TextMate KRL Commit Bundle

I created a simple TextMate bundle that maps cmd + k to saving the app code and then committing the app to the Kynetx servers.

You can view and download the bundle on my github at http://gist.github.com/437379

KRL Commit Growl Notification

I have been using the Kynetx KRL command line tool for several weeks now and it has made my development of Kynetx apps much easier. The only problem that I have had as I have been using the command line tool is that once I commit my app I have to wait a few seconds before being able to run the new version in my browser. Until now I have been doing a lot of command + tab switching between windows to check to see if it has finished saving.

I have now created a clean solution that allows me to know when the version has finished being committed to the Kynetx servers and had one unexpected benefit.

I started out by creating a simple bash alias that would pipe the output from the ‘krl commit’ command to a growl notification

# Growl notify after krl commit is done
alias krlc="krl commit | growlnotify -t "KRL" --image /Users/mikegrace/src/kynetx-x.png;"

I quickly realized that this wouldn’t work for me because piping the console to the growl notification means that the commit output wouldn’t be visible on the console.  I need to be able to see on the console what the output was in case there were errors or the latest saved version so I started looking for a better solution and came up with this

# Use growlnotify to alert user of commit status
krl() {
 if [[ $@ == "commit" ]]; then
  command krl commit | tee status.txt | growlnotify -t "KRL" --image /kynetx-x.png;
  cat status.txt;
 else
  command krl $@
 fi;
}

I created a function in my bash profile that runs when I run the krl command. When it sees me using the commit parameter it will do a krl commit and then tee that output to a status.txt file and pipe it to the growl notification. To have the output also show up on the console I cat the status.txt file back to the console. The unforeseen benefit here is that it is now really easy to share error output with others because it can be found in the status.txt file in the app folder.

I also created a bash script, available on my github, that takes care of the installation for you. I created this script purely for fun and I had a blast doing it!

I had a really great time doing all of this and learned a lot. There is a lot of power in being able to manipulate command line tools to make tasks easier.

As Bigweld would say, “See a need, fill a need”

Steps:

1. Get default gateway of VM machine
2. Use that address the same way you would “localhost” on your Mac

Example:

Get IP address of VM

Local Mac development environment

Dev environment from VM

Terminal command: tail -f <file.name> <file.name>

Tail Three Files

Tail Two Files

Tailing multiple files in one terminal window is a life saver when you are pressed for space on your screen.
With tail you can tail just about as many files as you want. I doubt it would be very useful to have more than a few tailed at the same time.

Leave a quick comment if you found this helpful or have other helpful suggestions like this one.

For a project that I am starting I wanted to use Rails and MySQL so I decided to install for source that I compile myself for both. It was amazingly easy and satisfying to have both compiled and installed on my machine for development. Hivelogic has some really simple easy to follow blog posts on how to do both. If you are wanting to compile and install either Rails or MySQL on your Mac from source code then I recommend you check them out.

Installing MySQL on Snow Leopard

Installing Ruby, RubyGems, and Rails on Snow Leopard

Bike photo by piston9 / CC BY 2.0

Key based authentication for SSH is a way to connect remotely to another computer/server using an encrypted file you HAVE and an optional password you KNOW to unlock the file. Key based authentication has the advantage of being more secure and/or more convenient.

Why?

Password based authentication:
Logging in via password over SSH encrypts your password so it ends up looking like this:
..t-:p.%.E.{..E..X7.@.@.~....s..............NXP...{W..!8..;.eh9..N......#....q..1f...:...D9R0 zy
Because the password is encrypted, it won’t be seen in plain text over the wire which is good. If the password is short or simple enough, a hacker will be able to crack your password. Assuming the password is good enough, password based authentication’s strength comes from keeping that knowledge from others.

Key based authentication allows you to connect remotely using an encrypted file as a key instead of a password. Key based authentication gives you the option to lock the key with a password or not. Many choose not to lock the key with a password for convenience but, if the key ever gets stolen, the captor will be able to use the key without putting in a password to unlock it.

Key based authentication is a very attractive remote authentication solution because it employs two factors of authentication: something you have and something you know. Getting someone’s password is fairly easy given enough time but getting a file from their computer and their password is much more difficult.

HOW TO

How to set up key based authentication on a linux server

Setting up key based ssh authentication consists of 4 steps.

1. Create public & private keys on your machine
2. Copy public key to server
3. Add public key on server to server’s authorized key list
4. Enjoy while protecting password & private key

1. Create public & private keys on your machine

• On your local machine, issue the following command into the terminal to create the directory to hold your public and private keys. If it tells you that the directory already exists that is just fine.

mkdir ~./.ssh

• Navigate to recently created directory.

cd ~/.ssh

• Start application that will help you generate keys.

ssh-keygen

• Follow and answer prompts to create keys. Pressing enter will accept defaults for prompts and is fine for all prompts except for the prompt asking for a passphrase. Enter a password to lock the key from unauthorized use or leave blank to have no passphrase. Running through the program looks like this:

mike:.ssh mike$ ssh-keygen
Generating public/private rsa key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (/Users/mike/.ssh/id_rsa):
Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase):
Enter same passphrase again:
Your identification has been saved in /Users/mike/.ssh/id_rsa.
Your public key has been saved in /Users/mike/.ssh/id_rsa.pub.
The key fingerprint is:
4a:3b:67:e0:82:b7:46:51:0b:b3:41:28:d4:9a:5d:f6 mike@mike
The key's randomart image is:
+--[ RSA 2048]----+
|...o. |
|. ..+o. |
| .+ o*.. |
| o .o .E |
| .o S |
| ..o + |
| ..o = o |
| ..o + |
| .. |
+-----------------+

2. Copy public key to server

• Connect to server via ssh (or other means)

ssh user@host

• Make folder to hold public key

mkdir ~/.ssh

• Open new terminal window to copy public key to server via scp

scp ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub user@host:~/.ssh/

• Close terminal window used to copy public key over

3. Add public key on server to server’s authorized key list

cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

4. Enjoy while protecting password & private key

• You are now all set up and can connect to the server using you newly created keys. Just ssh into the server as usual and the server will take care of the key authentication behind the scenes. If you are using a password to lock your key, you will see a window similar to this the first time you use the key until your mac keychain locks again. If you are not using a password to lock the key then you will never be prompted for a password again to ssh into your server from your computer.

Note:
You can easily rename the keys so you can have multiple keys on a computer and server. Just make sure to append each key to the server’s authorized_keys file using
cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

I originally learned how to set up key based authentication on a linux server from my friend Jesse on his blog http://www.jessecole.org/

Images:

Ever wonder how to level sound volume on a recording or podcast? The Levelator is a super simple application for Mac or Windows to level out sound volumes on a podcast recording. Mike Farmer and I use it for our podcast over at http://technologyforlearning.info and it works wonders for the times when we accidentally move away from the microphone. It’s free and it works great so what are you waiting for? Go download it from their site at http://www.conversationsnetwork.org/levelator

Answer:

/System/Library/CoreServices/CoreTypes.bundle/Contents/Resources

How to get there:

you can get there several different ways.
1) Paste into Terminal

cd /System/Library/CoreServices/CoreTypes.bundle/Contents/Resources; open .

2) Open Finder -> Select “Go” menu item -> Select “Go to Folder” -> Paste

/System/Library/CoreServices/CoreTypes.bundle/Contents/Resources

3) Open Finder -> (Keyboard Shortcut) Shift + Command + G -> Paste

/System/Library/CoreServices/CoreTypes.bundle/Contents/Resources

A Snow Leopard compatible beta can be found at

http://growl.info/beta.html

Stickies

Mail

Terminal

A big thanks to my friend Mike Farmer for pointing this out to me. ; )

Car Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jantik/ / CC BY 2.0

Set cursor focus in Firefox to search box -> cmd + K
Set cursor focus in most Mac OS X browsers -> cmd + L

Two of my most used and most useful keyboard shortcuts while browsing the web using Firefox on Mac OS X

My good friend Mike showed me the keyboard shortcut to jump to the Firefox search box after he accidentally stumbled upon it. Thanks Mike!

Spotlight Icon

How to fix your spotlight woes.

I use spotlight all the time to launch applications and open files. I recently ran into some trouble with files and applications disappearing from the spotlight index. I was able to fix the problem by deleting my spotlight index and rebuilding it.

System Preferences - Spotlight

First you should just make sure your spotlight settings haven’t caused the problem before you take the time to delete and rebuild your spotlight index. In system preferences go to spotlight. There are two tabs: Search Results and Privacy. Make sure the type of file you are looking for is selected and under privacy make sure the file isn’t located in any of the locations specified. Any location specified in the privacy tab will not be indexed.

Spotlight Search Results Preferences

Spotlight Privacy Preferences

Delete and Rebuild Spotlight Index

To delete and rebuild your spotlight index open up your terminal and enter in these commands. (You will need your root password to execute these commands)

sudo rm -r /.Spotlight-V100
sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist
sudo mdutil -E /

NOTE: For most, copying and pasting these commands will  work just fine. For some of you it might come back on the first command that the file was not found. If this is the case for you it’s ok, we just need to find the right file. Paste the first line all the way up to the “V” like this:

sudo rm -r /.Spotlight-V

then just hit the tab key and it should complete the file name. You can now hit enter and paste the rest of the commands with no problem.

Explained

1. Deletes the spotlight index file
2. Sends secret message to the elves in your computer that make things happen
3. Causes Spotlight to rebuild indexes

After you have rebuilt the index, you and spotlight can live happily ever after. :)

Resources:
Sunset Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mikebaird/ / CC BY 2.0
Terminal commands: Question I asked on superuser.com

Enjoy

Open the Mac OS X utility called “Disk Utility”. It can be found in the “Applications” folder and inside the “Utilities” folder. Or… be cool and use spotlight to open the application.

2. Click “New Image”

3. Name .dmg, image, and set options

• Size: Size of image
• Format: How the image file is constructed (The default will meet most needs)
• Encryption: No need for this if you are creating the image to burn to a disk
• Partitions: Ditto
• Image Format: read/write disk image will meet most needs

4.  Click create and find your creation

5. Open image and drag and drop your files into it

6. Eject image once you are done filling

7. Now the .dmg can be burned to a disk or you can just keep it. Double click the .dmg to mount the image.

1. Insert Disk into drive

2. Open “Disk Utility” application

3. Select Disk to image and click “New Image”

4. Name file and select location to save

5. All done! Now you can go register for MacWorld Expo or WWDC. ; )

What?

It may sound crazy but you actually can bun a multi partition CD and it can be useful.

Uses

• Combine several application CDs into one CD.
• Backup downloaded applications onto disk without using one disk per application.
• Impress your geek friends and woo a girl by showing off your burning expertise. ; )

Gist

Burn a multi-partition CD in OS X using the built in “Disk Utility”. Partitions are created by burning to the disk an image or a .dmg file. The trick is that when you burn an image to the disk you check the option to “Leave disk appendable”.

Do it!

1. Have or create image files (.dmg)

• If you already have the images to burn to the CD you are ready to go to the next step. If you need to create the images no problem, it’s easy! You can create an image from an existing disk or create an empty one from scratch and you fill it.

2. Select image file and options

• Open the Mac OS X utility called “Disk Utility”. It can be found in the “Applications” folder and inside the “Utilities” folder. Or… be cool and use spotlight to open the application.

• Click the burn icon found in the top left corner of the app.
• Select the .dmg image file to burn first.

• Select which drive to burn it with if you have more than one.
• Select speed to burn at.
• CHECK OPTION TO “Leave disk appendable”
• Click the “Burn” button and go have an ice cream float to keep you cool while your disk burns. ; )

3. Do it again

• After the disk is done burning it should eject or mount to the desktop depending on what you chose in the options. Because you chose to leave the disk appendable you can now repeat step 2 to append more disk images to the CD. Now when that disk is mounted each image that was burned will appear as its own disk to the system.

Note:

I have only found this to work with CDs and not DVDs. If you have found a way to make this work with a DVD please let me know.

It is always fun to read the “man” pages in terminal and learn more about each command that I already use. I recently read the man page for ping and learned some cool stuff worthy of sharing.

Ping in specific time intervals

• To ping at a time interval other than the default 1 second us the option flag of ‘-i [seconds to wait]‘
• Example: ping -i5 www.google.com
  • This command will send a ping to google every 5 seconds
  • Note: It appears that any interval below 1 second requires root privileges

Super Ping! aka “Flood ping”
Personally, I think super ping sounds way cooler than flood ping but the later provides a better description of what it does.

• According to the “man” pages, a flood will send out pings as fast as they come back or 100 pings/sec. Which ever one is happening faster will be the rule that is followed.
• Example: sudo ping -f www.google.com
  • This command will print a period to the console for every packet sent and will delete a period for every packet received. The cumulative effect of this is as more packets are dropped you will see more and more periods accumulate on the screen giving you instant feed back on how fast packets are being dropped.
  • Note: Use this command very wisely and with caution as it taxes your network.
  • With my internet connection, pinging google, I was able to send off 6,000 pings in 10 seconds.

The terminal is a very powerful tool!

Licensing
—————–

You may remix, tweak, and build upon this work even for commercial reasons, as long as you credit me and license your new creations under these identical terms. All new works based on this work will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also allow commercial use. To credit this work please use the web citation and archive service found at http://www.webcitation.org/archive or click on the “Archive & Cite this page!” image above.

Become a power “pinger” in the Terminal by Mike Grace is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Sources
—————-
The “man” pages were used for the information found in this post. You can find the ping man page by typing into a unix or linux terminal the command “man ping” or a copy of several operating system man pages can be found at http://manpages.unixforum.co.uk/

Terminal loves Finder

In Mac OS X Terminal open the current folder in Finder by using the command ‘open .’ You can also open a file with its default application by using ‘open fileName.fileExtension’

Examples:

If the current working directory in terminal is “/System/Library” then ‘open .’ would open “/System/Library” in finder.

‘open test.txt’ would open the text file “test.txt” in TextEdit.

‘open *’ would open all the files in the current directory with their default applications.

‘open *.jpg’ opens all jpg images in folder.

‘open [ABC]*.pdf’ opens all pdfs that start with an uppercase A, B, or C.

The possibilities and the power of the ‘open’ command in terminal are astounding. Learn even more about the command by using the command ‘man open’ or just ‘open’ and the terminal will display more information on that command and how it is used. If you use the ‘man open’ command spacebar will show the next page and ‘q’ will exit the manual.

Sources
————-
The heart in the image was acquired from http://www.eyehook.com/free/love.html under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic License

URL: http://www.eyehook.com/free/love.html Accessed: 2009-4-24. (Archived by WebCite® at http://www.webcitation.org/5h1DQldAm)

License
————-

Open files or directory in Finder from OS X Terminal by Mike Grace is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Update: Please download the updated version on the Mac Widgets page.

And my fingers and the keyboard lived happily ever after. : )

———
Resources

Smith, Dori. Safari Shortcuts. dori.com. URL: http://www.dori.com/safariShortcuts.html . Accessed: 2009-3-13. (Archived by WebCite® at http://www.webcitation.org/5g1DV8KDe)

Installing VMware Tools for Fedora

What Happened?

• In VMware Fusion selected “Virtual Machine” –> “Install VMware Tools”
• In a terminal navigate to folder with install file “/home/mike/Desktop/vmware-tools-distrib/”
• Ran install with “./vmware-install.pl”
• Accepted all default answers to prompts

Problem

Was prompted with:

What is the location of the directory of C header files that match your running
kernel? [/usr/src/linux/include]



The path “/usr/src/linux/include” is not an existing directory.

Fix

• Get kernal package name by entering “uname -r” into your terminal.
• The returned string is what you need to search for in google. Might look like “2.6.27.21-170.2.56.fc10.i686″
• Download the C header package found in your google search and install. I found mine at “http://rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/search.php?query=kernel-devel”
• Installed C header files ended up in “/usr/src/kernels/[package name]/include/” for me. “[package name]” is the name of the package you downloaded and installed.

Hopefully doing that works for you as well as it did for me. Would love to hear if this helped and let me know if you have any questions.

Resources:

icns2rsrc

Icns2Rsrc.app

Apple Developer Tools

Apple Developer Tools