Author: BlankMike

This morning while performing my daily internet news gathering I came across an update to an interesting program. Minitube is a You Tube downloader/player. One of the major points the author makes is it doesn’t use the Flash player. In my opinion this makes it fairly fast. This program is available in four forms, Mac, Windows, Linux (32bit binary), and source code. The Mac and Windows versions have demos. I would guess the Linux and source code versions are the…

Almost any series of commands which can be run in the shell can be run from a shell script. Tying in some of the last few posts I published here this is an example. Let’s say I wanted to run the gedit editor from the shell rather than from the dock/GUI… I would first have to locate the executable program. I happen to know it is installed in “/Applications/gedit.app/Contents/MacOS/gedit“. By running this program the gedit editor will start. Since it…

I volunteer as a system administrator at a place which installs software for an “educational charity” on Fridays. Yesterday the repair guy (who is a big Star Trek fan) called me over to his table. He showed me a video on Youtube about an Android app which turned a tablet into a “Tricorder”. I thought that was pretty cool. A quick search on Google for “lcars ipad” turned up this link to a couple of videos from last year. The…

The annual Pwn2Own competition has had it’s first day results come in. The idea behind the competition is to present some “hackers” with a series of web browsers on various machines. These machines are configured by various software manufacturers. The first hacker to generate a remote exploit on a particular machine gets to keep the machine plus $15,000. Although armed with 62 last minute patches, Safari was the first to go down. It took only five seconds. Next to go…

This is largely a repeat of an article in an earlier issue of the magazine. It works across all forms of *NIX (including OS X) and in a limited way Windows as well. Most professional *NIX people don’t recommend it. The reasons escape me at the moment. One thought some network analysts had a couple of years ago as to the slow loading of web pages was due to mis-configured or slow ad servers. Visiting some pages with numerous popups…

These tips can be used with the OS X terminal, iTerm, and most Linux shells. I have also verified the history works with the Windows “DOS Prompt”. It’s nice when things work out in a consistent cross-platform way. 😉 The history feature is useful when a programmer wishes to perform similar commands over again. In the past the process used to be more complex. Now it’s as simple as using the up arrow key. The down arrow key works to…

This morning I was dismayed to find that the Opera web browser download was causing a warning when downloading the browser from the Apple website (http://www.apple.com).  Restricted — Ages 17+.  I didn’t want to believe it but it’s true folks and quite frankly it seemed totally inappropriate. Visiting the Apple App Store even as I write this shows the warning is still there. The warning made me wonder at first they decided this particular application needs to be restricted? Pornographic…

The Mac has a unique way of setting up its $PATH variable. These are the locations the BSD portion of OS X looks at to find programs to run. In this case the list of paths can be found in the file /etc/paths. To edit it the administrator needs to sudo their favourite editor since the file itself is owned by root. For example “sudo pico /etc/paths”. This is useful for the programmer who wants to have their programs accessible…

Programmers are always looking for tools to make things easier. The Terminal program included with OS X is adequate. This alternative makes things a little less spartan. According to the documentation this is an active project where the author implements features from other shells. One thing I find useful is the use of the scrollwheel as the middle mouse button for copy and pasting selected text. It also uses PC (Linux) keybindings such as <Home> (beginning of the line) and…

Apple and the BSD folks have included two of the four editors as part of the base install packages. The first goes by two names and is accessed via the terminal (Applications –> Utilities –> Terminal). They are either pico or nano (note the lowercase). These are almost as basic as one can get and still refer to them as full screen editors. The other editor included by Apple is Textedit. This is entirely accessed by the GUI. It has…

The reason why people would want to set up one computer to store files for another computer are varied. For example I backed up my Linux box (PC) to a Mac before the power supply died. In my case the choice of a Mac comes down to two reasons. Ease of set up and stability. A common access method is to use ftp (file transfer protocol – note the lowercase letters). In OS X go to the System Preferences and…