• Uncategorized

    AppleSetupRedux

    AppleSetupRedux is a simple utility for resetting a system back to a factory-type state. Once run, on the next reboot, the Apple Setup Assistant will run so that you can distribute the machine to customers or whatever you might want to do with a machine where the Setup Assistant runs again. AppleSetupRedux AppleSetupRedux can be found on the Apps page of this site.

  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security,  Mass Deployment,  Xsan

    Programatic Screen Sharing

    You can remotely start ARD with kickstart, which I have previously covered at length. But Screen Sharing is a bit of a different little beast. To start up Screen Sharing, you can just use the following command: echo -n enabled > /Library/Preferences/com.apple.ScreenSharing.launchd I still prefer kickstart, but this method functions when you need something quick and easy. To then disable Screen Sharing, you can just toss the launchd item: rm /Library/Preferences/com.apple.ScreenSharing.launchd Once you have Screen Sharing started, you can then open the Screen Sharing application from a client by using the open command, followed by the protocol, which would be vnc and then the IP address. As with FTP you…

  • Mac OS X

    Box.net Client For Mac OS X

    Wrote a quick little tool for mounting Box.net accounts to the Finder of Mac OS X. This allows you to interact with the Box.net service as you would a MobileMe account or a file server. The tool connects to Box.net over WebDAV and so you will need to provide you username and password (which can be saved into your Keychain) for your Box.net account with each login. However, you can put the tool into your startup items, login items, etc. Future releases might include the ability to store your credentials so you don’t have to provide them any more or the ability to synchronize your files from your Box.net account,…

  • Mac Security,  sites

    Stats vs. Anonymity

    I could spend all my time reviewing site statistics or I could just write some articles. I typically choose to do the later. But occasionally (typically about once a month) I’ll look at the statistics for the site. Typically it’s just to see if the world is still an insane place and if people still view the dribble I tend to write here. But I see a lot of funny stuff in there and so those statistics tend to also afford me a bit of comedic relief. For example, images I use in my site are often used by others. I am guessing that the webmaster for a site simply…

  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security,  Unix

    Using the cut Command

    A number of commands available for finding positions that you want in a line and extracting only a certain amount of text can be pretty cumbersome in terms of learning curve. This isn’t to say that once you get the hang of them that they’re terribly complicated but it can take a little while to get the hang of them. And when you need something fast, you might want an easy command for extracting text from lines. In these cases, consider cut. The cut command doesn’t do regular expressions (I guess you could argue that its ability to use a delimiter can be used as a regular expression) and so…

  • Windows XP

    Programatically Clipboarding in Windows

    My last article showed how to interface with the clipboard in Mac OS X. Windows 7 comes with the same feature, but instead of pbcopy it’s simply clip. Since you don’t ls, we’ll pipe the output of dir into the clipboard: dir | clip Enjoy & no more complaining that I like one platform more than the other – you know who you are!

  • Mac OS X

    Shell to Clipboard & Back Again

    Many times I want to send data straight into the clipboard from a command or script and I don’t really want to have to mess with manually lasso’ing text, using Command-C, etc. What can I say, I’m kinda’ lazy (or working too much, not really sure which). Apple has been kind enough to supply us with a pair of really useful tools for interfacing with the clipboard (er, pasteboard) in Mac OS X: pbcopy and pbpaste. To use pbcopy, which copies text into the pasteboard, simply pipe data to it. For example, if you want to send a directory listing that you run in a script into the pasteboard, you…