Hodgepodge of thoughts, technical notes, and random observations
October 29th, 2009 — Technology
using apache, mysql, mod_wsgi, and virtualenv
Dreamhost provides free hosting to nonprofits, and for now they seem to have thrown in a virtual private server. This is hard not to take advantage of, and I’m hoping that the VPS is better performing than the shared hosting – but my concern is that they all share the same mysql servers. So here is how I got pinax up and running in its comfy and modern Python web stack.
October 28th, 2009 — Technology
At work we needed to have a standard local account that would work off campus, but not on campus. Here was my solution.
September 9th, 2009 — Technology
OE-Cake is still expired for OS X – lets work around that
September 8th, 2009 — Technology
The iTunes remote is pretty slick – if only it could turn on the stereo
September 8th, 2009 — Technology
In our school environment, we had a couple issues with Google Earth’s default behaviors – here are my workarounds.
September 3rd, 2009 — Technology
There are times I need to create some easy to remember weak initial passwords for students – here is a quick script
August 24th, 2009 — Technology
Even though we moved our email from OS X server to google apps for education – we still manage our lists with a local mailman instance (still on 10.4). However the web based interface for adding new members can be a bit of a pain as it never seems to remember the right authorization when switching between lists – luckily mailman has some great command line tools.
August 18th, 2009 — Technology
Sometimes you get in a situation where you are editing a long command on the command line and you’d kill to be able to use your mouse to select a word or option in the middle. This tip makes it a pleasure
July 16th, 2009 — Technology
In my quest to automate the workflow of managing Macs at work, I wanted a way to download disk image files from apple ahead of time – once downloaded the next will be to integrate with my watched install project from the previous post, and then auto lcreate the loadsets. I can then do all my management on the radmind server (picking and choosing loadsets ready to go).
The script monitors http://images.apple.com/downloads/macosx/apple/recent.rss and if it has been updated since last check (stores the last check in a plist file) it will check the feed links for any dmg it can find and download it to /downloaded_dmgs/ (which is easy enough to change in the script source)
The script source is below the fold – or download here
June 4th, 2009 — Technology
Sometimes doing tedious layout work in Illustrator is both time consuming and hard on the wrists. In this post I show a quick example of how one can script Illustrator very effectively
June 2nd, 2009 — Technology
Despite vowing to stay away from Applescript as far as I can – sometimes its the fastest way to save a little time
March 19th, 2009 — Technology
Managing a large number of Macs at an institution often requires a hodgepodge of tricks and tools. While Apple packages some useful stuff os OS X server, many of the most useful things are hidden, created by the community, or rely on OS X’s UNIX underpinnings. One of the tricks that I came up with a couple years back that I have found invaluable, is a system where by I can create and manage a set of scripts on a server, that get run on each client at login. Read on for details and some snippets.
March 11th, 2009 — Technology
Deny hosts is a clever python script that will monitor your ssh log file for repeated failed login attempts, and then add the offending hosts to a system blacklist. While you can disable ssh entirely, or move it to a different port, there are reason you may want to keep it available and on a standard port and this tool will help keep the bad guys out.
cd to the unpacked distribution folder and enter the following in terminal:
python setup.py install
touch /etc/hosts.deny
cp /usr/share/denyhosts/denyhosts.cfg-dist /usr/share/denyhosts/denyhosts.cfg
cp /usr/share/denyhosts/daemon-control-dist /usr/share/denyhosts/daemon-control
chmod 700 /usr/share/denyhosts/daemon-control
read on for configuration
March 9th, 2009 — Technology
9/2/2009 Updated to work with now longer Twitter ID numbers
back when Jott was free I was one of several people who were using it to get quick voice notes into OmniFocus (OF). A couple of limitations of the Jott solution was that:
There are just times when I think of something on the go, and firing up the iPhone OF app and tapping it in won’t work, so when a friend told me about vlingo for iPhone and twitter, I thought – hmm I’ve been playing a bit with the twitter API and that might be a good route for me to get stuff from voice into OF.
So here are the steps (updated with more detail):
February 23rd, 2009 — Technology
There are a has been a number of version control systems en vogue over time, CVS, SVN, Git etc.
I try to keep up with them, use them where possible, but don’t put EVERYTHING I do in version control. Since I am on a Mac running Leopard, I do have, and use Time Machine and so wanted to see if it would be pretty easy to use that to do some quick diffs between some source files.
The result is a quick and dirty python script. In the unlikely event that I ever have time, this would be a cool pyObjC project, a file browser panel, date versions picker, and a webkit view (with some better css).
The source to the script is below the fold – it will look for the first attached volume that has time machine backups for the current machine. It will not work with network based time machine backups that are on disk images. This script will run on a stock Leopard install without any extra python modules needed.