Jeff Kelley’s Blog » open-source

GCD Example Updated (Now With More Speed!)

Jeff Kelley — Sat, 13 Aug 2011 04:03:57 +0000

Due to popular demand, I’ve updated my GCD example from previous talks to include a few things to make the example not only do something on a background queue, but also snappy. It should scroll much better now. A quick rundown of what changed:

Images are now resized. Since the example uses wallpaper-sized images, there’s no sense in not resizing them to go on a 44-pixel-tall table view cell. I’m using the popular image-resizing routines from Trevor’s Bike Shed to do the resizing with a nice interpolation quailty.
Those resized images are now cached. I use an NSCache to store the images. If the app receives a memory warning, it’ll jettison all of the cached images, but if you’re just scrolling up and down this is a quick and dirty way to cache the images. I had never really used NSCache before, so this was a good excuse to try it.

I’m at CocoaConf in that state down to the South today, so this post has been brought to you by late-night hotel room caffeine. I made some other changes to the project to deal with a weird table view cell bug that I’ve submitted to Apple; a post on that is coming up next!

Apple Doesn’t Like “Die, You Gravy-Sucking Pig-Dog!”

Jeff Kelley — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 21:14:12 +0000

There’s a relatively well-known Easter egg in BSD’s shutdown.c: a function named die_you_gravy_sucking_pig_dog (side note: I’ve got three-to-one odds that say whoever wrote that has a huge UNIX beard). It turns out that Apple doesn’t care to have such uncouth function names floating around, so they re-defined it:

#ifdef __APPLE__ void log_and_exec_reboot_or_halt(void); #else void die_you_gravy_sucking_pig_dog(void); #endif

Sure, it does the same thing, but I don’t think log_and_exec_reboot_or_halt has the same panache.

New iPhone Project: uWarranty

Jeff Kelley — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 17:56:59 +0000

So, I created a new iPhone application called uWarranty. It used an unpublished Apple API for warranty status (from selfsolve.apple.com), and so I got this after submitting it:

Thank you for submitting your application to the App Store. Unfortunately, your application, uWarranty, cannot be added to the App Store because it violates section 3.3.7 of the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement:

“Applications may not perform any functions or link to any content or use any robot, spider, site search or other retrieval application or device to scrape, retrieve or index services provided by Apple or its licensors, or to collect, disseminate or use information about users for any unauthorized purpose.”

OK, I get it. That’s fine and is Apple’s prerogative. But now I have this program and all the development time that went into it. So what do I do? I guess the answer is to open-source it, just like AppSales Mobile. Watch this space for more details as I clean up the code and throw it up on a public repository somewhere.

Automatically get the latest Chromium snapshot with launchd

Jeff Kelley — Wed, 20 May 2009 04:24:08 +0000

I’ve been checking out the snapshots of Chromium recently, and they’re coming quicker than you can say “multithreaded web browser.” To facilitate always having the latest version, I wrote a quick LaunchAgent that takes care of it on Mac OS X. First, I have a script named ~/bin/chromiupdate:


#!/bin/bash

# Downloads the latest version of Chromium.

remove_working_dir()
{
    rm -rf "${WORKING_DIR}"
    exit 0
}

USER_DIR=$(dscl . -read /Users/$(whoami) NFSHomeDirectory | awk '{ print $2 }')
USER_APP_DIR="${USER_DIR}/Applications"
CHROMIUM_DIR="${USER_APP_DIR}/Chromium.app"
LATEST_URL="http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots/sub-rel-mac/LATEST"
TMP_DIR="/private/tmp"
WORKING_DIR="${TMP_DIR}/.chromium_launchd"
URL_BEGIN="http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots/sub-rel-mac"

if [ ! -d "${CHROMIUM_DIR}" ]; then
    mkdir -p "${CHROMIUM_DIR}"
fi

INSTALLED_VERSION="$(defaults read "${CHROMIUM_DIR}/Contents/Info" SVNRevision)"
VERSION=$(curl "${LATEST_URL}")

if [ "${VERSION}" != "${INSTALLED_VERSION}" ]; then
    logger Installed Chromium version \(${INSTALLED_VERSION}\) does not equal \
            latest version \(${VERSION}\), updating now...
    mkdir "${WORKING_DIR}" || exit 1
    trap remove_working_dir 1 2 3 6 15
    cd "${WORKING_DIR}" || exit 1
    curl -O "${URL_BEGIN}/${VERSION}/chrome-mac.zip"
    unzip chrome-mac.zip
    rsync -HavP --exclude="Contents/MacOS/chrome_debug.log" \
          "${WORKING_DIR}/chrome-mac/Chromium.app/" "${CHROMIUM_DIR}/"

    if [ "$(ps -aef | grep -i chromium | grep -v grep)" != "" ]; then
        open "${USER_DIR}/Library/Scripts/Chromium Update Dialog.app"
    fi

    logger "Chromium update complete. Version ${VERSION} installed."

    remove_working_dir
else
    logger Installed Chromium version \(${INSTALLED_VERSION}\) is up-to-date. \
           No action needed.
fi

exit 0

Next, I have a property list named ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.slaunchaman.chromium.plist:





    
        Label
        com.slaunchaman.chromium
        Program
        /Users/slauncha/bin/chromiupdate
        KeepAlive
        
        StartInterval
        3600
        RunAtLoad
        
        StandardOutPath
        /dev/null
        StandardErrorPath
        /dev/null

Finally, I have an AppleScript at ~/Library/Scripts/Chromium Update Dialog.app:


display dialog "Chromium was just updated. You should restart it."

The LaunchAgent runs once an hour, checking to see if the installed version of Chromium is older than the latest snapshot. If so, it downloads it and uses rsync to copy the changes. The script places Chromium in ~/Applications, but it shouldn’t be hard to modify to put it into /Applications.

Prevent Mac OS X Leopard from Prompting You to Start Synergyd Every Time You Use SynergyKM

Jeff Kelley — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 15:25:58 +0000

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.