Actually managed to find some documentation on this (why their server won’t list it’s program arguments, I will never understand). It’s here. When you’re wrapping to launchd, keep in mind that every parameter has to go in a separate tag. Ie not –port something, but –port something Otherwise the server will start up, but won’t be accepting connections on that port.

It’s really quite simple when you know it. This is all also somewhere in the documentation, but here are the exact steps for easy reference: 1) Boot off the install media 2) On another machine that has the tools installed, pull a /System/Library/ServerSetup/sa_srchr 224.0.0.1 That should get you something like this: localhost#1.25 GHz PowerPC G4#192.168.0.114#00:11:24:3e:62:aa#Mac OS X Server 10.4#RDY4PkgInstall#3.0#512 3) Cool. ssh root@192.168.0.114 Password: the first 8 characters of your server hardware's serial number 4) Set up the disks (if you have hardware RAID, remember to use megaraid!

More like 7 hours really. It turns out today’s UIs pretty much require a mouse (even though they don’t list them as a requirement, like they used to). Universal Access > Full Keyboard Access helps alot, but the 2 major things that made me reconnect my mouse were: * Webpages. Painful to access links. * IRC. Can’t open links either.

Mac OS X Server: About Privilege Mapping and When It Is Used defaults read -g com.apple.AppleShareClientCore defaults read /Library/Preferences/com.apple.AppleFileServer

Ping scanning with nmap. Ie how to find all your machines on the local subnet that have a DHCP address (100+) nmap -sP 192.168.0.100-255

By default, the squirrelmail conf only allows plaintext, but you don’t have to enable that just because of your webmail users. To fix it, just do: sudo /etc/squirrelmail/config/config.pl And set Server Settings > Update IMAP Settings > Authentication type > cram-md5. There are a bunch of other useful settings there that should be checked as well. This must be mentioned in the docs as well.

Was just looking to find a nice clean document format for my thesis and stumbled on this Apple Blog article. I think LaTeX is mostly useful in two situations: You have to write a lot of math equations Your language can be written in 7-bit ASCII and you have someone else to do the layouts for you (like in books etc) Why LaTeX is NOT suited for 99,9% of users: It’s difficult to learn and there’s a ton of useless crap you have to remember to do.

To send a command to the background and ignore all output: > command > /dev/null 2 > &1 &

Talk about an ambiguous error message! The CUPS docs basically say this could mean anything. Well, this time the fix was actually pretty logical, after turning logging to debug level, /var/log/cups/error_log had this to say: D [15/Nov/2006:17:19:55 +0200] [Job 8] Unknown device: cdj890 Mmkay, I guess I picked the wrong PPD. Indeed, setting it to “Foomatic/hpijs (recommended)” fixed the problem. Why the initial error couldn’t include “Uknown device: cdj890” I will never understand…

Finally finished that piece on getting the iChat server to work with MSN. It’s available for download here. (450kB PDF)

Changing IP-s is sometimes a risky business. Especially if your server’s behind a firewall, in another country, across a great body of water. So here’s a little backup strategy to use in case something does go bad: > sudo at now + 1 hour >networksetup -setmanual "Built-in Ethernet" youroldip youroldnetmask youroldrouter > Ctrl -D That way, if all goes to hell, it should go back to the previous state after an hour.

AppleScript URL protocol support Getting the home directory: set theHomeDir to the POSIX path of home directory of (system info) Getting and setting the clipboard: set whatever to the clipboard set the clipboard to "whatever" Encoding URLs Personally, I think you’re best off just piping it through PHP: do shell script "echo myurl | /usr/bin/php -r \"urlencode(fgets(STDIN));\"" Bu there’s also some info on Apple’s website. How does ScriptEditor know which app is scriptable?

This actually did make it to afp548.com, but I’m putting it up here also in the hopes that it might come in useful for someone else too: One way to train the spam filter that comes with OS X Server (10.4) is by setting up two accounts - “junkmail” and “notjunkmail” and redirecting all spam and false positives to them accordingly. This is all documented on page 52 of the Mail Service manual.

Isn’t it great when sometimes things just work? I think CUPS is one of these things. It took me a week with Solaris to finally understand that the reason my parallel printer wouldn’t work is because even the parallel port didn’t. Well, whatever. Just installed Debian (from the 180 MB netinstall), selected “print server” as the basic package selection, pushed some buttons, watched some TV. Configured networking (/etc/network/interfaces) and added the printer: lpadmin -p DeskJet -v parallel:/dev/lp0 -P /usr/share/ppd/HP/HP-DeskJet_890C-cdj890.

Scalable - you see the word in every other software description nowadays. But what the heck does it actually mean? Well, the Oxford dictionary has this to say: scalable |ˈskāləbəl| |ˌskeɪləbəl| |ˌskeɪləb(ə)l|adjective1 able to be scaled or climbed.2 able to be changed in size or scale : scalable fonts.• (of a computing process) able to be used or produced in a range of capabilities : it is scalable across a range of systems.

A thoroughly enjoyable animation. And a truly creepy one too. It’s fun to see someone else besides Pixar handle character animation so well. The animation style itself was quite different from Pixar’s though. Using much more mocap whereas Pixar’s stuff is still a great deal hand-animated. The mocap worked really well here because it didn’t try to match human movement down to the slightest detail, choosing a more stopmotion-style instead. I’ve always thought of 3D CG as the next generation of stopmotion/puppeteering so I think it’s a really good way to go.

This one actually made it to macosxhints: If there’s one thing that computers are better at than humans, it’s remembering things. Take for example the typical Out Of Office email reply - you go on vacation and set a rule in Mail.app to automatically respond of your absence to any email with a certain criteria. Then you come back and a day or two later remember to turn the notification back off again.

DigiExpo’s the biggest digital entertainment show in Finland. I must say, as much as I generally try to avoid these sc “general purpose” fairs, this one was actually fun. Probably a lot of that excitement had to do with the console generation shift that’s going on right now. Also, the “confusion of the HD transition” might have something to do with it. Got to try the Wii controller which I must say felt quite odd and nonsensical.

This isn’t much of a release announcement since it’s not even available for download yet, but Flannel’s demo page is finally up now. This is all part of a not-so-elaborate scheme to get Flannel out there in the hands of the users. Not knowing the current state of true WYSIWYG publishers out there, I still think it could be very useful for people who just want their stuff online quickly and easily.

David Pogue Ze Frank Jeff Han Nicholas Negroponte

… was amazing. Met some very nice people there. Thanks to all of You! Will definitely try to be back next year, although I’m still alittle woozy from all of it. Not sure if I could go tomorrow… 1⁄5 of the work is still to be done… I also put up some photos of the event (unfortunately didn’t have time to take many). For future reference Some words about the AV production.

http://www.photoshoplab.com/aging-people.html Oh, and don’t forget the “saucy” search engine!

The HVR A1E is a HDV camera from Sony that packs alot of features in a small package. Only been able to play with it for two days, but here goes: Pros: Very compact form factor, nice sturdy body Very nice image quality Two-channel XLR input module included DV, HDV and DVCAM (DV but faster) support, real 16:9 (anamorphic) Touchscreen menu Works pretty well with FCP (although getting HDV to work takes some time always…) A lot of configuration options Cons:

Your Mac won’t start up in Mac OS X (Mac OS X 10.3.9 or earlier) TN2123: Anatomy of a Crash Log

Yes. Whenever you delete someone from WM, this line appears in system.log: root : TTY=unknown ; PWD=/ ; USER=cyrusimap ; COMMAND=/usr/bin/cyrus/bin/ipurge -f -b 1 user/untitled_3

http://koutuk.blogspot.com/2006/10/shadow-girl.html

How Finder lists items that are sorted by name (Mac OS X)

and other Funnny IETF RFCs

useradd -g staff -c “Firstname Lastname” -d /export/home/username -m -s /bin/bash username passwd username Silly that Solaris comes with root enabled. And then says setting a password is optional (I thought it meant not enabling the account at all). Solaris is weird (and not very pretty either).

Weird but true: my small server was crashing intermittently for seemingly no apparent reason. After turning off the Software Update server that I simply didn’t need anymore all has been well again…

http://www.tomorrowland.us/sportscar/

Nothing about Rotoshop. I must say I’m surprised it was cut on Avid. But nevertheless, here’s a look at how they pulled it off.

The documentation says it’s only good for static content anyways. The weird port 16080 is weird too. The docs also said to put static stuff on a different vhost and enable cache on that. Pretty cool idea.

It seems I’m not alone

Found this little nugget of information while going through the Package Maker help: lsbom -p MUGsf /Library/Receipts/BaseSystem.pkg/Contents/Archive.bom

An ironic photo taken during the Great Depression.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;261186

I’ve noticed that if you just disconnect without first closing nano, it will be eating up all your CPU the next time you connect. I’ve seen this on alot of different servers with 10.4.x. This might be OK with other editors, but is still a good thing to keep in mind.

Was finally able to have the same site respond to different aadresses differently: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/vhosts/examples.html Just check /etc/httpd/sites/virtual_host_global.conf and make sure it looks like what’s described in the article. Rearranging them in the Sites list also seems to help.

Maybe there’s something to global warming after all: BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Drastic shrinkagte in Arctic ice

Available here. Universal, no TCL extension.

Available here. Built as Universal binary. Also includes SVN book PDF. Installs into /usr/local, no Apache support (wouldn’t work with 1.3 anyways).

window.onload = function() { var quotes = ["I wanna be a racecar passenger.", "Alright, you're a cook - can you farm?"]; var i = Math.floor(Math.random()*quotes.length); document.getElementsByTagName('h2')[0].innerHTML = '"' + quotes[i] + '"'; } Don’t forget to add blank lines before and after the JS!

Punk made it to the Staff Favorites list. It will also be included on the cover CD of Univers Mac, a French Mac Magazine! Thanks!

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/macosxtigersa/

Binaries as PKG available here and here. Both universal. Making them was really easy. Just create a sparse image, and ./configure with –prefix=/Volumes/MyImage Then set that as the root in PackageMaker and check perms etc.

I like quotes. There’s something about them - they’re kinda like crystallized ideas if you will: http://www.eskimo.com/%7Ehottub/software/programming_quotes.html

After spending 4 days with the problem of sorting an array of NSDictionaries (!!) using every kind of method imaginable, I finally found the solution: You can’t use sortUsingSelector because that operates on the object in the array (in this case an NSDictionary). That explains the countless (”[CFDictionary compareScores] selector not recognized etc…“) I was getting. Phew So use sortUsingFunction instead. And as the guys at cocoadev so eloquently showed:

Time to start compiling a list: - A Scanner Darkly - The Science of Sleep - Art School Confidential - Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan - Tonari no Totoro

You’ll notice there’s no “Empty the trash” Automator action. There are those who will try to sell you this action. But why? Add Automator > Run AppleScript action and: tell application "Finder" empty trash end tell Can I have some money now? ;-)