I’ve now added Mouse Locator to my set of training tools. It gives cross hairs to highlight the mouse without zooming in on things, which always seems to give me a little vertigo when I’m trying to do training. You can download Mouse Locator at http://2point5fish.com.
-
-
Mac: Building Screen Savers Quickly
It’s not that we’re going to do anything difficult here. But we’re going to take a prebuilt Apple screen saver, throw our own images in there and then test it. First off, go to /System/Library/Screen Savers and let’s grab a copy of, let’s say Nature Patters.slideSaver. I’m going to call my new screen saver MJ.slideSaver and put it into the same directory (/System/Library/Screen Savers). Now let’s go into the new MJ.slideSaver and then into the Contents directory. From here, we’re going to give our new screen saver a new name by altering the Info.plist file. Find the CFBundleName key and change the string listed for it to the string you’d like…
-
Disable Xserve Keyboard Locking
When you use the key to lock an Xserve the keyboard and drive modules are locked into place. But in a number of environments only the drive modules should be locked and the keyboard itself should still be active. In order to disable this feature you can use the systemsetup command, leveraging the getdisablekeyboardwhenenclosurelockisengaged option (which by the way is one of the longest I’ve seen). If you run the following command and the keyboard locks when you lock the server then you should get a simple output of Yes systemsetup getdisablekeyboardwhenenclosurelockisengaged But if you swap the g with an s you have the option to alter the setting with a…
-
Mac: Setting Screen Saver from the CLI
Earlier today I posted on how to activate the screen saver from the command line. But I hadn’t yet mentioned how to set it up. Before I do, let’s look at the /System/Library/Screen Savers directory. Here you should see a number of bundles, such as RSS Visualizer.qtz, Paper Shadow.slideSaver, Flurry.saver, Arabesque.qtz and any third party screen savers you may have installed. These are the paths to your screen savers. In order to set which screen saver you would like to use from the command line, you’re going to use the defaults command along with the com.apple.screensaver domain. First let’s read the settings there: defaults -currentHost read com.apple.screensaver Which will provide…
-
Initiating Mac OS X Screensaver from CLI
The ScreenSaverEngine.app that is located in the /System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/Versions/A/Resources/ directory can be used to invoke the screen saver on Mac OS X. So to do so from the command line you would just use the following: open /System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/Versions/A/Resources/ScreenSaverEngine.app
-
Mail Attachments from the Command Line
Concurrent with my last post on using mail from the command line there was a thread on the Mac OS X Server email list on using attachments with mail, so I thought I would supplement what they were doing there here (so if you were following that thread the only new thing here are the -c and -b options). Let’s say you have a file on your desktop called orgchart.doc and you wanted to attach it to an email and send it to a few email addresses: contact@org.com, contact2@org.com and krypted@mac.com. We’re also going to bcc secret@org.com. You would use the following command: uuencode ~/Desktop/orgchart.doc orgchart.doc | mail -s “orgchart”…
-
The New CTO
One of my favorite parts of my job is to act as an outsourced CTO for companies. In some cases it is more of acting as lateral support for incumbent CIO/CSO types, which actually works out really well in a number of cases. In those cases I really more help to define the technical guidance for organizations. In some cases the organization is too small for a C-level and it’s more of acting as a Director of IT, in others it’s simply as a supplement to another C-level for dispute resolution. And like many CTOs I once focused on computers, servers and backbones. But how quickly technology can redefine an…
-
Automatically Emailing Logs
As I have mentioned in the past, you can send mail from the command line by initiating a telnet session into port 25 of a mail server. Provided you have setup Mail.app you can also email from the command line using the mail command. In the below command we’re going to pipe the contents of a log file into an email by reading the contents using a cat command. From the output of the cat command we’re then going to email the contents of the file to an email address, specifying the subject line of the email using the -s option of the ppp command: cat /var/log/ppp.log | mail -s…
-
MySpace Layoffs
According to Reuters, MySpace is about to lay off around 1/3 of their staff, which will leave them at about 1,000 people strong. Whether connected or not this is just a few days after the number of Facebook users finally exceeding the number of MySpace users. Overall, a smaller and more nimble MySpace might be able to survive, but in order to do so they’re going to need to do something drastic in order to combat the inertia and the far superior technology that Facebook has. It’s hard to believe, looking at the the two portals, but Facebook has a very narrow edge (globally) over MySpace. IMHO, the coming year…
-
New Graphics
In a further step to refine the site so it’s less of a drain on your browsers (and my boxen) I’ve further tweaked the graphical elements in the site. It’s a little simpler, with the graphics comprised of sub-20KB files. There are also less of them, which I hope will improve performance. Stress tests seem to indicate that it can handle about 12,000 concurrent users. 🙂 Also, sorry for skipping some posts. I was at WWDC and have been diligently working on my next book.