I just don’t get why there is comment spam on my blog. Thanks to Akismet it all gets sorted into the spam category automatically. I don’t even see the junk, so what’s the point of even sending it? If the spam is never seen, isn’t it just a monumental waste of time?
So, for this that like sending me comment spam, send away I guess. It’s a waste of time and electricity. It’s monumentally stupid. I’m not even seeing it. Just notice a number and click “Empty Spam” and that’s it!
I subscribed to the Notify service from the Weather Channel. It was cheap and easy and kept me alerted to weather issues. They just sent me my “FINAL NOTICE” at 12:23am last night because my work credit card was replaced and they couldn’t auto-bill me. Then at 12:24am they sent me another email telling me that my account was cancelled.
I’ve been lazy about deciding whether to keep or kill this service. It’s more annoying than useful and now that there are apps galore that alert you over the phone, something like this is just a waste of money.
I think I’ll let the entire thing just lapse. They have cancelled my account, let it rot where it dropped. Feh.
Perhaps in all the fleeing Google I just assumed that apps like Flipboard are just going to roll over and play dead. Turns out, they aren’t. They state that we’ll be able to sync our Google Reader in the Flipboard infrastructure without Google. There is some vague “Everything will be ok, don’t run away” coming out of Flipboard, but users like me really would like the nitty gritty details. In what way will the July 1st outage actually do for Flipboard users? I suppose I can wait a few months while Flipboard figures it out. The feedHopper app is still quite good, but Flipboard does beat it out visually for me. I wish the Flipboard app devs would post something geekier than “Don’t Panic”, it would really help me, uh, not panic.
My abandonment of Google Reader is complete now. I have found an app that is independent of Google Reader, it’s called feedHopper and it’s available on the iOS App Store. It means that I’ll only be able to handle my RSS feeds on my iPad, but that’s okay, since that was where I wanted them to be anyways. The app is quite handy, you can set up Google Reader as a sync service, hoover in your feeds and then disconnect. Kicking Google Reader to the curb as it were. It comes feature complete with lots of sharing options including my beloved Pocket service.
I don’t think I’ll ever go back to Google Reader. I’m happy with what I’ve got. I recommend this app to anyone who used to use Google Reader. Now it’s time to dump all the apps that only work with Google Reader. In a way, Google dropping reader put a bunch of iOS devs out of business. Poof. Like that. That’s what happens when you hitch your horse to Google. You’ll need a 55 gallon drum of lubrication for what is coming. HA HA Dangly Bits.
Google just announced that their RSS Service, Google Reader is slated to be shutdown on July 1st, 2013. This upsets me greatly but I’m not really surprised. There was never any real traction for the service and they let the web component of it languish in the past. There was some noise that they were going to integrate the social features into Google Plus. Good luck with that.
What does this mean for the majority of users out there? Nothing really. I would say that if Google is going to pull the plug, essentially pull the rug out from under their customers by surprise like this, is that you get exactly what you pay for. Google Reader was great, and it was free and now it’s a dead service walking.
I can’t really see Google Plus succeeding against Facebook. That’s the battle to come. So they are reorganizing their infrastructure and pointing it to failtown. Okay. I would say that if you use any other Google product, like Picasa or Blogger, that you should migrate to something else like Flickr or WordPress as soon as you can, because if they kill Reader, who’s to say what’s next? The only thing I am planning to use now is Google Mail, which may be the last refuge for these scoundrels. It’s best to leave of your own volition than to be unceremoniously tossed out on your ass by surprise.
At work I’ve been thinking about a particular system administration subject on and off for a few days now. When Mac is first installed all the “Optional Sharing Services” are all shipped defaulted to off, which makes sense and is fine. Generally speaking I’ve been fine with using Apple Remote Desktop to share the workstation, open System Preferences, and turning on whatever sharing bits I need to have on for the client workstations and that’s that. However that’s not really that elegant and I’ve been looking for a way to programmatically do it on the command line. As it is, Apple Remote Desktop can send Unix commands to connected workstations. All my client workstations are assembled in a neat little pile on my Apple Remote Desktop screen, as easy as you please. How can I turn on or off these Sharing services without having to upset the user. Ideally I want to turn these on without even sharing their workstation, to in a way, do it under the covers.
Enter the command systemsetup. G’duh. There’s even a handy-dandy template in Apple Remote Desktop that I’ve overlooked all these years that even has the details of the options laid out. So, in Apple Remote Desktop, select the stations you want to change, click the UNIX button, in there select the right template, change the user to root and send the command. Moments later, and in this case, SSH is up and running on the client workstation as easy as you please. Boom. No futzing with sharing workstations, no mucking about with System Preferences. Just simple, easy, like I knew had to exist. Now I know how.
This is actually the way I prefer to learn these things. This was something I sussed out, so it’s worth more than if I just spotted it in some bit of documentation. It took time and energy and it’s mine. The solution is worth something to me, and so I blog about it so I can celebrate Mac OSX and keep a little log in case I forget in the future. It’ll always be here.
Hooray for Mac OSX!
What a problem this was! We had a user with a MacBook Pro that had a new copy of Macintosh OSX Mountain Lion 10.8.2 running on it. Plugged in a rinky-dink HP LaserJet 1505 and nothing. Even though there was the exact same printer installed before, from the user’s home, the system refused to reuse the connection for the printer at work. Obviously that has to be because the system notices it’s a different device and refuses to play along, which I find stupid.
Plug in the printer, try to add it, and the Add Printer function goes out to Apple Software Update to look for the driver and then comes back and tells us that nothing is available. Then commence zombie debugging via muzzle flare, wandering around in the dark trying to fix what shouldn’t be happening but apparently is beyond all logic and reason.
So how you do diagnose a Mac? Here’s a handy-dandy guide which anyone can use to fix their Macs. I seriously doubt any issues ever survive this particular procedure:
At this point your system should be all spic and span and whatever niggling bit was bothering you should be dealt with. Of course, for the problem I had to deal with at work, there is one little thing extra, one thing more. Open Finder, click Go on the Menubar, then Go to Folder… and type in /Library/Printers and click Ok. You’ll see a list of folders. In this list find the folder named “hp” and KILL IT WITH EXTREME PREJUDICE. Y’arr! This !@#$ folder is at the very center of my hatred for all that is Hewlett-Packard. I’ve started to unceremoniously refer to them as Fudge Packard. Bastards. Anyways, killing the folder does the trick, it clears everything up and Mountain Lion can download software from Apple again for the HP Drivers – blah blah blah. I’d rather just get a sledgehammer and pound the HP LaserJet 1505 into foil, but hey, you have to cope or have some sort of attack. I regret buying HP. I regret the LaserJet 1505. What a piece of crap. Steaming.
There is an issue I have at work, something I’ve written about before in my logs that I’ve found a solution for that I feel I can blog about. I can’t really talk about the why behind all of this, but I can share a technical explanation of how I am addressing this problem. It’s a half-thing, bear with me.
At Western, I’m very interested in the number of open TCP connections that a workstation has open at any one time. I don’t care what state the connection is in, ACK_WAIT to any of the others, if there is a line, I want to know about it. Specifically I want to know how many lines there are. Mac OSX is based on Darwin, and Darwin is based on BSD – so you get a shell to work with when you start Terminal.app. There is a lot of power in the command line interface and once you get the hang of it, it’s really quite useful.
So remote stations, at least two of them I have turned on “Remote Login” in their Sharing applet in System Preferences which enables the machines SSH servers to answer incoming connections. I can use SSH to call up a command line window to those remote stations, feeding them commands. I have done this for a long while for our servers in the office but this is the first time I’ve seriously done this for workstations. So, with this connection established I want to collect the number of TCP connections that machine has established. On the command line there are lots of pieces to get this to work:
First, you need a loop structure so that the command happens regularly:
while true; do [command]; sleep 60; done
This will run a command every 60 seconds and it will never end unless I send a Control-C character which represents “Break” to the shell.
At first I just needed to count how many connections. You get this number, or at least an approximation of it this way:
netstat -p tcp|wc -l
That calls netstat to list out all the TCP connections, which then I pipe, using the pipe character ‘|’ to another command called wc, which calculates word-counts. I make wc ignore words and just count lines by using the -l switch. I don’t really care what other stations my targets are communicating with, just a count of how many. And yes, technically the SSH connection inflates this by at least one connection, it’s not intended to be forensic.
But something was missing. I need a date stamp. In BSD, there is a command called date, and you can give it a format so you can make date write out the Hours, Minutes, and Seconds the way you want to see them, but date has an annoyance to it. The command date always inserts a ‘newline’ character at the end, so what you’d get is a date, a new line, and your count. It’s okay, but it’s annoying. It would be far better to get rid of that newline character altogether. Enter in the ‘tr’ command, which translates characters. In this case, we tell tr to just delete the newline character, so ask date for the right sort of date, have tr nail off that newline at the end because it’s annoying and…
while true; do date '+%H:%M:%S '|tr -d '\n'; netstat -p tcp|wc -l; sleep 60; done
This outputs a very nicely formatted report on a remote workstation. So now I have datestamps, connection count levels, and when the count gets to a certain number and things happen, I can be faux-psychic.
UPDATE: Apparently I just can’t leave well enough alone. Seeing a slow parade of numbers trot by is rather dull when all I really want to know is when these numbers say, get over 70. So…
while true; do test "$(netstat -p tcp|wc -l)" -gt 70 && (date '+%H:%M:%S '|tr -d '\n'; netstat -p tcp|wc -l;); sleep 60; done
While screwing around with my blog today I did notice something missing that I used to enjoy from the Plinky site that I used to use for blog prompts for interesting things to write about. WIthin Plinky you could put a word down and search Flickr for images you could use in your blog. That was a really cool feature and it made including pictures in my blog very easy. I didn’t have to worry about stealing photography from someone else as it only used pictures that were released under the Creative Commons licensing model. Since I don’t make any money from this blog, the Creative Commons has really helped out.
![051 of 365 - Droste Effect [Explored]](http://www.windchilde.com/bluedepth/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/051_of_365__droste_effect_explored-300x300.jpg)
So I went looking. I could still futz around with Google Image search which is annoying as you can’t define a default (only Creative Commons licensed) search that I could find – yes, you can go in afterwards and mark up an Advanced Search, but it’s annoying. In fact, I don’t want to ever leave the WordPress interface at all! So, thanks, perhaps, to PhotoDropper Plugin I won’t have to. I’ve seen some people complain about it but so far I haven’t seen any of the damage they have noticed on my blog. If the plugin behaves itself, I’ll enjoy it. Let’s see how it works with this post. 🙂
We had a Firewire 800 drive botch when it came to whole-volume encryption in Mac OSX 10.8.2 Mountain Lion. We lost the password and couldn’t recover it. The drive refused to erase, all the options were grayed out. I refuse to believe that a software change can render hardware junk, so there had to be a way, and I found it. Here’s the procedure: