mind the explanatory gap

Ever since I started managing Macs in a corporate environment, I’ve been annoyed that Apple has failed to offer a sanctioned way of locking the screen via a keyboard command. This is a reasonably common requirement in a lot of corporate deployments. Sure we can use hot corners etc, or we can use one [...]

Posted on November 25th, 2009 under macosx. Comments: 7

Thanks to Dave Dribin for pointing this out.
In http://opensource.apple.com/source/CF/CF-550/CFBinaryPList.c
So really there’s no reason why we can’t have plistlib etc for Ruby/Python/whatever deal with binary plists on non-Mac platforms.

/*
HEADER
magic number (“bplist”)
file format version

OBJECT TABLE
variable-sized objects

Object Formats (marker byte followed by additional info in some cases)
null 0000 0000
bool 0000 1000 // false
bool 0000 1001 // true
fill 0000 1111 // fill byte
int 0001 nnnn … // # of [...]

Posted on October 30th, 2009 under macosx. Comments: None

If you’re a Mac IT person, and you don’t know about Greg Neagle’s Managing OS X blog, you need to fix that situation now.
One of the reasons Greg is so awesome in our field is that he’s eminently pragmatic, with enough hacker mentality to make sure he simply gets the job done with a minimum [...]

Posted on October 8th, 2009 under macosx, puppet. Comments: 1

I have been waiting for this for a very long time…
One of the major problems with working in Mac IT has been the lack of a space to discuss pre-release seeds of major OS X versions, ie the current state of Snow Leopard 10.6.
Things change a lot between major releases. Seemingly small changes by Apple [...]

Posted on April 24th, 2009 under macosx. Comments: 3

So dre has done a great overview of the LKDC in Leopard, including a more detailed wiki page. There really isn’t enough info out there about the LKDC, and it’s quite awesome technology.

Posted on May 14th, 2008 under macosx. Comments: None

So as host, ping, nslookup, dig etc don’t use the same resolver path as the rest of the OS, we used to always use lookupd for this.
It’s not exactly the most obvious solution in the world, but since lookupd, netinfod and memberd were all rolled into DirectoryService in 10.5, we now use dscacheutil to do [...]

Posted on March 23rd, 2008 under macosx, macosxserver. Comments: None

After spending a little while banging my head against the wall over this one….

root@snicko [ ~ ]
# port install git-core +svn +bash_completion
—> Applying patches to perl5.8
Error: Target org.macports.patch returned: shell command ” cd “/opt/local/var/macports/build/_opt_local_var_macports_sources_rsync.macports.org_release_ports_lang_perl5.8/work/perl-5.8.8″ && patch -p0 < ‘/opt/local/var/macports/sources/rsync.macports.org/release/ports/lang/perl5.8/files/patch-makedepend.SH’” returned error 2
Command output: Get file makedepend.SH from Perforce with lock? [y]
Perforce client error:
Connect to [...]

Posted on March 23rd, 2008 under macosx, ramblings. Comments: 2

Longer article up at AFP548.com, but basically I’ve been playing around a fair bit with MCX in DSLocal lately, and there are a lot of interesting applications….
It’s so nice to be able to just manage plists now…. NetInfo I miss you not at all.

Posted on January 26th, 2008 under macosx. Comments: 2

So my webhost managed to mess up all htacess files and thus lock me out of my blog for a couple of weeks. I considered briefly posting via MySQL, but then dragged myself back into the realm of the sane and just waited it out. Apologies to the comments that were awaiting moderation…. [...]

Posted on January 25th, 2008 under macosx, macosxserver. Comments: 3