Jeff Kelley’s Mac Blog

Justice: Hackers steal 40 million credit card numbers - CNN.com.

After reading this article, I have just one question: why would a brick-and-mortar store like OfficeMax be transmitting credit card data wirelessly?  Even when encrypted it obviously isn’t secure, and the cash registers don’t exactly move often.  It makes no sense to me.  When I went to the Apple store to buy my iPhone, the woman who sold it to me used a handheld device to process my card; this is a situation where I understand why it’s using wireless.  Otherwise, though, using a wireless network where wires could work is just asking to get hacked.

I’ve split this blog in two.  Geeky stuff remains here, personal stuff is now here.

So here’s an annoyance.  Having just installed SynergyKM, a great front-end for the awesome command-line utility Synergy, launching it would result in the following prompt:

The promt you get when launching SynergyKM

To fix this, you need to remove the extended attribute com.apple.quarantine that’s on the file.  Fire up Terminal and enter the following commands:

sudo xattr -d com.apple.quarantine /Library/PreferencePanes/SynergyKM.prefPane/Contents/Resources/Synergyd.app
sudo xattr -d com.apple.quarantine /Library/PreferencePanes/SynergyKM.prefPane/Contents/Resources/Synergyd.app/Contents/MacOS/Synergyd

That will remove the flags and prevent the prompt.

Normally, you’d only see this prompt once, but since installing it for all users changes permissions such that your user account can’t remove the attribute, it isn’t removed.

Note: This is assuming that you’ve installed it for all users.  If you’ve installed it for one user, it’ll be in ~/Library, not /Library.

Update: I’ve submitted a patch to SynergyKM’s SourceForge page, so if they accept it this will no longer be an issue.

I recently wrote a script to automatically install firmware updates for our Macs. The problem with them is that for some, you have to hold down the power button to finish the installation after the machine has turned itself off. Now I don’t know about you, but I sure as hell don’t want to go around to 900 or so Macs and hold down their power button after installing an update. This script, while it can’t hold down the button for me, does allow student staff to automate the proces up to that point. I don’t have to give them a password they could use to break the system, they can do the update for me, everybody wins. It’s a beautiful system.

Well, today, I was testing the script out. The problem with testing it is that you can only test a given computer once; once the firmware update is installed, it won’t show up as needing to be installed anymore. So, I packed up my stuff and went to our biggest computer lab to do some testing. My test subjects were some “CyberStations,” computers we have with basic web-browsing and e-mail loadsets. They’re relatively unused during the summer, so if I broke any it wouldn’t be a big deal. I went up to one, ran the update, and waited. That’s when smoke came out of the back of the computer as the update ran. Oh shit, I thought, this thing is on fire!

Let’s go back a minute to my description of CyberStations. Their loadset consists of a vanilla Mac OS X Leopard install with some applications taken out, Firefox, Thunderbird, and Adium. Basically, it has the Apple-provided web browser, e-mail client, and IM program, as well as the leading open-source alternative for each. Nothing on these computers is too taxing. As a consequence, the fans never need to run too heavily, as the computer never really gets too hot.

Back to the smoking machine. I was sure it was on fire—where there’s smoke, there’s fire, right? Well, the student employee to whom I was demonstrating the script wasn’t too sure. He placed his hand on the back of the computer (an iMac G5, not that it matters) and didn’t feel any heat. So, if it wasn’t smoke, what was it? That’s when I realized what had happened. The fans, never having been run too hard, hadn’t been blowing a whole lot of dust around. When they ran full speed during the firmware update, dust had come flying out of the computer’s vents. A white, puffy cloud composed largely of the dead skin cells that had fallen off of our users’ skin for years. It was coming out of the bottom, out of the back, and even where the screen met the case. I quickly held my breath and stepped back.

I’m really glad that we have student staff to do the rest of this.

So, in a similar vein as to what pushed me to write my Applescript to resize windows, I’ve been looking at what to do about going from using the LCD on the MacBook pro to an external monitor.  Now, everyone knows that in order to use an external display, you have to connect the display adapter while the notebook is closed, plug in an external keyboard (and your power supply), and press a button, and boom, you’ve got external display action at your monitor’s native resolution.  But what if you don’t want to wait the ten seconds or so it takes to go from awake to asleep?  Messing with it, I was happy to note that the following procedure seems to work:

1. Plug in the external display, your keyboard/mouse, your power supply, etc—with your notebook open.  The external display will mirror your notebook’s LCD, at its resolution (if supported by the display.  If it isn’t, you’ll get the highest common denominator, I think).
2. Close your notebook cover so the display turns off.
3. Immediately open the notebook cover, then close it just as soon, then push a button on your keyboard.
4. Presto! Your MacBook Pro should see the display and change the resolution how you want it.

I’ve only tested this on my machine, so let me know in the comments if it works/doesn’t work or if you have a better way.

Wordpress.com is, don’t get me wrong, a great service.  They offer no-hassle blog hosting for free using WordPress, my blogging platform of choice.  At a certain point in a young blogger’s life, however, it’s time to move on to using WordPress’ more advanced features; uploading new themes, hand-editing theme components, and maybe even throwing Google AdSense on there.  Wordpress is always free from WordPress.org, is easy to set up, and very easy to customize and administer.  So, with a little help from blog-well, I was ready to go.  This blog post is a derivation of blog-well’s work (click that link over there to see it), but I’ll be focusing on DreamHost where they focused on GoDaddy.

1. Step 1: Obtain Hosting.
   Obviously the first step here is to sign up for a hosting account.  DreamHost’s process is simple enough that I won’t bore you with instructions.
2. Step 2: Tell DNS to point to WordPress.com
   Now we have to tell your blog’s DNS servers to point to WordPress.com, where your blog is currently. This step might seem counterintuitive—after all, we’re trying to point WordPress.com to your blog, not the other way around—but this is how you let WordPress know that you’re in control of your domain. Assuming that you want your blog at blog.yourdomain.com, you need to make a “CNAME” entry as follows:

   blog 14400 IN CNAME yourblog.wordpress.com

   Once that change propagates (which can take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours, and you may need to reboot your computer), visitors to blog.yourdomain.com will be redirected to yourblog.wordpress.com. For DreamHost, follow these pictures:

   
   

3. Step 3: Sign Up for WordPress.com Domain Forwarding
   This part, unfortunately, costs a little bit of money—^$10 per year. When you’re logged in to WordPress.com and at your dashboard, click “Upgrades” and then “Domains.” Enter your new domain in the field once you’ve paid for 10 credits and you’ll see it appear on the domain screen.
4. Step 4: Tell WordPress.com to Point to Your Domain
5. In the “Domains” view on your WordPress.com dashboard, click “put blog here” next to your domain. This tells WordPress to take all traffic sent to yourblog.wordpress.com to blog.yourdomain.com or whatever you want.  The end result should look like this:

   

6. Step 5: Re-do Your Custom Domain
   Go into your domain’s DNS settings again and delete the CNAME entry you made earlier. Now you’re all set to go! If you’re using DreamHost, you can do the easy install of WordPress to have it automatically updated to the latest version and the database automatically created for you.

I’ve moved this blog over to Dreamhost, which means a couple of things: first, I’m managing my own WordPress installation now, which is pretty cool.  Don’t get me wrong, WordPress.com is great—and I’m still technically using it to forward traffic to my old address here—but managing your own server is pretty cool.  I can install whatever themes I want and edit them as I see fit, without paying money to do so.  Sure, I’m paying money for hosting, the domain name, and the domain name forwarding from WordPress.com, but at least now the blog is here on my own terms.

Moving the blog here was a long and arduous process, one that required patience on my part and that gave me a crash course in DNS for web servers.  I was able to do it mostly off of a post at blog-well.com, and since the attached PDF has rights to edit it built in, I think I’ll work on some instructions for this process to help others along.  Keep your eyes peeled!

This blog may be temporarily unavailable as I switch it to blog.slaunchaman.com.  Be patient — it’ll soon be back up and all of your old links (including RSS subscriptions) will still work.

Maybe it’s the two-hour infomercial in California I attended. Maybe it’s the half-dozen times each night last week where one of us would say, “If I only had an iPhone, I could look up…” Maybe it’s all the cool iPhone applications that are going to come out. Or even the ^$200 price tag. Whatever it is, I really want an iPhone.  Watching Steve Jobs’ Keynote address (from an overflow room, as I hadn’t spent the night outside Moscone West in order to secure a good seat), I held out hope for him to say, “…and it’s available now!”  Alas.  Not only could I not get one at WWDC, but Apple has deigned not to allow Internet pre-sales.  I can’t even say that I will get an iPhone when the new version comes out, as I have to go to the store to get one, and they might be sold out by the time I get there.

More news also recently cropped up lately, saying that AT&T might not deliver on the ^$200 price point for people (like me) currently in a regular AT&T contract before the 2-year phone replacement cycle is over.  That’s pretty bad news, and it raises one obvious, but absolutely vital, question: how much is it going to cost me?  Inquiring minds want to know.

The big thing at WWDC is always the keynote address. Steve Jobs inevitably riles up the crowd (mostly composed of Mac geeks) by some groundbreaking announcement. This year’s keynote, while not as feature-rich as previous years’, at least gave me a month to wait for the iPhone 3G that I’ll inevitably have on pre-order as soon as that’s an option (does anyone want a black Razr?). The other big announcement at the keynote, aside from all the presentations by iPhone software engineers, was Apple’s replacement for .Mac, “MobileMe”. I’m of two minds about this service. First, I think the idea of the service is great. I sync my iCal, Address Book, etc. with Google right now through Spanning Sync; MobileMe is more expensive but also does photo albums and a 20 GB iDisk. I imagine I’ll try the 60-day trial and either not use it or enjoy it enough to subscribe. The part I don’t like is the name; Apple’s marketing department is usually top-notch, yet the logo for MobileMe is eerily reminiscent of Windows ME. Hopefully the two products won’t have the same “success” stories.
Time to go to my first session (which I can’t legally talk about here).