The Lab

Windows has had mapped shared drives for years, but for some reason maintaining a persistent mount in OS X is a chore. Anyway, I ended up bashing out this script (tested on OS 10.8 Mountain Lion) to mount the drives on my NAS. I added to the Login Items so it runs every time I log in, and if you want to add to cron so it runs every so often, go for it.

set AirportName to do shell script "/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/A/Resources/airport -I | sed '/ SSID: /!d; s/^.* SSID: //'" tell application "Finder" activate if AirportName is "Cosmic" then tell application "Usable Keychain Scripting" set myInternetKeys to every keychain item of current keychain whose name contains "Asura" repeat with i from 1 to (count of myInternetKeys) set theKey to item i of myInternetKeys set theAccount to account of theKey set thePassword to password of theKey end repeat end tell end tell tell application "Finder" try mount volume "afp://Asura/Share" as user name theAccount with password thePassword end try end tell

Every time I start with a *nix shell, I make these changes. Once you become accustomed to them, you'll wonder how you managed without...

set completion-ignore-case on

Add to /etc/inputrc (or ~/.inputrc) to tab complete directories and files with ease.

alias ls="ls -la"

Add to ~/.profile to make the "ls" command useful.

export TERM="xterm-color" PS1='\[\033[0;31m\]\u\[\033[0m\]@\[\033[0;32m\]\h\[\033[0m\]:\[\033[0;34m\]\w\[\033[0m\]\$ '

Over the years I've become accustomed to working on locked down Windows machines. As a developer, it's sometimes necessary to remove the group policy imposed by your I.T. department. Don't misunderstand me though, group policies play an important role in keeping enterprise machines sanitary, but as a developer, group policy can really f**k around with your development environment.

GPCul8r

GPCul8r is a dirty little program for bypassing group policy restrictions under Windows. It s not technically novel or interesting, but it's handy to have if you need to operate within a domain-joined desktop environment that's subject to group policy controls. The original .zip and article seem to have disappeared from the Internet now, so here's my mirror of GPCul8r-0.1.zip.

How to install:

1. Copy GPCul8r.dll and detoured.dll to a permanent location.

2. Use withdll.exe to launch regedit.exe with GPCul8r.dll & detoured.dll mapped into its process space as follows:

c:\> withdll /p:<full pathname of detoured.dll> /d:<full pathname of gpcul8r.dll> regedit.exe

3. Edit HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows\AppInit_DLLs, adding both GPCul8r.dll and detoured.dll to the list of DLL's.

That should do it. Note that if you don't have admin rights, you won't be able to perform this last step - sorry. You'll still be able to launch individual programs using GPCul8r as described in step #2, but if you want GPCul8r to be loaded automatically by all applications, you're on your own.

Security Administrator

GPCul8r is a great way to bypass the group policy block on unauthorised programs, and can be used to start Security Administrator - a fantastic tool for removing the group policy registry entries in 3 clicks.

I've been using iOS 5 beta 5 for a couple of weeks now, and while it improves on beta 4, there seems to be an annoying bug in this version:

"iTunes detects my iPhone as a new phone or something. It gives me the page to set up my iPhone and asks me to set it up as new or restore from backup. So every time I connect my iPhone, I must restore from backup, which is a real pain and it takes forever. Is this a known problem? What can I do to fix this?"

I've had a look around the web, and as far as I can see there are only a few people talking about the issue. Until Apple fix the problem, you can try these 3 things...

Solution 1 - If wi-fi sync is enabled, backup your iPhone from Settings » General » iTunes Wi-Fi Sync. Then use the restore in iTunes to restore to where you left off. This seems to be the quickest fix.

Solution 2 - If solution 1 didn't work, change the restore option to set up your iPhone as new. Backup beforehand if you can, just in case.

Solution 3 - I have a feeling this is something to do with the wi-fi syncing. I've seen my iTunes behaving oddly - trying to connect over wifi to do a backup, and failing... which seems to cause this issue. Once restored, disable wifi syncing for now.

If I find out anything else, I'll update this post.

(My setup: Mac OS X Lion 11.0.0, iTunes 11.5b77, iOS 5 beta 5, wi-fi sync enabled).

2-finger secondary click (aka "right click") stops working. Plenty of people are saying this is happening to them, so I guess it's a bug which will be addressed in a future update. In the meantime, here's how to fix it (restart/logout afterwards):

defaults -currentHost write -g com.apple.trackpad.enableSecondaryClick -bool YES

Unhide the Library folder:

chflags nohidden ~/Library/

Javascript doesn't seem to work properly in Google Chrome? Simple, update to the latest version of the browser. Also fixes some oddness with window resizing/fullscreen.

Hate the Mission Control/Login window grey texture? Here's how to replace it.

Go to System/Library/Coreservices/Dock.app.

Right click Dock.app and click "show package contents"

Go to Contents/Resources/

In there should be 3 pictures named "defaultdesktop.png" "defaultdesktop1440x900.png" "defaultdesktop1920x1200.png" (depending on your build of Lion, there may only be "defaultdesktop.png")

Back up these 3 files and replace them with a picture of your choice. Make sure your pictures are the correct sizes and in PNG format. "defaultdesktop" is 256x256. The other 2 sizes are shown in their name.

Type in "killall Dock" in Terminal, or reboot

(To make the change happen without a reboot, type "killall Dock" in Terminal)

Hate the ripped edges effect in iCal?

sudo mv /Applications/iCal.app/Contents/Resources/CanvasTopTile.png /Applications/iCal.app/Contents/Resources/CanvasTopTile.png.orig sudo curl -o /Applications/iCal.app/Contents/Resources/CanvasTopTile.png http://i.imgur.com/0DB2T.png sudo chown root:wheel /Applications/iCal.app/Contents/Resources/CanvasTopTile.png

Flash Player v11 - currently in beta - seems to fix video playback stuttering and excessive CPU activity. Yes, you too can now watch smooth fullscreen videos on YouTube without feeling like your Macs fans are about to take off. Here's what to do...

Download the latest Flash Player v11 build from here:  http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer11.html

Run the installer, it'll automatically update everything except Chrome

(For Chrome users) Type "about:plugins" (sans quotes) in the address bar and hit return, click "+ Details" in the top right to expand the additional plugin information. Disable your current version of Flash, and enable the v11.x beta

Earlier in the week, you may have heard about Joshua Kaufman who had his MacBook Pro stolen from his flat. Using a service called Hidden, he tracked its location and even got photos of the alleged thief using it in his home (yep, that's him below). The police eventually caught up with the thief thanks to the tracking software, and the laptop has been returned. I'd call that a happy ending.

In stark contrast, a friend called me a few of hours ago to ask if I could help recover her stolen Mac and secure her online data. She was still crying as she explained it didn't have any tracking software installed on the Mac, making recovery almost impossible. The user account had a password set, but there wasn't a firmware password so it won't be long before the laptop is wiped and probably sold on eBay. To make matters worse, her Time Machine backup had recently been reformatted and didn't contain a full backup. 

If you take 10 minutes (that's all!), this article can give you a fighting chance should the worst happen to your Mac.

1. Install tracking software

There's plenty of options, but my preference is Prey. Prey does all the usual stuff like reporting the location of your stolen device, screenshots of what's going on, captures from the webcam so you can get a photo of the cretin, network and process info, etc. Plus, it's free for up-to 3 computers and works on Mac, Windows and Linux. Hidden ($15/year) also has a good reputation, but it's Mac only and not free.

2. Secure your user account

Open System Preferences, then Accounts, and make sure your account (and any Admin accounts) have good, strong passwords set on them. Need help choosing a password, see here.

Go back to System Preferences, and into Security. Your settings should look like this...

On the next tab, FileVault, turn FileVault on. This will prevent unauthorised users accessing the contents of your home folder.

3. Secure your Mac at boot time

The common criminal can easily boot your Mac using a removable drive, and can reset your administrator password - gaining access to all your precious files. Details of the actual hack are here.

You can foil this hack easily, by setting a firmware password to prevent anyone booting your Mac from an external device with your password, and it's as simple as running the Firmware Password Protection utility and choosing a password.

You can find the Firmware Password Protection utility on your Mac OS X installation DVD, or if you don't have it handy, you can download the version from my Snow Leopard DVD here. Full details of what this is and how it works can be found in this Apple Knowledge Base article here.

4. Backup your data to the cloud

Time Machine is great but what happens if the thief steals all your kit? Maybe you're not even running Time Machine. CrashPlan is your solution - it's a dead simple backup to the cloud, and it costs peanuts. Should anything happen to your Mac - theft, fire, hardware failure - you can download your entire backup set. Your data is encrypted before it gets to the cloud, so it's stored securely. It even has options for version control and backing up files to friends computers. Yes it costs money; $1.50/mo for 10GB and $3/mo for unlimited storage - but how much are your documents, photos, source code, audio files worth? In my trials, BackBlaze came in 2nd place, so worth a look too.

Those in the know will be quick to point out Apple is about to announce the iCloud. Lets hope that allows Time Machine to backup into the cloud.

5. Pat yourself on the back

I recently had a Mac misbehaving; weekly kernel panics, kernel_task consuming excessive CPU and leaking memory, and spotlight appearing to delay boot up. To be fair, the poorly Mac had never seen an OS reinstall after three years, taking it from 10.4 to 10.6.6. I could've reinstalled the OS, but curiosity got the better of the me - I wanted to learn exactly what was causing these issues.

Most Mac users know about Onyx, a tool for tweaking/maintenance for OS X. I gave that a shot and while the boot time appeared to decrease slightly, it didn't really make much difference. In fact a day later, I observed another kernel panic.

I knew things weren't right with kernel_task, so I directed my energies into understanding what the process does, and how to debug it. Tyler Ballance explains what kernel_task is quite well. Then I stumbled across gold - Consultants Canary by KHI, a script that rattles through your system, finding kernel extensions, app plugins, frameworks and start-up items. After a couple of minutes of pouring through the output, I quickly identified several unwanted extensions and tasks -

udmarket

com.caiaq.driver.NIUSBHardware Driver

org.defyne.driver.MMInputFamily

org.defyne.driver.ConexantCX2388X 

org.defyne.driver.PhilipsSAA7146 

org.defyne.driver.UDMUtils 

org.defyne.driver.PrincipalMMInputs

com.taoeffect.ispy.kext

com.bombich.ccc

Pando Web Installer / PandoWebInst.plugin

I use App Zapper to uninstall unwanted apps, but obviously it wasn't removing absolutely everything. Once I'd removed all these extensions, I gave the system a reboot - it didn't seem any faster, and still got stuck loading the menu bar with just spotlight showing. [After three weeks of use, I've not seen a single kernel panic - so it probably was a kernel extension that caused them]

Next I turned my attention to Spotlight. After reading a ton of information about how Spotlight (aka mds and mdworker) works, and trying to find others with systems exhibiting the same behaviour, I eventually worked out the Cisco VPN client I had installed was the culprit. To uninstall it properly (there's no uninstaller app), I had to:

sudo /usr/local/bin/vpn_uninstall

Sure enough, after I'd removed it and rebooted, no more pauses as the menu bar and dock loaded.

Over the next 48 hours I kept Activity Monitor open, keeping an eye on CPU usage and memory consumption. Kernel_task was indeed behaving itself, but I noticed mdsworker chewing up CPU and RAM. After reading a couple of articles (here and here), I used fs_usage to identify a couple of places on the hard disk where Spotlight seemed to be spending a long time indexing - and once excluded in Preferences > Privacy, cleared that right up.

I subscribe to the "Dont Make Me Steal" digital media manifesto, so when I was forced to sit through adverts in the middle of watching a 4oD show, I just had to find a way to skip the ads.

Turned out it's pretty simple. Just watch the adverts on any show, and add this line to your hosts file [how to]...

216.120.238.16 realmedia.channel4.com

Here's my second large-vendor bug report of the year, this time it's Microsoft. The Document Connection in Office 2011 for Mac stopped working after recent updates. In v14.0.1 and v14.0.2 (currently the latest), when trying to connect to a Sharepoint site, you receive this error message:

Only connections to SharePoint or SkyDrive servers are supported

Enabling basic authentication on the Sharepoint server and in the Document Connection tool makes no difference. Other people are seeing the same behaviour. The only solution I've found is to roll-back to v14.0.0 which still has username and passwords boxes at the URL entry screen.

Occasionally I find myself connected to a public network, like a coffee shop or something, and I don't want my Mac announcing its file shares, and Bonjouring to every other schmuck on the wifi hotspot. In fact, I don't even want it to be visible so that it invites port scans and other shenanigans. Of course, in this kind of environment I should be using a VPN, but I digress.

First up, head into System Preferences > Firewall > and block all incoming connections. Make sure you enable stealth mode at the bottom.

Those paying attention will notice that the firewall won't automatically block Bonjour as Apple considers it a core service. I don't. You can disable it using my method (below), or the cludgy Apple support method.

defaults write /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.mDNSResponder ProgramArguments -array /usr/sbin/mDNSResponder -launchd -NoMulticastAdvertisements

And when you want to enable it again, just use...

defaults write /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.mDNSResponder ProgramArguments -array /usr/sbin/mDNSResponder -launchd

Restarting Bonjour to use the new, quieter setting is simple - just restart the mDNSResponder like so...

Occasionally an install from MacPorts fails, 9 times out of 10 it'll be a dependency failing to build. And 9 times out of 10, a clean+selfupdate+resintall does the trick...

sudo port clean portfile sudo port selfupdate sudo port install portfile [+variants]

Failing that, a port upgrade usually helps...

There's a couple of ways to recover a file from the Chrome/Firefox cache - the most straightforward option is the CacheViewer add-on for Firefox and ChromeCacheView for Chrome (Windows only). But sometimes you need to roll up your sleeves and tinker with about:cache.

Once you've found the file you want to save, you'll be confronted with a hex display like this:

So what now? Unhelpfully, the browser won't save the file. Copy the hex part (outlined in red above) into a new text file (call it "input.txt") and run this python script...

import os,sys f = open(os.path.dirname(sys.argv[0]) + "input.txt","r") hex = "" for line in f:      line = line[11:73]      print line           for c in line:           if c != " ":                hex += c f.close() c2 = None output = "" for c in hex:      if c2 == None:           c2 = c      else:           x = eval("int(0x" + c2 + c + ")")           output += chr(x)           c2 = None f = open(os.path.dirname(sys.argv[0]) + "output.txt", 'w') f.write(output) f.close()

Log files. Great for tracking down a problem, or digging up some tasty stats, but totally unmaintainable. With that in mind I've been investigating logging frameworks for .NET and Java (our two main programming languages).

Most of our .NET projects include the MS Enterprise Library, and Java projects use Log4j - both frameworks almost always log to a text file. In the past, these log files were compressed and squirrelled away by a nightly script, but as we grew, this has become tiresome. Not to mention that we don't have an overview of what's been going on as all the information is now buried in our SAN somewhere (what was the point of the logging?).

After some investigation (thanks to all the contributors at Stackoverflow) and discussion with the developers, we eventually settled on Log4net and Log4j as our main logging frameworks (thus consolidating our logging technologies) - and am hereby outlawing writing log files. Both frameworks will squirt logging information into a database (with buffering), and I'm relying on Log4net Dashboard to provide an overview of what's going on. Although Log4net isn't free, I think it provides an essential service to our support team.

Further reading:

http://www.dotnetlogging.com/comparison/

Having been trained in Agile earlier in the year, I've been absorbing everything I can about the methodology and experiences of other Agile proponents and development teams. Here's a collection of resources I've found useful or interesting (in no particular order)...

Getting started with Agile

Mike Cohn's website (templates, tips, experience)

User Story tips and template

Robert Martin's website (tips, videos, experience)

Cucumber (BDD tool)

BDD with SpecFlow and Cucumber and ASP.NET MVC

Stackoverflow question: What's the best BDD framework for working with ASP.NET MVC 2

Real-world example of ASP.NET MVC + BDD

Dan North's introduction to BDD

BDD for Web Applications

The SOLID Principles explained

Agile Planning Templates in Visual Studio Team System 2010

Architecture in Agile projects (video)

Ken Schwaber and and Sam Guckenheimer: Professional Scrum Development (video)

Anna Forss' blog (experience, tips, TFS)

TFS for product owners (how TFS can be useful for product owners)

Planning Poker (fun estimation tool)

Pex and Moles (autogen test suites and method delegates)

First bug report of 2011, and it's one for Apple. Here's the write-up...

I'm using a MBP running OS X 10.6.6 and a Windows 2003 R2 SP2 file server. The Windows 2003 server is in a domain ("neurope"), and my MBP is configured to log on to the AD domain. All working fine (internet access, remote desktop, etc).

If I open a share on the server (Finder > Go > Connect to Server... > smb://server - or the IP address), and provide my domain credentials (domain\username + password), the shared folder appears as it should.

However, on opening a subfolder of that share, the subfolder appears to be empty - despite containing files and folders. Note that I have correct permissions to read and write.

Opening a subfolder that appears empty generates these lines in the log...

08/01/2011 12:11:08 kernel 0 smb_maperr32: no direct map for 32 bit server error (0xc0000279)

08/01/2011 12:11:08 kernel 0 smbfs_smb_lookup: smbfs_smb_qpathinfo error = 5

Browsing the same folder from smbclient at the command line gives the correct results...

ssl-97635efd02b:/ Dave$ smbclient -U domain\\username \\\\server\\share

Password: [hidden]

Domain=[domain] OS=[Windows Server 2003 R2 3790 Service Pack 2] Server=[Windows Server 2003 R2 5.2]

smb: \> cd users

smb: \users\> ls David*

  David.Nicoll                        D        0  Thu Jan  6 12:07:32 2011

38399 blocks of size 16777216. 770 blocks available

Browsing from a Windows XP or Windows 7 machine works fine.