The iTunes remote is pretty slick – if only it could turn on the stereo
Making iPhone iTunes remote more useful
September 8th, 2009 — Technology
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:
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
Time Machine: poor man’s version control
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.
Fixing PDB and TextMate for files with spaces in path
January 7th, 2009 — Technology
There is a cool little glue package out there called PdbTextMateSupport that allows you to highlight the current line of python code as you debug it in PDB, python’s debugger. It works by sending URLs to textmate – however the python code does not escape spaces in the path, and if you are on OS X there is a decent chance that you have a folder somewhere along the way that might have a space…
Here is the fix:
quick python cgi to send email
December 18th, 2008 — Technology
In the previous post I mentioned a python script I was using with curl to send me a SMS message. Its a pretty quick and dirty one, but here is the script I use. Since these are quick messages meant for my phone – I don’t do much with the body. And I just use this with a GET style URL, although the python cgi lib could just as easily handle a POST. So I call it like this:
http://www.domain.net/cgi-bin/sendmemail.py?to=number@txt.att.net&subject=printing_done
I use this via curl in other scripts as a sort of notification system. Continue reading →