On this day, I own a buttload of Apple gear: iPhone, iPod, iPad, MacBook Pro, Apple TV, Apple TV 2, Time Capsule, Mac Mini… I’m planning on getting an iPhone 4S as soon as possible.

I was (and am) a big open source dork at heart, but Apple’s simplicity and ease of use, especially the past 7 years really spoke to the pragmatic side of me.  It turned me into a fan boy, I guess.  It didn’t hurt that OS X is NeXTStep is UNIX… I touch OS X and Linux every day.

One of Dinah’s first words was iPod which she taught herself so she could ask me to turn on music for her.

In college, I loved using the NeXT computers we had. My first class in college used scheme on the NeXT’s. The NeXT is one of the first places I played Doom.  I took calculus using Mathematica on the Mac in college.

Steve also touched my kids’ lives via Pixar. (Okay, my life too, I saw Toy Story in the theater first run, long before I had kids.) Also through their first computer, a Mac Mini.

There were too other public figures who’s lives and deaths touched me the way Steve’s passing is touching me today: Jim Henson and Fred Rodgers.

• Duration is no longer hard-coded to 32:00 and actually reflects the duration of the show
• The script will attempt to find the TiVo via Bonjour/mDNS/ZeroConf/DNS-SD/whatever unless passed a -t flag with the TiVo’s IP address. If you have more than one TiVo, it will go with the first one it finds.
• Moved the stuff in lib to lib/tivo so the package is more easier sucked in by something like encap or stow

Download: tivoscripts-20100314.tar.gz

When I get some motivation later in the week, I’ll put the git archive online, incase anyone wants to clone it and do some development on it.

After two years of saying I was going to fully automate the process of downloading and transcoding shows for my iPhone, I finally got off my ass and did it.  The script is called TiVo2Podcast and it not only does the downloading and transcoding, but it stuffs the resultant video into a an RSS feed for easy consumption/playback by a podcatcher such as iTunes. I’m now automatically getting the shows off my TiVo and onto my iPhone for easy commute-time consumption. (I commute by train, I do not recommend commute-time consumption if you are driving.)

The ruby script wraps tivodecode, HandbrakeCLI, and AtomicParsley and is intended to be run from cron.  I’ve tested this on Linux, but it should run on any UNIX-alike, but it won’t run on windows since I make liberal use of the system() call. Also, this is intended for PERSONAL USE ONLY, do not set up podcast feeds and violate the ethics (and also the laws) of copyright left and right.

This is a very early version and can certainly use some tweaks and enhancements, primarily in configuring the shows you want to capture.  Right now, configuration is in the form of doing INSERT statements in SQLite.  Not very friendly, but it gets the job done until I can make a quick and dirty question based TUI. Here’s an example of setting up getting the best fucking news team on the planet:

insert into configs (config_name, show_name, rss_filename, rss_link,
                     rss_baseurl, rss_ownername, rss_owneremail, ep_to_keep, encode_decomb)
            values ('tds', 'The Daily Show', 'tds.xml', 'http://www.thedailyshow.com/', 
                    'http://example.com/podcasts/', 'Keith T. Garner', 'kgarner@example.com', 4, 1);

Download tivoscripts-20100304.tar.gz and let me know what you think. Make sure you read the README!

[Update 3/5: Forgot to add that all the code I wrote is under the Simplified BSD License, so have at it.]

One of the neat features of WordPress 2.5 is the click to install plugin upgrades, assuming the plugin is registered in the WordPress Plugin Directory. If certain conditions are correct on the server it can do it in place, otherwise it tries to do it via FTP.

To make it so wordpress could upgrade them on the server without FTP requires doing some permission changes. You should be aware, the changes I made allow the web server (Apache) to be able to write to the plugin directory. This creates some security exposure. Since I do nightly backups, for me this is an acceptable risk. You may make a different call.

The way I’ve done it also assumes you have admin rights on the unix box or you’re friendly with (s)he who does. Without admin rights to do the group ownership changes, you’re stuck having to make files writable by the world, and that’s not something I’d do. Luckily, I hold the power on the box(es) I care about.

The changes I made were as follows:

chgrp -R apache wp-content/plugins
find wp-content/plugins -type d | xargs chmod g+ws
find wp-content/plugins -type f | xargs chmod g+w

After doing that, I fired off upgrading the google-sitemap-generator plugin, as that was out of date. It brought me to a screen asking for FTP information, which means the server-side update failed. That sent me to the code. After walking the code I found two things:

1. Without WP_TEMP_DIR specified in your config, the upgrade will use wp-content as a temp directory.
2. A bug/feature of the code that prevents it from work.

To get around #1, I defined WP_TEMP_DIR in my wp-config so it looked like this:

define('WP_TEMP_DIR', ABSPATH . 'wp-content/tmp');

I then created a tmp directory and set its permissions inline with what I have above.

mkdir wp-content/tmp
chgrp apache wp-content/tmp
chmod 2775 wp-content/tmp

As I called #2 above, I’m not sure if its a bug or a feature. One of the sanity checks that wordpress does to see if it can do the update is to make sure it can write into the temp directory and if the current process owns the resultant file. I’m thinking its a bug because it looks like they expected the PHP function call used to be reasonable rather than suffer from the occasional brain-dead PHPism.

The sanity check uses getmyuid() which anyone with unix coding experience would assume its the user id of the running process. Not so! If you read the PHP documentation, it actually returns the UID of who owns the script file. Since my user owns the file, but the script is being executed by apache’s user, it ends up returning the wrong information. In reading the code, and guessing its intent, what they actually wanted to use was either posix_getuid() or posix_geteuid(). Once I switched to using posix_getuid() everything worked as expected.

To make this change, open up wp-admin/includes/file.php in your editor of choice and go to somewhere around line 323. You’ll want to change the line that looks like this:

if ( getmyuid() == fileowner($tempFile) ) {

To look something like this:

if ( posix_getuid() == fileowner($tempFile) ) {

And boom, I have working click to upgrade for plugins.

As a note, I have no idea if this will work on Windows or not as I’m not up with the permissions there or if the posix_ functions are available on that platform.

Download it and check it out.

(Fear my non-twitter content!)

While I agree with Dave about the empty password thing, one thing you can do in your .ssh/authorized_keys file is lock down a key to a specific IP and to a specific command. So, while you may have a passwordless ssh access, you can somewhat mitigate the risk by locking down what they can can do. For example, with a key truncated because it is long:

from=”192.168.33.22″,command=”/usr/bin/uptime” ssh-rsa AAA…

With this addition in the authorized_keys section, a user with this key from 192.168.33.22 will only be able to execute /usr/bin/uptime. For more information on that and other options you can use, see the AUTHORIZED_KEYS FILE FORMAT section of the sshd(8) man page.

Some pros for cmake that I’ve found so far (compared to what we’ve been doing):

• support a big number of build environments on the different platforms. On windows it sports 11 different build environments, OS X 3, and Linux 2. For OS X and Linux, you only really need those two or three, but on windows it supports 4 different versions of visual studio as well as Borland, Watcom, and gcc.
• Takes care of the flags needed to build executables and libraries on those supported platforms.
• Does out of source builds on windows.
• Tracks dependences on all platforms without an external application
• Does search and replacing on things like .in files without having to call out to external applications

Some cons I’ve found so far:

• The documentation on the web page is pretty horrid. The book is pretty bad too, especially when compared to other technical books I’ve read recently, but its much better than the website. When combined with the book and experimentation, the FAQ is helpful.
• Doesn’t really have the concept of convenience libraries. This will result in common files being built multiple times. I don’t like this, but its not fatal.
• The CMakeCache is getting in my way more than being a help, but that might be the side effect of my learning process right now.
• I haven’t yet figured out how to make it query the person compiling the app if it can’t find something. This may not be possible. At the very least I want to make it bitch and bomb out if a required dependency isn’t there. I just haven’t found it yet, I’m thinking.

This isn’t an exhaustive review yet, but I wanted to get down what was in my mind before I forgot. I had just found the convenience library thing and that’s what inspired the post. My next step is to move a full existing project over to being built with cmake. This is a library that depends on expat, boost, curl, antlr, and (optionally) swig. Should be a good challenge.

[Update 11:58: I found an answer to my "bomb out if the dependencies are missing" question. Thanks, devchannel!]

[Update 2:51: No this isn't here just for g0ff. Turns out the latest cmake has modules to Find Java, Doxygen, Boost, Curl, Expat, and Swig already. It looks like just custom items for antlr and cppunit will be needed. Also, it only ever wants to link against dynamic libraries, not static ones. That's a PITA.]

[Update 5:52: Okay, the convenience library thing is upsetting.  The output of what I was working on is a static library and there are same example command line tools that link against it.  From my reading of the cmake stuff, I should just include the library source files to the target for the executables being created.  The problem with this is for n example programs, I'm compiling librets n times.  This doesn't seem very optimal.]

It turns out that this was a zshism that I wasn’t aware of, and Mark might not have been as well.  I finally took the time to get to the bottom of this and I found this FAQ which explains how word splitting differs in zsh.  (All OTHER shells do it wrong, of course.)  In any case, my multiple search terms were being passed to mairix as a single command line argument, so, of course nothing matched.  I edit the script to call mairix ${=*} instead of mairix $* and it works now.

MARK might not have run into this because he might have SH_WORD_SPLIT turned on.  I do not.

Anyway, here’s the function:

mairix_mail (){
  if (( ${#argv} == 0 )); then
    # nothing to do
    mairix --help
    return
  fi
  # search
  mairix ${=*}
  # see the results
  # assumes results are in ~/Maildir/search_results
  mutt -f=search_results
}
alias gm='mairix_mail';

# grep –color=auto -i metadata todo.txt
Metadata Functions to Move:
   MetadataView…Make sure only our indexed items are passed up.

Its a very simple thing, but one of those that I’m surpised I haven’t been using.  I know have a shell aliases for that.  See the grep documentation for more information.

[Update 6/2: linux.com has a great article on GNU grep's new features which talks about the color.  One that I'm particularly expected about is the ability to use Perl-style regular expressions.]

a2ps -Eps -Afill -stumble 1.ps 2.ps 3.ps 4.ps

I tried this approach under OS X, but the problem is that the postscript that is generated on OS X is so detailed that it takes forever to process to print out, on the order of 2 minutes of processing per article.  Since PDF is the spooling format for printing in OS X (coming soon to linux) I thought I’d look to see if there was an easy way to concatinate PDF files so I could then have the regular printing interface (via Preview) handle the 2-up, double-sided, stapling goodness.

After much searching around I found this article and later this web page.  Combining a bit from both, I came up with following that works really well in my few days of testing.

texexec --pdf --paper=letter --pdfarrange --result all.pdf 1.pdf 2.pdf 3.pdf 4.pdf

It runs really quickly (especially in comparison to the a2ps method) and then I just open all.pdf and print from there.  It requires that you have teTeX installed.  On both Linux and OS X I had this installed as part of the prerequesets for docbook and doxygen.

rsync/unison/scp data off your co-loc to a local machine, and back it up again, just for good measure.

The new drive is the drive most likely to die first.

Losing /var really fucking sucks.

Recreating most of the information in ldap out of mail logs is cool, though.

Drinking doesn’t solve sysadmin nightmares, but it makes you feel good while you’re having the nightmare.

Today, Dave couldn’t figure out why he was unable to launch an X application from a machine with both use. We both started looking into it, and it looked like xauth wasn’t being called to update the .Xauthority file. We spent a good half hour or more looking around trying to figure out if it was a bug in OpenSSH on his mac, or one on the Linux server, if xauth was wonky, or what other small differences there were between his server side environment and mine.

During the search I found this post on a Debian mailing list. It was a red herring as it had us investigating a few dead ends. However, it did point out to my mind the existence of the ~/.ssh/rc file. Up until this point, I didn’t know of this files existence. Anyway, while looking in ~dave/.ssh/ I saw he had such a file.

To quote from the man page:

$HOME/.ssh/rc
Commands in this file are executed by ssh when the user logs in
just before the user’s shell (or command) is started. See the
sshd(8) manual page for more information.

There was an emacs backup file (rc~) there, which I looked into. At one time Dave used it to set a umask for all his connections that came in via ssh. For whatever reason, he must have decided that was not doing what he wanted, so he removed the umask line, but didn’t remove the file. Because the file existed, ssh was trying to execute the commands in it, and since there was nothing in it, ssh did nothing and dumped him to a shell.

From the behavior of ssh, it appears there is a “default” rc that happens if you don’t have one or one doesn’t exist in /etc/ssh. One of the tasks of this default includes calling xauth if you’re doing X11 forwarding. By having an empty file there, Dave was bypassing all of it. I haven’t taken the time to see what other side effects came about from that, but there must not have been much, as Dave hadn’t noticed it since last April (at least according to the mod time on the rc file.)

Dave just IMed me and told me to look at the sshd man page and see the following:

When a user successfully logs in, sshd does the following:
[snip]
8. If $HOME/.ssh/rc exists, runs it; else if /etc/ssh/sshrc
exists, runs it; otherwise runs xauth. The “rc” files are
given the X11 authentication protocol and cookie in standard
input.

One other thing we learned in this is that xauth is dumb dumb stupid. xauth won’t create a .Xauthority file if there is nothing to put into it, such as when you call “xauth list” when a file doesn’t exist. However, if you do an “xauth list” and you don’t have a .Xauthority file, xauth spits out a diagnostic message saying its creating it. In reality, it doesn’t really create the file. Bad coding on someone’s part. This wasted us time, as we though it was xauth that was broken, not Dave’s ssh environment. One could argue that xauth IS broken by demonstrating this behavior, but that’s a different rant.