Pete Shanahan's Shack

This entry is brought to you by intrepid ibex

2008-08-22T17:21:24Z

Sitting in the Galway Hooker bar, having a pint waiting until my train starts boarding.
Using an Acer Aspire One laptop, running Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex and my USB 3g data dongle.
It's actually usable. It may be small, but it's cabable.
Oh, and it looks like my train is boarding. At least I have a seat reserved so I don't need to queue with the other folks.

Address book searching on the Mac

2008-07-31T19:08:39Z

I don't want to keep manually syncing my address book on Vodafone with that of my mac, so I use this script to pull out the phone numbers of people when I want to send them a text message using webtext (or my webtext script).
#!/bin/sh

search_for=name
return_val=phone

args=$(getopt s:r: $*)

set -- $args

while :; do
    case $1 in
        -s) search_for=$2; shift;;
        -r) return_val=$2; shift;;
        --) shift; break;;
    esac
    shift
done

if [ $# -lt 1 ]; then
    echo 1>&2 "usage: $(basename $0) -s -r YOUR_SEARCH"
    exit 127
fi

search=
for i in $@; do
    if [[ -z $search ]]; then
        search="($search_for contains \"$i\")"
    else
        search="$search and ($search_for contains \"$i\")"
    fi
done

scriptcode="tell app \"Address Book\" to get (value of $return_val) of every person where $search"

osascript -s "s" -e "$scriptcode"

exit 0

You can get it Here.

Go see 'The Dark Knight'

2008-07-24T22:09:19Z

It will make you go Zonino for it is such a god flick.

Your request could not be completed

2008-07-21T18:43:15Z

Because, apparently it's only available in the US. I'd love to buy the Dr. Horrible's Sing-along blog videos. Unfortunately I'm not in the US so I am denied. In fact when in Ireland there are a lot of things that stop being available to me. Like any of the TV shows. Drive me to other sources!
Thankfully Warner seem to have been sensible with most of their Blu-Ray dvds - they don't have zone locking so I can watch the ones I bought in the US in Ireland without violating anyone's TOS.

The sensation is truly disturbing

2008-07-13T08:52:33Z

This morning, following the standard dog walking to get the Sunday papers I found a dead blackbird (female) at the front door of the house - her poor neck had been broken from an impact with the window. We've had this problem before, but it's generally from the low windows; the impact isn't fatal and usually the bird shrugs it off in a few minutes and gets going. Today, however it was, unfortunately dead.
I picked it up to leave it in the back garden and it still felt warm. As I walked back to the end of the garden that warmth kept flowing into me.
It was truly disturbing to think that if I hadn't been there all that heat would have just passed away without ever having had an impact on anything.

Trust me...

2008-07-11T03:54:20Z

It tells me to trust it. After all, it's a certificate that's signed by a CA that isn't in the list of known certificate authorities.
I don't trust certificates. There is a list of certificate authorities a mile long stored on my computer of groups who are to be trusted when a certificate is presented. I don't know them from adam, and the certs from the Hong Kong post office are about as trusted as the ones from the Apple Root CA - get real people this is not security, this is just posturing. I trust them about as much as I trust the digital quicksand upon which they are based.
I've stopped caring anymore. The only thing that these certificates establish is a temporary private channel between me and the web server. The rest; it's just smoke and mirrors.

More features...

2008-07-09T18:29:27Z

It looks like we have a bunch more sync options for the address book now. I don't believe it supported Exchange or Google prior to 10.5.4, now it does. Let the insanity of address book syncing continue.

This gnome tab-rip thing is just killing me

2008-07-02T18:01:20Z

Aargh, it's too bloody easy to rip off these tabs and there's no way to re-attach them from what I can tell. Something about the sensitivity pop-up menus and the tab drag thing has been tuned up. It's practically impossible to keep a pop-up menu open using a two-fingered click (touchpad).
Every time I rip-off a tab it makes me want to throw gnome out the window. the UI seems to have become more and more of a crayon interface without actually improving.
Tabs. A logical option for grouping works on different projects. Apparently, you're supposed to use multiple windows in a desktop.

Don't hide or disable menu items...

2008-07-01T18:15:45Z

The suggestion by Joel to not hide or disable menu items is a good one. There's only one issue. With the way it's worded you could end up with a swarm of dialogs. I would suggest some form of stackable notification item. The status bar isn't really suitable for this as there's no way to get stuff back from it historically.
The 'in frame' dialog that's becoming popular these days in such browsers as Firefox. This is a reasonable 'dialog', and you could remove them automatically after a period of time (say 30 seconds). as long as they are differentiated from the other items on the screen it would be reasonable.

I reboot and get an 'emergency security update' from Flash

2008-07-01T08:22:00Z

Apparently, it needed to install a security update. I don't believe I'm using any flash applications that would keep the player in use, so why the pathetic dialog on the left after I installed it? This is one of those cases where pushing through the update makes more sense. As it is this only tells me that I need to reboot my computer to be safe from 'flash viruses'.
Is it that the flash component is so embedded in the operating system that updating it requires a reboot? If that's the case then why? it's only a little thing for displaying animations; not the end of the fricking world.

The fuzzy plus kind of hurts my eye

2008-06-30T16:58:18Z

It's kind of noticeable. Respect the grid!
I wonder what it looks like on windows...

Spaces and multi-monitor

2008-06-30T16:32:17Z

I would not recommend using spaces on a multi-monitor setup. It's just a bit too painful to use. Things just disappear into the pit of another space.
It works well on a single-monitor setup though.

Security, what the f**k do you mean by this

2008-06-30T02:00:00Z

These bloody security measures drive me up the wall. I may, or may not have already stated where this special error message comes from, but probably didn't. In this case it's caused by the sysinternals process explorer running. It would also probably be triggered by the registry monitor as well, I'm just not certain. The issue is a two parter. Yes, I understand that you're trying to protect your damned stupid copy protection mechanism, but would you please put a decent damned error message up so that the common user can have a chance of getting past the problem. But no, this is at the same level as 'General Protection Fault' under windows 3.11. There's no actual protection from this. A practiced hacker has already changed the pattern of the virtual drivers of procexp and regmon to be undetectable (generally using permissions on the registry).
I use No-cd patches for this reason. There's no obvious no-cd patch for mass effect, simply because it needs a single activation before playing. Unfortunately the entire securom scheme is still in place, causing play degredation and generally making life difficult for people.

Slashes for filenames

2008-06-26T16:05:17Z

I created a file with a series of slashes in the name under Mac OSX; Or at least they look like slashes. When I look at it under the cli they're colons. Ok mac, which one is it [:/] ???

pt_deny_attach still works

2008-06-26T15:43:11Z

I was concerned that it wasn't working properly when I was trying a ::tick-100 /execname == "iTunes"/ { @[ustack()] = count() }, which is kind of useless, and all I received was a bunch of errors involving invalid addresses.
However, it seems to be working...

himitsu:/Library/Extensions# gdb --pid=$(ps -fe | grep '[i]Tunes' | grep -v Helper | awk '{print $2}')
GNU gdb 6.3.50-20050815 (Apple version gdb-960) (Sun May 18 18:38:33 UTC 2008)
Copyright 2004 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
GDB is free software, covered by the GNU General Public License, and you are
welcome to change it and/or distribute copies of it under certain conditions.
Type "show copying" to see the conditions.
There is absolutely no warranty for GDB.  Type "show warranty" for details.
This GDB was configured as "i386-apple-darwin".
/Library/Extensions/15971: No such file or directory.
Attaching to process 15971.
zsh: segmentation fault  gdb --pid=15971
himitsu:/Library/Extensions# kextload pt_deny_attach.kext                                                
kextload: pt_deny_attach.kext loaded successfully
himitsu:/Library/Extensions# gdb --pid=$(ps -fe | grep '[i]Tunes' | grep -v Helper | awk '{print $2}')
GNU gdb 6.3.50-20050815 (Apple version gdb-960) (Sun May 18 18:38:33 UTC 2008)
Copyright 2004 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
GDB is free software, covered by the GNU General Public License, and you are
welcome to change it and/or distribute copies of it under certain conditions.
Type "show copying" to see the conditions.
There is absolutely no warranty for GDB.  Type "show warranty" for details.
This GDB was configured as "i386-apple-darwin".
/Library/Extensions/16048: No such file or directory.
Attaching to process 16048.
Reading symbols for shared libraries . done
Reading symbols for shared libraries .................................................................................................................................................... done
0x943114a6 in mach_msg_trap ()
(gdb) quit
The program is running.  Quit anyway (and detach it)? (y or n) y
Detaching from process 16048 thread 0x20b.
himitsu:/Library/Extensions#