Author Archives: bluedepth

OwnCloud

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At work I’ve been thinking about cloud sync services, something like Dropbox without actually using Dropbox, because it’s non-kosher around these parts. I thought about OwnCloud so I went investigating.

OwnCloud is neat, it’s a PHP script that will set itself up on a web host, and then provide you with a web interface like Dropbox and access to clients like Dropbox which mirror the function of Dropbox completely. This was a possible route to satisfy our legal people and maybe leverage cloud sync at work. As it turns out, it didn’t work. OwnCloud is a lost cause. I installed it on my iPage host and got it to work all up until I tried to connect the Mac desktop client to it. It got files perfectly well, but when I put a file in the owncloud folder to be synced back up to my host it all fell apart. The error was “errno 22” and ended up being shown to me as “Bad Request” – so that was a no-go. Then I thought maybe I could install OwnCloud on my Mac Pro server at work, keep it in house maybe. That also was a failure, the web side was fine, but the client just couldn’t connect no matter what I tried.

So I’m going to abandon the pursuit of OwnCloud. I’ve tried it and found that it just won’t work on what I’ve got. It was something that could have possibly worked and been great, but it’s got too many moving parts and it was a total failure when you tried to get all the parts to spin up and run. Oh well, at least now I know I can abandon OwnCloud and move forward.

iOS 7 and iMessage

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After I upgraded to iOS 7 on my iPhone 5 I ran into a really annoying problem. Whenever I would send iMessage messages to friends and family the message would look like it’s sending and then the progress bar along the top would stop about 1/4 inch from the end and just stay there for hours. Never sending the message. I tried the Kung-Fu Grip to only partial avail. The solution is to reset the network settings on the iPhone:

Tap Settings
Tap General
Tap Reset
Tap Reset Network Settings

Once the phone resets, and you reset your Wifi and turn on all the cellular bits, like voice and data roaming (at least for me) then after that, everything works as it should.

If this helps you, please let me know. 🙂

Did You Get That Thing I Sent Ya?

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Museum of Communications

This video, adapted from a character on Cartoon Network’s Harvey Birdman animated series. Asks the most fundamental question that exists and is at the center of my issues with workplace communications.

“Did you get that thing, that thing, THAT THING, … that… I sent ya?”

It happens a lot, I do it, and a lot of other people do it too and it’s so annoying, irritating, and upsetting. You send a message to someone else and if it’s email, it can be like it flew into a black hole. You don’t know if they got it, if they read it, if they don’t care. Did they file it? Did they laugh when they got it? Dunno. When will whatever it is get attention? Dunno.

It’s the not knowing that irks me. We used to use GroupWise which made this particular issue somewhat of a non-event because it would record the fate of the message and you could get read receipts automatically sent back to you. Generally, this isn’t a problem either with SupportPress as we get emailed when a ticket comes in and the system enforces a receipt structure whenever we get tickets and manipulate them. It’s just, well, everything else. And it’s not something you want to include with every email because it should be a matter of common courtesy to acknowledge that you got a message and that you are working on it, or whatever is really going on with it.

Then again, my experience is that much like verbal arguments, nobody is really listening. In email, nobody is really reading. Time and time again I notice people who only pick out keywords from a cursory scan of what I send and reply to the things they feel they want to reply with, ignoring the actual message itself.

When asked, “What is the biggest stumbling block for you professionally?” The answer can be only this: Basic human communication and the lack of it. How can anyone get anything accomplished if we aren’t listening or reading or even paying attention to each other? Thank god for cognitive dissonance. It’s an absurd life if it is this way and obviously it isn’t because things get done, somehow, so it can’t be that bad, not really. But I think it is bad and I fear that it’s just getting worse.

If you get an email, maybe it’s a good idea to form a new habit and immediately reply telling the other party that you got it. At least when everyone knows, it’s one less little chunk of mystery floating out there.

photo by: Cargo Cult

WIL WHEATON dot TUMBLR, So any journalist passing through London’s Heathrow has now been warned: do not take any documents with you. Britain is now a police state when it comes to journalists, just like Russia is.

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WIL WHEATON dot TUMBLR, So any journalist passing through London’s Heathrow has now been warned: do not take any documents with you. Britain is now a police state when it comes to journalists, just like Russia is..

This post by Wil Wheaton is a really great reminder that when you are traveling, and I wouldn’t necessarily just put this as international to Britain but even when visiting the next town or crossing state lines even. Rights are being trampled everywhere you go, wether it be from a out-of-control cop, a bloodthirsty Sheriffs deputy or even a sticky-fingered TSA agent there is no lack of potential thugs, enemies, and thieves in your midst.

There are ways to secure your data and keep it handy as well. Store everything in an encrypted disk image or TrueCrypt archive on a cloud service like Dropbox or Google Drive and duplicate the same things in your memory sticks. If the thugs take your devices then you can rest assured that all you lost was the material itself, but no content.

I’m surprised that journalists and people who know journalists don’t all use GPG to secure their communications. I would think that if you were a whistleblower or had contact with a whistleblower that these little checkboxes would be foremost on your mind and already checked off.

You can’t trust any government, any cop, or any Vampire to keep their word. This goes for everyone as well, including your carrier and service providers. What should Verizon know? Shit. How about Dropbox? The same. Trust nobody and you’ll be safer than someone who trusted someone else. Trust is earned and right now, very very few people have it.

Encrypt Everything

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Lavabit and Silent Circle have given up when it comes to providing encrypted email communications. Mega plans on providing something to cover the gap and in general the only real way to deal with privacy-in-email is end-to-end encryption. There was talk that at some point email might give way to writing letters and using the US Postal Service but there as well you’ve got Postmasters writing commands taped to mail about how everything has to be photocopied and stored – so even the US Postal Service is full of spies, the only thing the US Postal Service can be trusted to carry is junk mail.

What is the answer? Pretty Good Privacy. PGP, or rather, the non-Symantec version of it which is the GNU one, the GPG. If you really want to keep what you write private when you send it to someone else, the only way to do that is for everyone to have GPG installed on their email system so you can write email using their public key, which converts your email to cyphertext, secure from even the NSA’s prying eyes, and requires your recipient to unlock the message using their secret key, which they have.

I’ve been playing with PGP and GPG now for a very long time and I decided I would at least make a route available if anyone wanted to contact me with privacy intact – my public keys are on my blog, they are also on all the keyservers including the one hosted and run by MIT and the GPG Keyserver as well. To send me a private message via email all you need to do is get GPG, set it up, create your secret and public key, get my public key, use it to write me an email and only I’ll be able to read it. The NSA will just flag the encrypted contents for later analysis and thanks to AES–256, they’ll be hard pressed to get to the plaintext in your message.

That’s the way around all of this. GPG for everything. GPG public keys for email, for chat, for VPN, for files, and HTTP-in-GPG. Everything pumped through GPG. Since the government won’t stop spying on us, it’s our duty as citizens to secure our own effects against illegal search and siezure, and technology exists to do so.

Encrypt everything.

Grayed Folders in Macintosh OSX

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While copying files to an external hard drive with a bum cable using my Mac’s Finder to move the files I ended up with an accidentally half-copied folder that was grayed out and I couldn’t open it at all. I could go into Terminal and access it that way, but Finder was a dead duck. Even after I properly unmounted and remounted the drive it didn’t work. I putzed about for a while searching for a solution and the general answer most people have is to use the ‘cat’ command to copy the files elsewhere and just be done with it. This didn’t sit well with me, there should be a way to correct the situation without having to duplicate the folder or copy the files or do anything laborious like that – and it turns out there is just that.

The folder had a creation time of some date in 1984. Probably the first possible date for OSX knowing Apple. They initiated the folder but since the move was interrupted the later adjustment never got made. This is a bug, Apple. Anyways, how to correct it? Some people seemed to think that the ‘touch’ command could possibly do the trick, but touch can’t really get to all the dates that come with files in the HFS file system. This folder, for examples sake I’ll just call it “folder” had displayed this 1984 date as it’s creation date. The touch command was successful in mangling all the other dates, except for the specific one I was after. I used the ‘stat’ command on the folder and discovered that the st_birthtime of the folder was 1984. How in the hell do you change that date?

I found out that you need another utility to do it properly. You need to download the Command Line Tools for XCode, which is the development platform for the OSX Operating System. It’s free and easy to install. Once you do that, you will get a new command to use in the terminal called SetFile. So here’s how to fix this problem if you run into it: SetFile -d [todays date][file or folder] and press enter. So for my file, it would be SetFile -d 08/17/2013 folder/ and press Enter. Voila! Folder is real and not-grayed and Finder thinks it’s just peachy keen.

So for anyone with grayed out folders, check your dates. Use the stat command, download the XCode CLI tools and use SetFile to rescue your folder or file from inaccessible hell.

Private Dancer

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Several days ago, while pondering an issue we’ve had at work an epiphany struck me. The problem we ran into was that our local network is a box of question marks. We don’t really know how it’s assembled or really what the rules are for using it, we just plug cables into wall jacks and if things work, they work. Until they don’t.

Enter NetInstall and NetRestore. These are the two imaging technologies for Macintosh and I’ve assigned my coworker to explore and develop images. Frankly he self-started it and I encouraged his exploration. We tried it first and both actions use a lot of bandwidth on the network and we eventually ran into a lot of problems. Not only did the machine we were working on take forever but it bogged down the server and caused huge headaches for everyone. We came to the conclusion that our local network just isn’t designed to carry any payload of appreciable size. It’s not really a complaint, but more of a characterization. It’s kind of fragile and wimpy.

So, was there a way we could still use ethernet technology without having to depend on our “provided” fragile and weak network? I sat in my chair pondering all of it, knocking some options out of the park instantly because of the machines we have. We can’t really depend on IP-over-Firewire as we have plain-jane MacBooks in the mix, they don’t have FireWire ports, just ethernet ones. As I looked across the way at all the server technology I had in the rack it struck me, each one, including the lowly Drobo had two Ethernet ports. Huh. Two. Only one was really being used to connect each machine to the network so each one had an available secondary port available. I then started to root around in my junk bin and found an old unused Netgear ethernet switch, five ports model, no fuss, no muss. I then grabbed a gaggle of short ethernet cables and started hooking all my servers and such to this little spare switch. Everything worked out magnificently well. In each server I configured these ports to conform to 192.168.0.* and assigned manual IP addresses for each of them. Then I found a unused Apple Express Wifi Access Point, plugged it in, set it for bridge mode and now I can extend this custom network into Wifi using 802.11N which is nice and fast. Just like that, cake and eat it too! What’s great about this setup is that my coworker and I can move large batches of data all over between these machines without having to worry about clogging up the network for all the other users who are trying to use these servers for their real work. Their files are small and their use sporadic, our use is large and nearly (sometimes) constant. The parts are just a few more blinking lights in the rack and just a little bit more spaghetti wiring hither and yon, but I don’t care, it works and it was free with the parts I already had on hand. The only part of all of this that upsets me is that I didn’t think to do it sooner. I suppose I should take some solace that it’s better late than never. Having this private access to all the systems makes both of our lives much better. We don’t have to complain to central networking anymore because we’ve abandoned their fragile wimpy thing for a far better solution in-house, and because it’s unroutable, we didn’t break one single rule, mind we don’t know what the rules are, but still. 🙂

It’s a good Friday.

Cosmetics

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I was browsing through my Feedly app this morning looking at all the feeds I am tracking with the site and I ran across a site which displayed what it would look like if a woman applied 365 days worth of makeup in one day. It was gruesome. She looked, at the end, as if her face was melting. It was downright ghastly.

Which got me thinking about cosmetics. All the things that women do to make themselves “look beautiful” and that of course started me thinking about a chain of thoughts all linked one to another and the further I went the more silly it got. Now, none of this is actually honestly an argument, but it is a inside look as to one way I carry on with coming up with these ideas.

There is a constellation of things that some women do to themselves in order to make themselves look beautiful. Now I would posit that this is a fallacy right from the get go, why can’t a person who is hygenic and unadorned not be considered honestly beautiful? Eh. So let’s carry on with all the playing blocks to this chain of thought. Women adorn themselves with various bits and pieces. High heels, shoulder pads, brightly (sometimes colored) skin applications to the face, lipstick, eye shadow, eyebrow shadow, lip gloss, mascara, and of course, all the shaving. Shave the arms, the legs, the face. Pluck pluck pluck, wax wax wax.

What have women done? They have changed their shape and their form, at least when it comes to high heels and shoulder pads they have elected to become taller and more masculine, especially with the shoulder pads. The accidental overloading of shoulder pads is where the real comedy gold lies, women can sometimes accidentally have too much shoulder and look foolish because they stop looking like women and more like… linebackers.

Oh god, is this where it’s going? Bright colors, ruddy cheeks, colorful lips, tall, pronounced shoulders, it really argubly starts to feel like a relatively unfocused gender warp. Women are attempting to become beautiful by emulating men? Does the application of cosmetics and all the other bullshit that men expect women to go through masculinize them? When you get dressed up, are you on your way to becoming a drag king?

But then there is all that shaving. Denial of body hair. Which creates a very specific condition of masculinized pre-pubescent adrogyny. Male-boy-male. That’s really troubling to think about. At the end, could it be that the entire cosmetic industry, the entire cultural structure that women have been sold, about how they should look, be thin, be hairless, be tall, have pronounced shoulders, look aggressive, look excited… where do you go when you play all this out? Where do you end up?

Do you end up with straight men fetishizing women through the lens of unfocused pedophilic homosexuality? You turn your women into lithe young men who just ran 5 miles. The sheen of sweat (shiny), the red lips, the shoulders, the hairlessness, the ruddy cheeks, the tallness…

Boys who do Girls like their Boys… Ahem.

Not that it actually is this way, but what if it was?

Automatic Tag Generator for DayOne Journals synced with Dropbox

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Here’s how I created a system to automatically sync up keywords to tags in DayOne Journal. The journal is stored on my Dropbox, so if you have it in iCloud, I don’t know what you’re going to do.

First Step: Get text list of tags in a text file: (do this in the entries folder of your DayOne Journal, cd to it, if you can’t, google-fu.)

find . -type f |xargs sed -n “/<array>/,/<\/array>/p”|grep “<string>”|sed ‘s/<[^>]*>//g’|sed “s/^[ \t]*//”|tr -d ‘\011’|sort -f|uniq > tags.txt

Then copy this tags.txt folder to your home directory. Edit the file, be careful of phrases in XML that would confuse the system, Weather, Apple, DTD, String – that sort of thing, also be very careful around TLA’s as they can have unintended side effects. The later scripts that do the keyword searches don’t give a damn about cases, so your keywords or your KeYwOrDs will be equivalent.

You’ll need two more scripts. This one adds tags based on keywords passed to it as parameters: (be VERY careful, little L and capital I look very much the same, read man pages, yo)

tag.sh:

#!/bin/bash

cd /Users/username/Dropbox/Apps/Day\ One/Journal.dayone/entries

find . -type f -print0 |xargs -0 grep -L “<string>”$1″</string>”| xargs grep -li “”$1″” |xargs grep -l “<key>Tags</key>”|xargs -I file /usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c “add Tags:Key string “$1″” file

find . -type f -print0 |xargs -0 grep -L “<string>”$1″</string>”| xargs grep -li “”$1″” |xargs grep -L “<key>Tags</key>”|xargs -I file /usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c “add Tags array” file

find . -type f -print0 |xargs -0 grep -L “<string>”$1″</string>”| xargs grep -li “”$1″” |xargs grep -l “<key>Tags</key>”|xargs -I file /usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c “add Tags:Key string “$1″” file

Next, you’ll need another script called updatetags.sh, looks like this:

#!/bin/bash
cat /Users/andy/Dropbox/Apps/Day\ One/tags.txt|xargs -n 1 /Users/andy/tag.sh

The last bit will be a new LaunchAgent, so go to ~/Library/LaunchAgents and mock up a plist file by copying one from there, if you need an example, try this:

more ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.andymchugh.tag.plist
<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC “-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN”
“http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd”>
<plist version=”1.0″>
<dict>
<key>Label</key>
<string>org.andymchugh.tag</string>
<key>ProgramArguments</key>
<array>
<string>/Users/andy/updatetags.sh</string>
</array>
<key>StartCalendarInterval</key>
<dict>
<key>Minute</key>
<integer>00</integer>
<key>Hour</key>
<integer>06</integer>
</dict>
</dict>
</plist>

The name of the LaunchAgent has to be unique and the inside name (<string>org.andymchugh.tag</string>) should match the file name like you see here. Swap out the com bit for org, and forget the plist bit. This script will run every day at 6am. You can flavor it to your liking.

Then the final command to tie it all together:

launchctl load -w com.andymchugh.tag.plist

So now, when you write DayOne Journal entries you can mark up the tags.txt file that lives in your Dropbox. Value added, if you change this file anywhere, Dropbox will make sure it syncs up with all your other systems, so you can edit it and forget it pretty nicely as long as it’s not open-for-editing when your script fires off at 6am. That would be messy.

The first time you do it, you’ll notice your Dropbox churn for a long while and then all your other connected Dropboxes will churn as they sync up. Your iPhone and iPad will have huge downloads to do, but they’ll catch up well enough. As you create new DayOne Journal entries you can rest assured that your script will be doing keyword searching for you on your behalf and hooking up your tags to your DayOne Journal entries for you.

Just one more thing automated and out of the way. Hooray!

P.S. Backup your Journal, DIY. Be safe, be smart, learn how to use tar. man tar. Read it. Live it. tar is your delight and your savior. 🙂

EDIT: tags.sh needed a cd command first, otherwise it would just wander aimlessly. Sorry about that.

Tag Painting in Day One Journal

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I’ve been really enjoying DayOne and they have recently updated their app so that the iPad, iPhone and Mac Apps can all create and manage tags. What’s been missing is a way to blast in tags based on keywords.

In this example, every time I have a journal entry with “Scott” in it, I want it to be tagged “Scott”.

Here’s how I did it:

1) Open Terminal, go to ~/Dropbox/Apps/Day One/Journal.dayone/entries

2) FOR FILES THAT DON’T HAVE TAGS, A TAG SECTION, PAINT THE SECTIONS WITH THE TAG

find . -print0 |xargs -0 grep -L “<string>Scott</string>”|xargs grep -l “Scott” |xargs grep -l “<key>Tags</key>”|xargs -I file /usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c “add Tags:Key string ‘Scott'” file

3) FOR FILES THAT DON’T HAVE TAGS, DON’T HAVE A TAG SECTION, CREATE TAG SECTION

find . -print0 |xargs -0 grep -L “<string>Scott</string>”|xargs grep -l “Scott” |xargs grep -L “<key>Tags</key>”|xargs -I file /usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c “add Tags array” file

4) Then go back to #2 and re-run it. Everything that has your text should be tagged with the text you choose.

Swanky! The only thing you have to watch out for here is the little l (little ell) looks a lot like a capital I (capital-eye) – might be best to copy this into a browser and set the font to Courier just to make sure before you run it, also, the last xargs does the changes, so skipping out on that might be smart. I can’t make any guarantees that it’ll work, but as far as I can tell, it works great!

YMMV. Careful.