loopkid: Category English

safariomnibar port for powerpc

Stefan — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 03:39:00 +0100

I did a port of Olivier Poitrey’s SafariOmnibar for Macs with PowerPC processor running Safari 5.0.6 on Mac OS 10.5.8. Go ahead and grab the current version over at Github.

old swedish mailbox in helsinki

Stefan — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 04:33:00 +0100

In the staircase of my current residence in Helsinki I have discovered traces of swedish language history. The mailbox sign says “Bref och Tidningar” which is swedish for “letters and newspapers”. It is not uncommon to find swedish labels in Helsinki since there is swedish speaking minority but this one caught my attention because it had a non-standard spelling. Since the house has a Jugendstil architecture my assumption was that maybe it’s an old spelling from the turn of the last century. I did some research and found some statements supporting my assumption.

Before the spelling reform of 1906 the v sound was represented by hv- at the beginning of some words, -fv- medially and -f finally. One may still encounter forms like hvad (vad), hvem (vem), gräfva(gräva), bref(brev) in older texts. (Swedish: a comprehensive grammar, Philip Holmes and Ian Hinchliffe, Routledge, 2003, page 584)

Furthermore I found out the house was actually built 1900 by the finnish architect office Usko Nyström, Petrelius & Penttilä which is six years before the spelling reform so it seems quite reasonable they’ve used the old spelling on the mailbox.

vox for mac os x website moved

Stefan — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 13:24:00 +0200

The minimalist Mac OS X audio player of Alessio Nonni has moved. Check out the new Vox website for a Lion compatible version. If you enjoy the app don’t hesitate to make a donation to support ~~the suffering italian economy~~ a talented developer!

really empty the safari cache

Stefan — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 09:24:00 +0200

After telling Safari to empty the cache I wondered If Safari actually did what I told it.

$ du -sh ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.safari
629M    /Users/stefan/Library/Caches/com.apple.safari

Hm, 626 megabyte don’t look like obedience to me. Let’s see what’s in there.

$ du -sh ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.safari/*
173M    /Users/stefan/Library/Caches/com.apple.safari/Cache.db
5.6M    /Users/stefan/Library/Caches/com.apple.safari/Extensions
450M    /Users/stefan/Library/Caches/com.apple.safari/Webpage Previews
 64K    /Users/stefan/Library/Caches/com.apple.safari/com.apple.opencl

450 megabyte of “Webpage Previews”?

$ find ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.safari/Webpage\ Previews -type f \
| sed -E 's/.*\.([^\.]*)/\1/' | sort | uniq -c
7016 jpeg
 400 png

No wonder we need gigabyte sized hard disks today. Let’s delete the crap altogether.

$ rm -r ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.safari

And let’s make sure it doesn’t come back (works in Safari 5.0.3).

$ defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSnapshotsUpdatePolicy -int 2

So, what have we gained after restarting Safari?

$ du -sh ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.safari | awk '{print $1}'
3.6M

Nice, especially in times of undersized solid state disks.

downgrade safari 5.1 to 5.0.x on lion

Stefan — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 07:11:00 +0200

If you want to downgrade Safari 5.1 to Safari 5.0.x on Lion you can download Safari 5.0.3 from the original Apple servers and extract just the Browser with Pacifist. The installation image is called Safari5.0.3SnowLeopard.dmg but it works just fine on Lion. Have fun!

recursive chmod and chown on files

Stefan — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 21:47:00 +0200

If you want to recursively apply permissions to files it’s best to use GNU parallel because it handles obscure filenames robustly:

find directory -type f | parallel -m chmod mode

If you want to change ownership of the files, you can use a root subshell:

sudo bash -c "find directory -type f | parallel -m chown user:group"

make ard work with dynamic dns

Stefan — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 14:11:00 +0200

With its default settings Apple Remote Desktop doesn’t play well with dynamic DNS services. If you add a domain with a dynamic IP address it retrieves the IP address only once and if the IP address changes, the connect fails. A temporary workaround is to remove the IP address from the computer information window or to remove and readd the computer, but that certainly sucks for the long term.

A permanent solution is to disable reverse IP lookups:

defaults write com.apple.RemoteDesktop \
DisableReverseIPLookup -bool yes

Now Apple Remote Desktop will update the IPs upon launch.

ssl certificate errors on mac os x

Stefan — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 02:30:00 +0200

If you try to download something from Github via https with wget on Mac OS X you might receive one of the following errors:

ERROR: The certificate of `github.com' is not trusted.
ERROR: The certificate of `nodeload.github.com' is not trusted.
ERROR: The certificate of `raw.github.com' is not trusted.

The reason is that the default certificate directory is hard coded in wget as /etc/ssl/certs which corresponds to the Linux directory layout and doesn’t exist on Mac OS X. I’m actually quite suprised by this because I installed wget via MacPorts so I would have expected it to have been patched for my plattform.

So, where do you get root certificates from?

You could use the certificates from the default curl installation on Mac OS X, but they are hopelessly outdated (Yes Apple, I’m looking at you!):

$ head -n 5 /usr/share/curl/curl-ca-bundle.crt
##
## $Id: ca-bundle.crt,v 1.2 2003/03/24 11:06:57 bagder Exp $
##
##  ca-bundle.crt -- Bundle of CA Root Certificates
##  Last Modified: Thu Mar  2 09:32:46 CET 2000

The version from the curl website is a lot fresher:

$ curl -s http://curl.haxx.se/ca/cacert.pem | head -n 4
##
## ca-bundle.crt -- Bundle of CA Root Certificates
##
## Certificate data from Mozilla as of: Fri Sep  2 23:34:57 2011

Interestingly the version from MacPorts is the freshest:

$ head -n 4 /opt/local/share/curl/curl-ca-bundle.crt
##
## lib/ca-bundle.crt -- Bundle of CA Root Certificates
##
## Certificate data from Mozilla as of: Tue Sep 20 00:13:05 2011

You don’t need to install curl to get the certificates, there is a separate bundle:

$ sudo port install curl-ca-bundle

Using MacPorts also has the advantage, that your root certificates get upgraded automatically when you upgrade your outdated ports.

After you installed the root certificates you need to tell wget where to look.

You can use a parameter:

$ wget --ca-certificate=/opt/local/share/curl/curl-ca-bundle.crt \
https://www.domain.com/path/to/your/file

Or you can add an option to your ~/.wgetrc:

CA_CERTIFICATE=/opt/local/share/curl/curl-ca-bundle.crt

The latter is of course much more meaningful, because it saves you from manually applying the lengthy parameter on every https download.

acoustic feedback in the terminal

Stefan — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 22:33:00 +0200

If you compile larger programs on the command line of Mac OS X it can take quite a while and you will probably not want to stare at the Terminal until compilation is finished. To give you an acoustic feedback you can create some aliases:

alias success='afplay /System/Library/Sounds/Glass.aiff'
alias failure='afplay /System/Library/Sounds/Basso.aiff'
alias exitsound='if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then success; else failure; fi'

I like to put them in ~/.bash_aliases and source them from ~/.bashrc put that’s just a matter of taste. Now you can enjoy the full glory of the alert sounds while doing stuff in the Terminal!

sudo port install something; exitsound
./configure && make; exitsound

Have fun!

safari 5.1 user agent changed

Stefan — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 02:49:00 +0200

If you are using Glimmerblocker and Little Snitch together with Safari 5.1 you need to be aware that Safari 5.1 uses a different user agent so you have to include WebProcess and possibly PluginProcess in your PAC file. I have created updated versions of the PAC rule and the PAC script. For more information see the Glimmerblocker wiki.