Rage Against The Mac

macosxhints – 10.4: Detach widgets from the Dashboard

I wondered how long it would take for someone to figure this out.

Hasta la vista, Konfabulator!

Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger : Page 3

I don’t know about you, but I like the Panther look a heck of a lot better. The first time I saw the new Mail toolbar, I filed a bug on it. (Radar 3968093: “Toolbar buttons in Mail 2.0 are hideously ugly.”) It was immediately closed as a duplicate, so at least one other person agrees with me.

:-)

I’m hoping Amazon delivers my copy tomorrow…

The postman and eBay were good to me today. USPS dropped off my autographed, pre-ordered copy of John Brown’s Body’s new CD Pressure Points. As anyone who knows me will testify, I’m damn near rabid when it comes to these guys, having gotten to see them and a bunch of their off-shoot projects live when I lived in and around Ithaca. I was utterly delighted to see them showcased over on Internet Archive’s Live Music Archive. There are 18 shows archived at the Archive and the current most-downloaded show does indeed rock, especially if you like picking out little-known small-town guitar players.

The other tidbit I picked up today (in the virtual sense; it hasn’t been delivered just yet) is Lincoln’s self-titled album, with the track “Sucker” on it, which will make for a great addition to my driving mix:

I hit the pedal like a trucker
Flip the finger, so long sucker

Apparently this is their first and only CD, and it was relased in ‘97, as near as I can tell. There is almost nothing on the mighty Interweb regarding these guys, aside from the above-quoted choice lyrics. After searching Amazon, CDBaby, UBL, and wading through Google, I found a single copy on eBay for the low, low price of three dollars (plus another 50% for shipping). It wasn’t an easy mission, I’ll tell you. I’m just hoping Zach was wrong when he quipped “maybe there’s a reason they’re so hard to find?” Cynic.

I’ve just completed migrating all my previous posts (19 of ‘em, over the course of 8 months. whee.) from Blojsom to WordPress. It wasn’t what I’d call “easy”, exactly, but it could have been worse. It did affirm my love for the simplicity and ease of use of Python and libxmlrpc.

I expect to continue to use WordPress until the precise time that Confluence introduces a single-user version (of which there is discussion that it will happen around release 1.4). I’m a huge fan of The Tao of Mac and his integrated weblog/wiki environment. Unfortunately, I just don’t have the time or energy to make a run at it myself.

Anyway, in the interests of simplicity, I’ve decided to go with WordPress, despite my hatred of PHP. Blojsom and Pebble both are pretty nice Java-based solutions, but neither have the community support that WP does. Like every other geek worth his or her salt, I’ve got some interesting ideas for implementing my own blogging system, but I also like to pretend that I have a life and interests outside of computers.

I’m hardly a prolific blogger, but I am a huge fan of techology, and I want to be able to inject a little something back into the interweb.

With that said, I’m off to put WP through its paces!

After reading Joey Hess’ article on keeping your “life” (or at least your home directory) in subversion, I started tinkering with that myself. I work on a number of different *nix systems (OS X, AIX, Linux, for a rough count of a dozen…) and not having my working environment similar on them is a real PITA. One glitch that I ran into when doing this was that subversion doesn’t store unix permissions for files, so I was extremely wary of versioning my .ssh directory (and other private directories), as they usually end up being world-readable (based on my umask). Hess also mentioned versioning system configuration files (such as the contents of /etc) but I think this same problem, including the one of user/group ownership, remains an issue.

I took a couple of hours last night and whacked together an sh script to store and retrieve unix permissions and user/group ownership into versioned svn properties. It isn’t terribly elegant, but does work fairly well. It should also be fully POSIX-compliant, so that you don’t need bash, just sh.

It still needs some work; it’s a little too recursive, and doesn’t print out full pathnames when descending into a directory. The usage it a little obtuse in that “setting” permissions sets the property value in svn and “getting” permissions sets the file’s permissions from that value.

Here’s how I use it:

• set the appropriate permissions on a file using chmod
• store the permissions as svn properties with svn_perms.sh -s <filename>
• svn commit the changed properties
• use svn_perms.sh -g <filename>to set the permissions at a later time, probably after a svn up

The script can also work recursively, using -r, but, in the interest of not polluting svn with properties I don’t really care about (only some directories and files need to have their permissions explicitly set) I’ve been using that sparingly.

Finally, I also have support for storing user/group ownership as a separate property, which should be useful when running as root, but I haven’t found a need for that just yet.

The script is available here.

So, what exactly does this mean?

Kernel
CVE ID: CAN-2005-0970
Impact: Permitting SUID/SGID scripts to be installed could lead to privilege escalation.
Description: Mac OS X inherited the ability to run SUID/SGID scripts from FreeBSD. Apple does not distribute any SUID/SGID scripts, but the system would allow them to be installed or created. This update removes the ability of Mac OS X to run SUID/SGID scripts. Credit to Bruce Murphy of rattus.net and Justin Walker for reporting this
issue.

This seems kind of severe. Setuid programs have always been a liability, but removing a part of UNIX?

The Morning News – MiniDisco

Them: And you can’t record faster than real time?

Sad, but true. I went through a MiniDisc phase. Even went so far as to hard-wire a remote for it into the left switchgear pod on my motorcycle. Unfortunately, the MD player kind of degraded from “skips a lot” to “doesn’t play much”. When I finally made the jump to the iPod, it was like “what the hell were you waiting for? Isn’t this just so much easier?”.

This is a great mashup from kokogiak. Be sure to check out the next one in the photostream, too.