• Set up a routine for dumping the rolodex into a flat xml file monthly
• Coded the searching of the the data using PHP and SimpleXML
• Coded the cookie management (sessions) and most important, a “remember me” feature (because Safari doesn’t remember passwords on the iPhone)
• Found this lovely library for creating iPhone compatible user intarfaces via the web (read, looks like a native app): iUI (User Interface Library for Safari development on iPhone)

Checkout the screenshots:

It’s pretty cool, because if the contact in the rolodex has a telephone number, address, email address, or webpage associated with them, the data will be displayed and linked to iPhone friendly functions… For example, the telephone number, when clicked on will provide a call button. An address clicked on will link to the built in maps app. Email links open up directly in the built in mail app. Finally, of course, webpages openup in Safari.

So here’s for getting the world more connected… one app at at time.

1. Download and boot from a live Linux distro
2. Become “root” within a shell
3. Run “fdisk -l” (”mac-fdisk -l” I know works on SystemRescueCD 0.2.0 (PPC) for PPC/Macs (what about Intel Macs?)) and note the internal hard disk partition to backup (ex: ‘/dev/hda’)

The rest assumes that (in short, you will probably have to substitute some numbers or devices and you have ssh access somewhere):

1. You have network access
2. You have access to an SSH server
3. Your network is configured with private addresses and you are not assigning one that conflicts with another local IP address
4. Your netmask is the same as the one supplied in the following commands

Give an IP address to the workstation you have just booted the live Linux disc on, set the netmask, and bring the network interface up:

Set the default gateway (if you need to reach outside of the LAN that is… normally this is your router’s IP address):

Set a DNS server (if you are in the habit of not strictly using IP addresses):

Execute the backup command:

Obviously, most of the previous is getting the network up… try running “dhclient” if the live Linux disc has it installed, and your network has DHCP setup.

I suppose it can be accomplished via a variety of ways, however I was able to reproduce this particular issue via generating one of these tasty spam mails via the following (all internally of course… I am not a spammer):

and then issuing these commands:

Notice the mail is being sent to the user… and from the user…

1. The server would receive the email addressed to emailuser@example.com
2. goldfish would parse the message and notice it needed to respond to… emailuser@example.com
3. The mail was delivered
4. Rinse, wash, repeat

The source of the message looked something like this:

and to prevent goldfish from causing havoc on the particular inbox (or mitigating what was already done… and preventing future issues), I added the following PHP:

just before letting the mail being sent…

I love goldfish. It’s like a do it yourself autoresponder! Keep in mind, this code works on Version 002, patch level 1, but could very well not work on any future releases (there have been indications that a newer version is in the works). Maybe I will post a few more tweaks in upcoming posts if the latest stable stays around for much longer.

Sitting at my administrative workstation I:

• looked at Apple Remote Desktop and noticed that the troubled laptop on the network had an odd status and I could not connect graphically (not that it would help if I could)
• tried opening a terminal and ping‘ing. It responded.
• was able to ssh into the laptop. Running ‘top‘ showed that CrashReporter kept running.

I wondered if rebooting it would have any different effect, so I issued a quick “reboot” over ssh and gave it another shot. This boot had the same behavior… So I tried the standard recovery procedures when things act odd:

• Restart into single user mode and fsck
• Repair permissions

Still no change. The only other “best idea” I had was to try and install the update again… but since I couldn’t login graphically I had to go through the command line (Mac’s seem so much cooler since being built on top of Unix).

• Download Security Update 2008-005 (PPC) on the administrative workstation (target was a 700 MHz, PowerPC, iBook).
• scp SecUpd2008-005PPC.dmg adminUser@host.fqdn:
• ssh adminUser@host.fqdn
• hdiutil attach ./SecUpd2008-005PPC.dmg
• sudo install -pkg “SecUpd2008-005PPC.pkg” -target /
• sudo reboot

The laptop rebooted, went past the animated progress circle and auto logged in to the user account it had so many times previously. That made me happy.

My main issue was that I needed to remotely adjust my OS X workstation’s sound, and I figured a control would be easier than opening a shell and running a script. Basically this will give you a small gtk.VScale widget (a vertical slider widget used to select a value from a range) in a resizable window. When everything is all setup I also run it using AllTray so that it can be docked into the system tray.

When a value is selected using the widget it passes the value off to rsh, which in turn sends the command to a remote workstation (the command I have prefilled into the script works on OS X’s main volume):

The following, in the intended deployment requires password-less key based ssh connections between the workstation intended to remotely adjust the sound (any platform that supports PyGTK) and the Macintosh workstation:

The situation went something like this:

• I had a ticket in RT that I wanted to resolve.
• I set the form to cc the comment to a group of users who were interested in the details of the resolution.
• I applied the ticket in RT.
• RT cc’ed the users about the resolution.
• One of the users had an autoresponder setup using goldfish, so it emailed back to RT about the user’s absence.
• RT opened a ticket with the content of the email from the autoresponder, faithfully attaching the subject explaining the user’s absence.
• RT then responded to the user’s email account about the new ticket’s creation.
• Again goldfish autoresponds to a message from RT, creating a loop.

Every five minutes a new ticket was being created in RT because of goldfish’s configuration and cron job being set to run that often. I caught the cycle happening when the incoming queue of tickets had three or four created with their subjects typical of those created by an autoresponder.

Hopefully it can get approved soon. I tested functionality on Ubuntu 8.04/Firefox 3 and on Windows XP Home/Firefox 3. It works as expected.

Changelog:
Minor update for 3.0 compatibility.

Basically this does the following:

• Makes a listing of all .png files in the current directory
• Runs the “convert” command (part of ImageMagick) on each .png file in that listing
  • Crops the image specified by the geometry arguments
  • Saves each image as a .jpg

Here’s the short source: