• Mac OS X,  Mac Security

    A couple one-liners for analyzing Mac app usage

    Reporting on application usage is an interesting topic on the Mac. This is done automatically with a number of device management solutions. But there are things built into the OS that can help as well. mdls "/Applications/Xcode.app" -name kMDItemLastUsedDate | awk '{print $3}' Now, if you happen to also need the time, simply add ,$4 to the end of your awk print so you can see the next position, which is the time. Additionally, a simple one-liner to grab the foreground app via AppleScript is: osascript -e 'tell application "System Events"' -e 'set frontApp to name of first application process whose frontmost is true' -e 'end tell' That’s pretty much…

  • Active Directory,  Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security,  Mass Deployment

    Using odutil with opendirectoryd

    The options for Open Directory continue to get more refined, aligning with opendirectoryd. The odutil command is becoming more and more useful with each version of OS X. Let’s inspect the directory service cache, using odutil with the show verb and the cache option: odutil show cache You can also view statistics for opendirectoryd using that show verb but with the statistics option: odutil show statistics And to see everything, use odutil with the show verb and the all option to get plenty of data to grep through: odutil show all The final show option we’ll look at is configuration. Here, you will also need to feed a directory nodename…

  • sites,  Social Networking

    More Additions

    At the bottom of the sidebar, you will now find badges for my pages on the main social networks. I also added Flickr & Facebook into a new Pictures page (and added pictures to the actual Flickr account since I mostly used Facebook for that)… Also changed the title and post-info/comments sections to the dark red color scheme, since I didn’t really think they looked right as black any longer. Finally, made the navbar a little slimmer. Hope ya’ll like the changes.