "Processing #{knob_d}..."
  if ! File.directory?(knob_d)
    logger("Can't read #{knob_d}!")
    return nil
  end
  Dir["#{knob_d}/*"].each do |knob|
    if File.readable?(knob)
      knob_name = knob.split('/')[-1]
      Facter.add("#{knob_name}") do
        setcode do
          data = read_knob(knob)
          data
        end
      end
    else
      logger("Can't read #{knob}!")
    end
  end
end
load_knobs('/etc/knobs')

Releasing some of my OS X administrative utility scripts

2010-02-02T18:41:00.000-08:00

I decided to release some code I've been using at work to manage our Macintoshes.

All the code is downloadable at http://github.com/unixorn/osxtoolkit

Currently osxtoolkit includes:

A puppet fact script to load the contents of files in /etc/knobs as facts named after the file name.

scripts to use as login & logout hooks that run /etc/hooks/LI* on login, and /etc/hooks/LO* on logout. It uses iHook so the users can see progress.

Usage:

read_hook.rb

Copy to the lib/facter directory in one of your modules.

enable_login_scripts

The hook drivers only load scripts that are in /etc/hooks, have their x bit set, and have either an LI or LO prefix in their name. They're run in alphabetic order. LI* hooks are run on login, and LO* hooks are run on logout. You'll probably want to replace hook_background.jpg with something

appropriate for your local environment.

Prerequisites:

iHook

You need to download a copy of iHook from

http://rsug.itd.umich.edu/software/ihook/

since the hook driver scripts rely on it to present a pretty dialog with a progress bar during login & logout as they run the appropriate hook scripts.

Tar iHook.app up, then bzip2 the tarball. I recommend keeping the tarball (with version number in the name) on a central server, then letting make download it and rename it to iHook.app.tar.bz2 as part of the package build process. This will let you reproduce specific versions of the package later.

Luggage: http://http://github.com/unixorn/luggage

Luggage isn't necessary to run the hook loaders, just to make deploying them to your Macintoshes easier. You need to update TARBALL_LOCATION in the included Luggage Makefile to point to where you're storing your iHook tarball, then you can make a dmg with a pkg file containing everything necessary for the hook script suite with 'make dmg'. That dmg can then be easily deployed with InstaDMG or puppet.

Luggage 1.0rc2 released

2010-01-21T00:08:00.000-08:00

Synced my latest changes to the Luggage. Detailed documentation here.

1.0rc2 includes

Fixed broken unarchive step in unbz2-applications & ungz-applications rules
Added recipe to install Ruby scripts to site-ruby
Added recipe to install Python scripts to site-python
Added more interesting example package - enable_login_hooks.

The enable_login_hooks example package also includes code to run all login hooks found in /etc/hooks on login, and logout hooks at logout.

Enjoy.

(Updated to add link to github repo, documentation)

Losing ZFS

2009-10-25T11:55:00.000-07:00

Luis Gerbarg has an interesting article with his thoughts about the reasons behind the absence of ZFS in 10.6 on his blog at http://devwhy.blogspot.com/2009/10/loss-of-zfs.html.

Here's hoping that he's right and Apple is already working on their own next generation filesystem - HFS+ is getting a bit long in the tooth, and it'd be nice to see an alternative in 10.7.

Released the Luggage

2009-10-12T22:37:00.000-07:00

I've been rewriting a tool I originally wrote when I was at Google that allows you to generate an OS X pkg file using a Makefile without using PackageMaker.app's gui at all. At Google we used the internal tool to create most of the packages we used to create disk images with InstaDMG or with puppet. After I left, I missed it, so I'm releasing my rewrite, the Luggage, with the Apache 2.0 license. The source is at http://github.com/unixorn/luggage

What the Luggage provides

Easy repackaging of GUI apps that don't come with Apple pkg installers, custom scripts and configuration files, payload-less packages that do settings changes on target machines in their postflight/postupdate scripts. These packages are easily used in InstaDMG to create master disk images for deployment, or system management systems like puppet to distribute new software to managed Macintoshes.

How it works

You create a Makefile describing where you want each file in the package to end up on the target machines. luggage.make includes rules that will generate a package root with appropriate permissions, copy the files into place, create a package version-stamped with the date, then wrap the package in a disk image file.

So how do I use it?

Requirements for all Makefiles

Every package makefile must include luggage.make, specify a title for the package, a base reversed domain for creating the package id, and the payload listing which files we want installed by the package. Include luggage.make before your variable declarations so your declarations override the internal ones in luggage.make. Please note that TITLE must not include spaces - it's going to be used as part of the package id. Also remember to include luggage.make before any of your definitions so your definitions override the defaults.

include /usr/local/share/luggage/luggage.make
 
TITLE=install_foo
REVERSE_DOMAIN=com.example.corp
PAYLOAD=

Creating a package for a GUI Application

For our first example, we're going to repackage a GUI application that didn't come with a PKG installer. First, tar up the application (making sure to use Apple's tar so resource forks don't get mangled) with /usr/bin/tar cvj Foo.app.tar.bz Foo.app, then update PAYLOAD with


PAYLOAD=unbz2-applications-foo.app

This tells luggage.make that we want Foo.app.tar.bz2 untarred into /Applications. If we want it installed in /Applications/Utilities instead, we'd useunbz2-utilities-foo.app instead, Now we can create a package with "make pkg", or have it automatically wrapped in a disk image with "make dmg". That's all it takes.

Packaging scripts and configuration files

Similarly, if you want to install bar as /usr/local/bin/bar, add pack-usr-local-bin-bar to PAYLOAD.

Available PAYLOAD additions


















 Rule  Ownership  Permissions  Destination
 pack-etc-foo  root:wheel  644  /etc/foo
 pack-usr-bin-foo  root:wheel  755  /usr/bin/foo
 pack-usr-sbin-foo  root:wheel  755  /usr/sbin/foo
 pack-usr-local-bin-foo  root:wheel  755  /usr/local/bin/foo
 pack-usr-local-sbin-foo  root:wheel  755  /usr/local/sbin/foo
 pack-hookscript-foo  root:wheel  755  /etc/hooks/foo
 pack-Library-LaunchAgents-foo  root:wheel  644  /Library/LaunchAgents/foo
 pack-Library-LaunchDaemons-foo  root:wheel  644  /Library/LaunchDaemons/foo
 pack-Library-Preferences-foo  root:admin  644  /Library/Preferences/foo
 pack-ppd-foo  root:admin  644  /Library/Printers/PPDs/Contents/Resources/foo
 pack-user-template-plist-foo  root:wheel  644  /System/Library/User\ Template/English.lproj/Library/Preferences/foo
 unbz2-applications-foo  root:admin  based on tarball contents  /Applications/Foo
 ungz-applications-foo  root:admin  based on tarball contents  /Applications/Foo
 unbz2-utilities-foo  root:admin  based on tarball contents  /Applications/Utilities/Foo
 ungz-utilities-foo  root:admin  based on tarball contents  /Applications/Utilities/Foo

Adding preflight/postflight/postinstall/postupdate scripts

Name the script preflight, postflight, postinstall, or postupdate, then add pack-script-XX to PAYLOAD and it will automatically be added to the final package.

Make targets
make dmg - create a package, then wrap it in a dmg. Result will be in the current directory.

make pkg - create a package and copy it into the current directory

make pkgls - create a package, then list the contents so you can confirm it's generating a package with a payload that matches what you're expecting.

Customizing your packages

How do I add a file to my package that is installed somewhere luggage.make doesn't cover?

luggage.make defines several convenience targets that create various directory paths within the package root. You can use them to create the parent directory for your target location, then create your target location. Here's an example that creates /etc/cups so you can install a custom cupsd.conf

l_cups: l_etc

@sudo mkdir ${WORK_D}/etc/cups

@sudo chown root:_lp ${WORK_D}/etc/cups

@sudo chmod 755 ${WORK_D}/etc/cups

pack-cupsd.conf: l_cups

@sudo ${CP} cupsd.conf ${WORK_D}/etc/cups

@sudo chown root:_lp ${WORK_D}/etc/cups/cupsd.conf

@sudo chmod 644 ${WORK_D}/etc/cups/cupsd.conf

Now all you need to do is add pack-cupsd.conf to your PAYLOAD variable, and make will create /etc/cups in your package root, change the permissions and ownership, then copy in your cupsd.conf.

I need to install foo with permissions different from the defaults luggage.make uses. How do I change the ownership/permissions for files installed using luggage.make?

You could make your changes using a postflight script, but for convenience, luggage.make runs make modify_packageroot after it has created the package root and copied the install files there, but before it invokes packagemaker's command line tool to create the package.

If you add that target to your package's Makefile, it will override the dummy one in luggage.make and let you change the permissions of files in your package root. ${WORK_D} contains the path to your package root. For example, if your package installed a modified cupsd.conf to /etc/cups, and you needed it to have a group of _lp, you would add the following to your package Makefile:

modify_packageroot:

    @sudo chgrp _lp ${WORK_D}/etc/cups/cupsd.conf

I don't want the package version to be based on the current date. How can I force it to something specific?

By default, luggage.make sets the version number to YYYYMMDD. If you prefer to set it to something specific, set PACKAGE_VERSION=something_numeric.

FAQ

My makefile looks ok, but I get an error about a missing separator

You've probably indented your rules with spaces rather than a tab. Make requires the indentation be with tabs.

Lightroom 2.5 released

2009-09-15T11:21:00.000-07:00

Lightroom 2.5 released here.

Ars Technica on Grand Central and Linux

2009-09-15T09:09:00.000-07:00

Ars Technica notes on integrating Apple's Grand Central into Linux are here.

Known photoshop & lightroom issues with 10.6

2009-09-13T19:01:00.000-07:00

Adobe posted a tech note about 10.6 known issues here.

So this is what a 50mm f1.8 looks like inside...

2009-09-12T23:53:00.000-07:00

I would have been quite happy without finding out exactly what my 50mm f1.8 looks like inside.

I was going through airport security in San Jose on my way to visit family in Chicago and TSA had to hand check my bag because I had forgotten there was a leatherman in it. Once they spotted my "contraband", they insisted on unpacking the bag instead of letting me do it. The next day, I took the lens cap off to shoot a picture of my niece, and the whole front assembly fell off into my hand.

I only started using a DSLR a few months ago, and on the recommendation of a coworker at Google, the 50mm f1.8 was the first lens I bought besides the kit lens that came with the XSi body.

I loved this lens - nice and sharp, much faster than the kit lens, nice color, nice and light. I ended up using it far more than my other two lenses.

Here's a shot I took of Xan McCurdy with it at the Cake concert at WWDC -

Not bad for a $90 lens. That said, the reason it's so nice and light is that the innards are mostly plastic, and the front assembly that came off is held on by four tiny (3mm or so) plastic fingers, two of which appear to have sheared off on mine.

Ended up deciding to replace it with the Canon EF 50mm f1.4,which I'm impatiently waiting to arrive.

More Cake shots:

Siracusa on Snow Leopard

2009-09-01T10:43:00.000-07:00

John has his as usual excellent technical overview of Snow Leopard on Ars Technica.

New disk image tests

2009-03-13T20:06:00.004-07:00

I got permission to release the changes I've made at work to the run_image_tests.py disk image test framework that Nigel Kersten originally wrote (thanks Chris, for pushing them into svn for me) along with a bunch of example tests you can use. These are all the tests I use at work every time I make a new master disk image that are generic enough the be useful to others.

I don't bother to manually test any images that don't pass all of the unit tests first.

You can find them at the pymacadmin project site at Google Code.

All the unit tests descend from macdmgtest.DMGUnitTest. DMGUnitTest provides some handy utility functions that convert paths relative to / to the path relative to the mounted dmg you're testing.

dmgtestutilities.py provides some more convenience functions - there are functions to lint plists and load plists using Foundation so plistlib doesn't crap out when you try to load a binary plist.

Example tests:
applications_dir_test.py:
Ensures all applications in /Applications and /Applications/Utilities have sane ownership/permissions.

blacklist_test.py:
Confirms the absence of files in your blacklist. I mainly use this to confirm that various settings files that would contain information specific to the hardware model I ran InstaDMG on don't end up on my master images.

empty_directory_test.py:
Confirms that directories that you want to be empty on the generated image, actually are.

network_plist_test.py:
Confirms the absence of various network preference files. This prevents a problem we ran into when booting MacBook Airs from an image created on a machine that has built-in ethernet.

ouradmin_test.py:
Ensures that there's a local admin user on the image named ouradmin, and that it's a member of the admin, _lpadmin and _appserveradm groups. Also lints the appropriate plist files in /var/db/dslocal/nodes/Default to detect if your user creation package corrupted them.

skipsetup_test.py:
Makes sure the appropriate files have been touched on the image to prevent a newly imaged machine from playing the annoying welcome movie.

software_update_test.py:
If you're using a local software update server in your environment, you can use this to make sure the dmg has the correct settings to use it instead of the standard Apple servers.

zz_plint_test.py:
Lints every plist on the dmg and displays a list of any files that failed their lint check.

zz_suidguid_test.py:
Finds every suid/setguid file on the dmg and reports any that aren't in your whitelist. Handy for detecting crappy installers.

zz_world_writable_test.py:
Finds every file or directory that is world writable and reports any that aren't in your whitelist. Also useful for detecting poorly written installers.

I've also included the whitelists and blacklists I'm using for these tests for you to use as a base to customize your own, though I'd appreciate it if you'd email any additions you think are useful.

Photo of another solar system

2008-11-13T19:19:00.002-08:00

Discover has an article about the first photo of another solar system. Not just a planet, multiple planets. Way cool.

Thanks to my friend Morf for the heads up.

New MacBook and MacBookPros

2008-10-14T14:16:00.003-07:00

So, new hardware. On the pro side, the hard drive is no longer an ordeal to swap out, which is great for those of us in the enterprise. On the down side, no more target disk mode, which was always one of the great things about working on Macs.

More later once I've had a chance to use one for a couple of days.

Thin 1.0 is out

2008-10-08T22:53:00.002-07:00

Marc André Cournoyer announced the release of Thin 1.0 on his blog last week.

Updating gem to 1.3 on OS X Leopard

2008-10-07T20:30:00.002-07:00

wincent.com has a clear set of instructions on how to deal with errors updating gem to 1.3.0 on OS X.

Negadon and Miroku

2008-09-28T16:07:00.001-07:00

If you're a fan of Godzilla and/or giant robot movies, you'll like this. All the feel of the 60s movies, but done with CGI.

Negadon and Miroku.

Run Ruby Script Automator Action

2008-06-17T16:40:00.002-07:00

Jason Foreman published an Automator action that allows you to take advantage of Cocoa in Ruby scripts on his blog.

New Blog

2008-05-04T10:10:00.002-07:00

My friend Jack is, among other things, a technical author. He's just set up a new site for his technology writing at http://jackherrington.com.

His latest book is on Flex, and is being published by O'Reilly. More details at his blog.

Tracks

2008-04-02T12:26:00.002-07:00

Tracks is a GPL Rails application to help implement David Allen's "Getting Things Done".

I've installed it on my MBP and it looks great so far. You can tag tasks (and view only tasks for one tag), set up contexts such as work/home/misc and then view things grouped by context, set due dates, set tasks to only be visible after a certain date, view graphs and statistics about how long it takes you to complete tasks, comes with an API so you can write your own scripts to interact with it - it's very comprehensive.

Gem 1.1 released

2008-04-02T08:31:00.001-07:00

Bug fixes, speedups. More details on Eric Hodel's blog. Update with
sudo gem update --system

iJailbreak bumped to 0.5.4 and nows supports 1.1.4

2008-03-03T20:05:00.002-08:00

iJailbreak is a gui OS X wrapper for the ZiPhone utility.

The 0.5.4 release can jailbreak an iPhone running 1.1.4 directly and is available from http://code.google.com/p/ijailbreak/downloads/list, and you can read more details from the developers at http://ijailbreak.com/.

Suspicious Package update

2008-03-03T19:59:00.003-08:00

Suspicious Package is a QuickLook plugin that lets you examine pkg (and now mpkg) files from Finder with QuickLook. No more having to drop into Terminal.app and use lsbom.

Here are the bullet points from the release notes:

Added support for metapackages.

Fixed problem where the actual installation location was not shown for some packages.

Added indication when a package requires authentication with an administrator password.

Added indication when a package requires a system restart (or shut down, or log out) after installation.

Added indication when a package has install scripts, and an option to view the actual scripts (see details).

Added support for installer receipts and .bom files

Download the new release from http://www.mothersruin.com.

Matz on Ruby

2008-02-23T23:12:00.001-08:00

I got to see Matz speak on Ruby at work, and finally found the video of the lecture.

Handbrake 0.9.2 released

2008-02-20T12:16:00.000-08:00

Supports AppleTV Take 2, iPhone/iPod, Dolby 5.1 sound in mp4 files, many more new features.

Only runs on Leopard, and download it from http://handbrake.fr.

iJailbreak 0.5.2

2008-02-13T07:13:00.003-08:00

iJailbreak is an OS X wrapper for the ZiPhone utility.

This release can jailbreak an iPhone running 1.1.3 directly, no more having to install a helper package onto an already jailbroken 1.1.2. It's available from http://code.google.com/p/ijailbreak/downloads/list, and you can read more details from the developers at http://ijailbreak.com/. There is currently no iPod touch support in iJailbreak.

I got to climb inside a tokamak...

2008-02-08T19:13:00.000-08:00

I went to Disneyland on Tuesday for a company trip, and while spending several hours in the park with only co-workers there was cool, what was more cool was the stop at the UCLA Energy Science Lab we made on the way back.

I'd driven down with a group of coworkers rather than suffer through the airport experience, and it turns out Pete and Ian knew someone at UCLA who got us a tour of the Energy Science Lab's Electric Tokamak. We got to climb inside since it's in the middle of being renovated, and here are my pics.

200 tons of steel torus, and another hundred tons of magnets

Here's a shot of the entrance to the torus

Me about to climb inside.

Me inside, looking out.

A shot of the inside of the torus

To give some perspective of the size, here's a shot of Pete and Chris inside.

Me inside, with our guide Russell to my right.

Me in front of one of the 5 Farad capacitor banks.

They have two banks like this and each of the blue cylinders is a 1500 microfarad cap.

Me in front of a linear accelerator in the basement.

The accelerators and tokamak need their own substation - each of the big blue boxes here is 1 megawatt.

Here's a pic of the small accelerator.

This one was running, here's the video

iPhoneesque Growl notification

2008-01-29T16:27:00.000-08:00

Grab it at http://macthemes2.net/forum/viewtopic.php?id=16783761.

1.1.3 Jailbreak

2008-01-27T10:11:00.000-08:00

iJailBreak 0.4.1 has been released and is available for download at code.google.com.

This will jailbreak the iPhones and iPod Touch.

QuickLook plugin for .PKG

2008-01-21T13:18:00.000-08:00

There's a handy QuickLook plugin to show what files a pkg will install at http://MothersRuin.com/software/SuspiciousPackage/

Suspicious Package is a plugin for the Quick Look feature of Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard). It allows you to preview the contents of a standard Apple installer package without launching the Installer. Just select the icon in the Finder and select Quick Look

3 guys + 1 week = D Day

2008-01-13T09:34:00.000-08:00

Great example of just what you can do now with computer graphics.

New version of MacFUSE

2008-01-09T12:02:00.000-08:00

Details posted at Google Mac Blog, direct download link is here.

ZFS update for the bleeding edge

2008-01-08T21:20:00.001-08:00

Saw a post on zfs-discuss today, ZFS for Leopard source & binaries have been posted to zfs.macosforge.org. This includes some new fixes over the one on ADC, but it is also bleeding edge - there's no PKG file to install, so you have to be comfortable manually copying a bunch of files at the command line with sudo to use this, and there are a bunch of known bugs (listed at zfs.macosforge.org).

It's not an official Apple release, so if you break anything on your system with it, I'm sure their response is going to be "reinstall everything - you did have backups, right?"

That said, Noël's announcement said that he has his homedir on ZFS now, which is what I've been wanting to do ever since I heard there might be ZFS support in 10.5.

Here's the list of bugs fixed in the 102A rev:

Bugs Fixed in this Rev:

5448925: sync ZFS with Solaris build 72

5405398: zfs needs kqueue(2) API support

5602507: Leopard9A581: Kernel trap at 0×4d351d9c, type 14=page fault, registers:

5592757: Kernel panic when writing to a zfs volume

5482932: Raidz parity rewrite issue

5641577: ZFS: panic: zap->zap_u.zap_fat.zap_phys->zap_magic == 0×2F52AB2ABULL failed

5621659: assertion failed in /Users/local/zfs-101-latest_fixes/zfs_kext/zfs/zfs_dir.c line 730: error == 0

5643944: ZFS get/set and mountpoints are misbehaving

5645880: Finder copy and “delete” broken in zfs-101 plus fixes..

iTunes & FUSE

2008-01-06T12:48:00.000-08:00

iTunesFS is a FUSE filesystem that lets you see all your iPods & iTunes playlists as Finder folders. Download it here.

rspec_on_rails sqlite3 error

2008-01-05T11:40:00.000-08:00

I started a new project last night, and decided to use rspec_on_rails. I was following some examples from Luke Redpath's blog entry and got the following error:


SQLite3::SQLException in 'A player should be invalid without a user_id'
SQL logic error or missing database

I eventually tracked down an email from David Chelimsky on rspec-users that explained this could be fixed by setting config.use_transactional_fixtures = false in
spec/spec_helper.rb.

Anyway, posting it here to make it easier to google for.

QuickLook + TextMate

2007-12-17T18:06:00.000-08:00

QuickLook plugins for TextMate - there's one that lets you view source files in your project with TextMate, and another that lets QuickLook use TextMate to render syntax-colorized views of source code.

Both are at Ciarán Walsh's blog.

ZIP file Quick Look plugin

2007-12-15T00:13:00.000-08:00

XX posted a free Quick Look plugin that lets you examine ZIP, TAR, GZip, BZip2, ARJ, LZH, ISO, CHM, CAB, CPIO, RAR, 7-Zip, DEB, RPM, StuffIt's SIT, DiskDoubler, BinHex, and MacBinary on his MacItBetter blog.

Free album on iTunes

2007-11-27T21:17:00.000-08:00

Get 34 free tracks, courtesy of tunecore, at http://www.tunecore.com/freealbum.

They're a specific set of tracks from tunecore customers, and I liked a few.

Leopard Security Roundup

2007-10-31T12:26:00.000-07:00

Thomas Ptacek of Matasano Security posted a very good review of the various Leopard security features on their blog, matasano chargen.

Remove APE before insalling 10.5

2007-10-28T16:00:00.001-07:00

There are known issues with Unsanity's APE extension and 10.5. Remove it before upgrading to 10.5.

You may not realize you have APE - Logitech's mouse driver is known to use it, and AudioHijack Pro's Instant hijack is also known to use it.

If you are getting the blue screen and no loginwindow, you can nuke APE without a reinstall with the following steps:

Boot into single user mode by holding Apple+S on startup

fsck -fy /

/sbin/mount -uw /

rm -rf /Library/Preference Panes/Application Enhancer.prefpane /Library/Frameworks/Application Enhancer.framework /System/Library/SystemConfiguration/Application Enhancer.bundle /Library/Preferences/com.unsanity.ape.plist

sync;shutdown -r now

Edit
John Gruber has more background on this in an article he wrote on Daring Fireball here and Apple posted a KB article about this here.

Open Finder selection in TextMate

2007-10-28T12:55:00.000-07:00

The Pug Automatic posted a nice little applescript you can add to your Finder toolbar that lets you just click the button to open the selected files/folders in TextMate.

Grab it here.

New MacFUSE with Leopard support

2007-10-27T13:36:00.000-07:00

Get it from http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/.

The QuickStart guide is here.

There's also a new SSHfs build for 10.5 as well.

Plugin to export pictures as archives from iPhoto

2007-10-24T23:57:00.001-07:00

Joey Gibson wrote a handy iPhoto 7 plugin that lets you export photos as zip, tar.gz or tar.bz archives.

Download it here.

iPhoto plugin to export pictures as archives

2007-10-24T23:57:00.000-07:00

Joey Gibson wrote a handy iPhoto 7 plugin that lets you export photos as zip, tar.gz or tar.bz archives.

Download it here.

Hack your 1.1.1 iPhone

2007-10-20T16:18:00.000-07:00

iNdependence is a handy gui that will help you revert your iPhone to 1.0.2, then prep it so it can be jailbroken once 1.1.1 is installed.

Then all you need is AppTapp to get Installer.app, and you're golden again.

iPhone 1.1.1 jailbreak!

2007-10-08T21:27:00.000-07:00

3rd party applications should be back soon!

BSD level stuff is running again, 3rd party apps need recompilation.

Via gizmodo.

Synthetic GPS for your iPhone

2007-09-19T17:11:00.000-07:00

There's a Navizon application available with installer.app on the iPhone now. It triangulates your location based on known cell tower positions and updates the map on the iPhone.

Pretty sweet. (Courtesy iPodHacks)

In other news, cold fronts moving in in hell...

2007-09-13T10:06:00.000-07:00

Sun to Become Windows Server OEM.

Seriously, don't they remember what happened when SGI released windows boxes?

Well, their motto doesn't mention anything about not being evil, so I guess it's ok...

2007-09-13T10:02:00.000-07:00

Nice blog entry on zdnet about how, even if you have a system explicitly set to not update automatically, Microsoft will silently update your machines with no notification or asking permission.

Nice.

Extra Apps for iPhone

2007-09-11T12:48:00.000-07:00

To sum up:

Installer.app is a UIKit based package manager for the iPhone. It works by downloading packages over WiFi (wireless networking) or EDGE. It supports installing, updating and uninstalling applications from multiple sources.

Very painless, very cool.

Handbrake 0.9.0 released

2007-08-20T12:13:00.000-07:00

All sorts of changes, read about them here.

Th-th-that's all Folks!

2007-08-10T18:01:00.000-07:00

Groklaw has a good article explaining what the latest court ruling in SCO vs Novell means in detail. To sum up, SCO lost, Novell does indeed own the UnixWare and UNIX copyrights.

And SCO owes Novell big bucks for the licenses it sold Microsoft and Sun.

Sweet!

sshd on iPhone

2007-07-24T10:46:00.000-07:00

There is a nice little summary of pointers to how to get more unixy stuff installed on your iPhone at The Unofficial Apple Weblog.

Cat Cam

2007-06-13T10:49:00.000-07:00

J. Perthold has a very cool website explaining about his project to create a collar-mounted camera for his cat. He goes into detail about which camera he used, schematics of the custom board he made to control the camera and periodically take a picture. You even get to see a few days worth of the life of his indoor-outdoor cat, Mr. Lee.

JRuby 1.0 Released

2007-06-09T12:37:00.000-07:00

Read more details at http://www.jruby.org/.

Or just download it at http://dist.codehaus.org/jruby and try it for yourself.

RubyCocoa 0.11.0 released

2007-05-25T14:18:00.000-07:00

RubyCocoa 0.11.0 is out. Build Cocoa applications with Ruby. Download it from Sourceforge.

Subversion scripts for Finder

2007-05-21T12:35:00.000-07:00

Adam Brytek posted a list of AppleScripts for OS X Finder that allow you to do a bunch of convenient Subversion commands here.

The current rev supports

Commit

Delete

Revert

Status

Update

OSX process snapshots

2007-05-14T11:29:00.000-07:00

Amit Singh posted details of how to make a snapshot of a running process - memory, registers, the works - here. He posted source code for a program that will make the snapshot, too.

The really cool thing is that you don't need to make changes to the program for his technique to work, and taking the snapshot doesn't force the running process to halt.

More MacFUSE

2007-05-09T18:04:00.000-07:00

MacFusion is an Open Source GUI for MacFUSE. It currently supports SSH filesystems and Secure FTP filesystems, but it has a plugin architecture so I expect to see more supported filesystems soon.

ProcFS for MacFUSE

2007-05-09T14:40:00.000-07:00

Amit Singh has released procfs (with source) for OS X here. You'l need to have MacFUSE installed for this to work.

Speak out against Real ID

2007-05-08T08:29:00.000-07:00

Here's a quote from privacycoalition.org:

Organizations have launched a nationwide campaign to engage the public in the debate over what would be the first national identification document. These transpartisan, nonpartisan, privacy, consumer, civil liberty, civil rights, and immigrant organizations have joined in this unique public education project because the REAL ID proposal put forth by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) would harm our lives in a multitude of ways every day. The proposed regulations set requirements that states must follow to have their state issued identification documents accepted for federal purposes, like getting on an airplane or entering a government building, including courthouses.

Do you really want the same guys who think that shampoo is too dangerous to go in your carry on to force you to carry a national ID? Isn't that what a passport is for?

Fun web wargame

2007-04-27T10:16:00.000-07:00

I found a nice little wargame online the other day - weewar.com.

It's turn based so you don't have to commit to blowing all your free time on it, and simple enough to play quickly. Feel free to invite me to a game - I'm jpb there.

HandBrake 0.8.5b1 Released

2007-04-21T15:39:00.000-07:00

All sorts of nice stuff. Cool new features include AppleTV support & surround sound.

Get it here.

MacFUSE 0.2.5

2007-04-19T22:52:00.000-07:00

Another rev of MacFUSE stuff available here. Enjoy.

Good Firefox extension for GMail

2007-04-17T14:39:00.000-07:00

Lifehacker has a post here showing how to use the extension they've compiled a bunch of good Greasemonkey extensions for making GMail even more easy to use into.

More keyboard macros, adds icons to messages with attachments, saving searches, a helper for making a new filter based on the message you're looking at, and more goodies.

Google Desktop for Mac

2007-04-04T13:44:00.000-07:00

So I can finally talk about this. To sum up, very cool. You can use it for launching applications like Quicksilver, or just use it to search the docs on your machine like Spotlight, only with less frustration. And you can have it search your GMail account, too.

Fun with iPhoto

2007-03-16T17:48:00.000-07:00

Nathaniel Grey has a great little plugin for iPhoto that lets you use your own scripts when you export photos here.

You can specify scripts that get run before the export, for each file in the export, and after the export. And they can be in real languages, not just AppleScript.

Use Google Calculator as OS X Service

2007-03-10T18:40:00.000-08:00

Christopher Biagini packaged up an OS X service that wraps Google Calculator here.

Get subversion to launch on boot on OSX

2007-03-06T09:22:00.000-08:00

There's a good article on how to get subversion server to start on boot on OS X here.

Serverskine

2007-03-06T09:19:00.000-08:00

Free, and handy for the OS X based web developers.

Serverskine

"Designed to allow web developers, who deal with many projects at once, quick access to FTP, hosting accounts, domain name accounts and more. Especially when dealing with off-site shared hosting, keeping track of usernames and passwords can be daunting. Serverskine eliminates the terror by allowing you to quickly organize, search, edit, and backup all of your important account information."

MacFUSE 0.2.2

2007-02-28T18:04:00.000-08:00

Another MacFUSE release, with bugfixes and sample filesystem source code. Get it here.

Replace AppleScript with Ruby

2007-02-28T11:21:00.000-08:00

There's a great article on replacing AppleScript with Ruby at O'Reilly's MacDevcenter here.

Ugly hack to use AppleScript to present a dialog from a bash script, and get their choice.

2007-02-21T17:33:00.000-08:00

I am reposting this from my old blog because a coworker ended up needing this. This has only been tested on 10.4, though nothing in it is all that special.

I was trying to slap a prettier interface onto a bash script for a client. I only bothered to use an AppleScript instead of just sending it to Growl because I needed them to be able to make a choice that I’m going to act on in my script. Even if it was just for display, I didn’t particularly want them to have to install Growl just for my little script.

This is ugly because I had to use a temporary file to store the AppleScript to display the dialog. It is also ugly because we can’t just display the dialog – we get an error message if we try – but we can tell another application to display the dialog. I picked System Events because it’s always running anyway.

This method also allows us to use a program-generated message instead of something static.

And just for the heck of it, I stuff the name of the button the user clicks into a variable, in case you want to use this snippet to display choices for the user.


#! /bin/bash 

msg="Giant cracks appeared in the earth’s surface!" 

# use $$ here so that the process ID of this script is part of the file name. 
# this makes it a lot harder to accidentally step on another instance 
# of the script that’s trying to also display something to the user. 

tf=/tmp/ziggurat$$ 

# note that there should be 3 lines between EOF and EOF, in 
# in case this is mangled by blogger
 
cat>$tf <<EOF 
tell application "System Events" 
   display dialog "$msg" with icon stop buttons {"Foo", "Bar", "OK"} default button "OK" 
end tell 
EOF 

foo=`osascript $tf | awk -F":" ’{print $2}’` 

echo "foo: $foo" 

# don’t forget to trash the temporary file when we’re done with it. 
rm $tf

MacFUSE bumped to 0.21

2007-02-20T11:43:00.000-08:00

New rev of MacFUSE available.

MacFuse

2007-01-26T14:02:00.000-08:00

Amit released the Macintosh port of FUSE at MacWorld, which lets people write filesystems that don't require kernel code. Greg Miller has written a great sample filesystem for it, SpotlightFS.

Easy way to create services on OS X

2007-01-25T21:53:00.000-08:00

ThisService is an extremely handy tool for creating services on OS X. Any script you have that reads from STDIN and writes (if appropriate) to STDOUT can be easily turned into a service.

Google hosting the blog now

2007-01-16T18:31:00.000-08:00

Switched to having blogger host my blog under my domain and it has been painless. I don't have Google control my dns, so I can have other hosts on this domain, but after a single CNAME in my domain, I get to have Google still host the blog while it's visible as somewhere in my domain.

Coolest. Lego. Ever.

2007-01-05T00:50:00.000-08:00

This has got to be the coolest Lego gadget I've ever seen.

I wonder how many mindstorms bricks it took to make - I think I counted 6 in the video, but I'm sure I could have missed some more.

Tab completion and syntax hilighting for irb

2006-12-31T10:49:00.000-08:00

Frank Spychalski posted how to use wirble to get syntax hiliting and tab completion in irb here.

Time to eat the dog food

2006-12-31T10:47:00.000-08:00

Plus, care and feeding of blog software was more pain than it was worth.

New posts are all at http://digitalhominid.apesseekingknowledge.net

2006-02-28T07:42:00.000-08:00

New posts are all at http://digitalhominid.apesseekingknowledge.net.

New Butler out for 10.4.1

2005-06-04T14:31:00.000-07:00

Peter Maurer has a new beta of Butler out for 10.4.1, here.

Spotlight importer for Python source

2005-05-26T07:49:00.000-07:00

The guys over at Toxic Software have released a freeware Spotlight plugin to handle Python source code.

Very sweet, lets you search for stuff in comment strings, function names, all sorts of goodness.

Ruby on Rails & MySQL on Tiger

2005-05-25T14:04:00.000-07:00

First, see the previous blog entry to fix your Ruby install to be able to make proper binary extensions. You're going to need to build a mysql extension for Ruby later.

If you haven't already done so, install XCode (it's on the Tiger DVD), and fink. If you've only just installed fink, make sure you do a


fink selfupdate
fink update-all

Those will take a considerable amount of time if you haven't run them before.

Now you need to install MySQL. You can either do it from the bare tarball, or use a package manager like fink or darwinports. I like fink, so do:


fink install mysql mysql-client

and let fink grind away at all the assorted dependencies mysql needs. This will take a while, MySQL is big.

Now that MySQL is installed, we can install rails -


sudo gem install rails

Rails doesn't ship with an adapter for MySQL. We install it like so (this should be one line)


sudo gem install mysql -- --with-mysql-lib=/sw/lib/mysql --with-mysql-include=/sw/include

so that it can find the mysql libraries fink installed earlier. Note that the -- --with-mysql-include is supposed to be there, that isn't a typo.

You can now go find one of the Rails tutorials like the one Vincent Foley has at http://darkhost.mine.nu:81/~vince/rails/tutorial.html and get started with Rails.

Fix Ruby problem on 10.4

2005-05-25T13:47:00.000-07:00

I've wanted to experiment with Ruby on Rails (the same technology behind Backpack) for a while now, but ran into a problem when I tried to install it on my 10.4 machine. Rails installs with gem, no problem, but I couldn't get gem to build the external libraries Ruby needs to interact with MySQL.

Fortunately, the kind folks at technoblog made a script that does all the fixes you need to get your Tiger Ruby to properly make binary libraries.

Tiger Mail cleanup

2005-05-24T10:30:00.000-07:00

When you upgrade from Panther to Tiger, Mail converts the old format mbox files & indexes to .elmx files and spotlight indexing. To be safe, it doesn't delete the old files in case you want to roll back. It also doesn't update them though, so they're kind of worthless spacewasters.

Here's a list of commands to clear out the Panther grime. Make sure you have a backup of ~/Library/Mail, of course. Each line starting with find should be a separate command in a Terminal window.


find ~/Library/Mail -path "*.imapmbox/Cached*" -exec rm -v '{}' ';'

find ~/Library/Mail -path "*.mbox/mbox" -exec rm -frv '{}' ';'

find ~/Library/Mail -path "*.*mbox/content_index"  -exec rm -frv '{}' ';'

find ~/Library/Mail -path "*.mbox/table_of_contents" -exec rm -frv '{}' ';'

Running this saved me 3G of disk space.

If you don't make a backup before running this and this nukes your email, it's your fault.

Nice Advanced Spotlight Tutorial

2005-05-23T09:51:00.000-07:00

ScribeNT has a nice tutorial up on how to use the advanced query features in Spotlight at http://www.scribent.com/osx/xtip/comments/tiger_spotlight1/.

He covers stuff like using the Raw Query option to do boolean searches like "files with X but not Y" that you can't do easily from the simple query window.

Broadcast Flag Redux

2005-05-22T07:53:00.000-07:00

Hollywood is trying to get legislation passed to reduce the functionality of HDTV. They want to be able to mark shows as unrecordable so we can't timeshift them any more.

The EFF has more information about this, and a form to automatically fax your congressman here.

Fun with fingerprints

2005-05-19T14:44:00.000-07:00

Someone's written a howto on creating false fingerprints, suitable for fooling commercial grade fingerprint sensors here.

Defeat a Kensington laptop lock

2005-05-19T13:30:00.000-07:00

Joy. So much for leaving my laptop unattended at Borders when I want to use the restroom.

See the pathetically easy details on unlocking a Kensington laptop lock here.

Automator and shell scripts

2005-05-17T11:29:00.000-07:00

So I was writing my first Automator workflow, and found a bug in the "Do shell script" action. I was trying to write a workflow to iterate over the selection in the finder (and any files in subfolders of the selected files) and use SetFile to change the type and creator. This seemed easy enough, except that it turns out when Automator converts a list of files to strings to hand off to the shell script action, it doesn't properly quote them.

Thanks to Mike Ashley from the Automator-users mailing list for the following code snippet that works around this:



on run {input, parameters}
 set output to {}
 repeat with i from 1 to length of input
  set x to item i of input
  set output to output & {quoted form of POSIX path of x}
 end repeat
 return output
end run

Just put a "do applescript" stage ahead of the "do shell script" stage, and put the above code in. It'll take the list of file aliases and convert them to properly quoted paths for the shell script to act on.

Fixing 10.4.1's issues with GPGMail

2005-05-17T05:53:00.000-07:00

10.4.1 semi-breaks the GPGMail plugin. To fix it,

run Mail, let it disable the plugin
quit Mail
rename the Bundles-disabled back to Bundles
Open Terminal
defaults write com.apple.mail EnableBundles 1
restart Mail

The plugin should work again. Note that we're using 1 and not YES (like the plugin docs for 10.4.0 said).

According to the mailing list, if you follow the previous directions from the dmg, and set BundleCompatibilityVersion to 1, that triggers the new Mail in 10.4.1 to complain and disable the bundle.

Cool web service of the day

2005-05-16T18:57:00.000-07:00

I've been tinkering with Backpack, lately. Backpack allows you to dynamically create web pages, which can contain notes, todo lists, text, images and/or files. You can embed HTML markup. Now, while this doesn't seem all that special (why not just use mediawiki?) to the hardcore geeks, what makes it cool is that it has a nice clean web interface to everything - and you can email items to your pages. This is something I'd have no problem recommending to my non-techie friends.

I'm not really doing it justice in this summary - go sign up for a freebie account (they won't host images or files for freebie accounts, and you have a limited number of pages) and try it for yourself.

This is another service from the same guys who did BaseCamp and TaDa Lists, so you know it's going to work well.

Foreign Spam

2005-05-15T11:58:00.000-07:00

I've been seeing a lot more foreign language spam the last few months, and have created a mail rule to nuke it all before applying any of my other couple of hundred rules.

Basically, the rule is set to delete any messages when the Content-Type header contains any of the following strings:

charset="koi8-r"
charset="gb2312"
charset="GB2312"
charset="ks_c_5601-1987"
charset=iso-2022-jp
charset="iso-2022-jp"

I don't speak any of those languages, so all messages encoded in them are spam, as far as I'm concerned. If you know of more charsets to nuke, please leave a comment.

Simple automator plugin to add spotlight tags

2005-05-15T09:33:00.000-07:00

Adam Rice has a nice howto for creating an automator plugin to add spotlight tags to a file at http://www.adamrice.org/eponymous/2005/05/add_spotlight_t.html.

DMCA update

2005-05-11T11:31:00.000-07:00

Our congresscritters are looking at reforming the DMCA and formally legalizing circumventing copy protection as long as your use of the copy is legal. The EFF has set up a page that will allow you to fax & mail your congresscritter to support this, at http://action.eff.org/site/Advocacy?id=115.

Go let your congresscritter know you support this.

Launchd and anacron Howto

2005-05-08T15:58:00.000-07:00

I used to run anacron on my laptop in 10.3 so that I could run the daily/weekly/monthly maintenance tasks at appropriate intervals, but without having to have the laptop awake at any specific time. Anacron allows you to specify that specific tasks run every N days, and every time it runs, it checks each job to see if it's been long enough since the last run, and runs it if appropriate. This worked out quite well - I had anacron tasks set up to run the daily script every day, the weekly every 7 days, and the monthly every 30 days. I had cron set to fire up anacron every 15 minutes, and all was well.

Until 10.4, anyway. 10.4 introduced launchd, which replaces cron, and Apple no longer started cron as part of the boot process. I had a lot of maintenance tasks that I was running with anacron via cron though, and while it was easy enough to make an old-style StartupItem to launch cron, I wanted to do the right thing.

Anyway, after experimenting with plutil and launchctl a bit, I figured out how to get launchd to run anacron every 15 minutes. It isn't all that complicated, if you're familiar with XML, but in the interest of sparing other people the hassle, I'm documenting it here.

Presuming you've used fink to install anacron, you can cause launchd to run anacron every 15 minutes by creating a file called /Library/LaunchDaemons/net.sourceforge.fink.anacron.plist with the following contents:


<?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>org.debian.anacron</string>
 <key>ProgramArguments</key>
 <array>
  <string>/sw/sbin/anacron</string>
  <string>-s</string>
 </array>
 <key>RunAtLoad</key>
 <true/>
 <key>LowPriorityIO</key>
 <true/>
 <key>Nice</key>
 <integer>1</integer>
 <key>StartInterval</key>
 <integer>900</integer>
 <key>WatchPaths</key>
 <array>
  <string>/sw/etc/anacrontab</string>
 </array>
 <key>ServiceDescription</key>
 <string>anacron service</string>
</dict>
</plist>

Once you've created the file, all you need to do is use launchctl to load it, by typing sudo launchctl load /Library/LaunchDaemons/net.sourceforge.fink.anacron.plist in a Terminal window. Or reboot.

To change the interval, change the 900 above to whatever number of seconds you want launchd to wait between invocations.

If you don't want it automatically running as soon as you boot up in addition to every 300 seconds, delete the RunAtLoad key, and don't forget to delete the <true/> argument as well.

If you didn't use fink, change the /sw/sbin/anacron to the path you installed anacron on.

If you get an error message when you try to load the file with launchctl, you can use plutil to check the syntax by typing plutil lint org.debian.anacron.plist - if it isn't exactly correct, launchd will complain and refuse load your job.

And if you're using anacron to run the periodic tasks like I am, you can keep them from getting re-run at the regular time by doing the following commands:

sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.periodic-daily.plist

sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.periodic-weekly.plist

sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.periodic-monthly.plist

Then do sudo launchctl list to make sure they aren't showing up.

The plist file is available here.

Rule	Ownership	Permissions	Destination
pack-etc-foo	root:wheel	644	/etc/foo
pack-usr-bin-foo	root:wheel	755	/usr/bin/foo
pack-usr-sbin-foo	root:wheel	755	/usr/sbin/foo
pack-usr-local-bin-foo	root:wheel	755	/usr/local/bin/foo
pack-usr-local-sbin-foo	root:wheel	755	/usr/local/sbin/foo
pack-hookscript-foo	root:wheel	755	/etc/hooks/foo
pack-Library-LaunchAgents-foo	root:wheel	644	/Library/LaunchAgents/foo
pack-Library-LaunchDaemons-foo	root:wheel	644	/Library/LaunchDaemons/foo
pack-Library-Preferences-foo	root:admin	644	/Library/Preferences/foo
pack-ppd-foo	root:admin	644	/Library/Printers/PPDs/Contents/Resources/foo
pack-user-template-plist-foo	root:wheel	644	/System/Library/User\ Template/English.lproj/Library/Preferences/foo
unbz2-applications-foo	root:admin	based on tarball contents	/Applications/Foo
ungz-applications-foo	root:admin	based on tarball contents	/Applications/Foo
unbz2-utilities-foo	root:admin	based on tarball contents	/Applications/Utilities/Foo
ungz-utilities-foo	root:admin	based on tarball contents	/Applications/Utilities/Foo