In our school environment, we had a couple issues with Google Earth’s default behaviors – here are my workarounds.
Making Google Earth work for us
September 8th, 2009 — Technology
simple weak password generator
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
Managing mailman on the command line
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.
Editing long commands
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
Letting users get to (i)Work
August 13th, 2009 — Random Observation
iLife and iWork can throw up an awful lot of update dialogs and welcome screens for people who first launch them. For users on my network I wanted to prevent those from coming up
Geek distractions
August 7th, 2009 — Random Observation
Tools are getting so sophisticated now – that they can be a distraction for the lightweight or part time coder.
You can get lost in the ins and outs of git vs hg, choosing a database engine (SQL vs Key-Value etc), javascript frameworks, PIP vs Buildout and integrating with virtualenv.
They all have their merit, especially to people who sit in this world all day long, but none of them directly produce work product for you. They are tools – and its best to learn them bit by bit, not all at once, or you will be overwhelmed.
Pre-fetch Apple downloads as dmg files
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
watchedinstall
July 15th, 2009 — Random Observation
[update: project now on bitbucket]
The Problem
There is often the need in a deployment scenario to repackage an installer into some other format. This might be a [radmind][1] transcript, a simple payload only installer package or perhaps just a manifest of what exactly changed on the system.
Apple installer style packages contain simple payloads, but often contain pre or postflight scripts which can make additional and important changes to the filesystem.
There are a couple methods that have been used to try to deduce what exactly was installed:
calling to the shell in python
July 14th, 2009 — Random Observation
This is one of the most frequent utility routines I have in many (most?) of my python scripts. Creating subprocesses in python is very flexble and powerful, but a bit verbose. Sometimes you just want to run a command and set a variable to the output.
from subprocess import Popen, call, STDOUT, PIPE
def sh(cmd):
return Popen(cmd,shell=True,stdout=PIPE,stderr=PIPE).communicate()[0]
You can then just use this as:
sh('ps -x')
Saving time (and wrists) scripting Illustrator
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
Two quick collage assistants
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
Will iTunes 8.2 lock out the Pre before it arrives?
June 1st, 2009 — Random Observation
The iTunes 8.2 update came out today with some curious details that, when you squint hard enough, suggest that Apple is trying to lock out the Palm Pre even before it launches.
10.5.7 fails to update PPC machines properly
May 21st, 2009 — Random Observation
One of the things Leopard changed from Tiger was who could add printers. In Leopard only admins could manage printers – a change made apparently because schools were complaining that non-admins were adding printers they weren’t supposed to. But then it turned out that there were just as many cases where this caused a problem. Apple tried to fix this in 10.5.7 – but forgot to apply the fix completely for PPC machines.
Reducing size of iPhoto POI database
April 29th, 2009 — Random Observation
This is probably only of interest to those of you that have to deploy iPhoto over a slower (ie wireless) network.
Screen Juggling
April 9th, 2009 — Random Observation
Ever since I had a Powerbook Duo back in the day – I’ve made a laptop my primary machine. There has never been a sync solution that I have found adequate – and with my current AL macbook – I’m happy with the performance and memory. The only shortcomming is the screen as you can never have too much (spaces help – but its not a solution). At my desk at work I have an older eMac that serves as sort of a utility workhorse (encoding/archiving DVDs, backup ARD admin terminal, iTunes jukebox etc). I’ve always sought a way to make good use of the extra screen. In the beginning I was just using Apple Remote Desktop, but this was always a little klunky as it required switching away from whatever I was doing. I’ve not found a couple pieces that when put together result in close to a perfect setup.