The Hobbs Family

Building the AppStore version of Growl

2011-11-07T11:54:12-08:00

The latest versions of Growl are only officially available through the AppStore. The AppStore version is now a paid app. For those of you who don't want to pay for it, the source code is still freely available and BSD licensed.

Here's how to build the latest Growl version from source (those who don't want to compile the source themselves but still want the latest Growl for free, check the links at the bottom of this post for my own build). You'll need Xcode and mercurial.

Clone source code repository: hg clone https://code.google.com/p/growl/
Change to the growl directory: cd growl
Build: LC_ALL="en_US.UTF-8" xcodebuild -project Growl.xcodeproj -configuration Release -target Growl.app CODE_SIGN_IDENTITY="Don't Code Sign"
Copy Growl.app to /Applications: cp -rp build/Release/Growl.app /Applications/.

My latest build is linked below (may be out of date. If it is, leave a comment and I'll build the latest).

New site for my Python code

2011-10-31T13:50:19-07:00

I created a new site for my Python code: http://www.pyhacker.com

All my Python code will live there for now on. I'm copying over the python articles from this site to that one although I won't delete them from here. All new Python related content will be posted at the new site.

Mounting box.net account on Ubuntu

2011-10-25T12:17:08-07:00

For those who don't know, box.net is offering 50GB of free storage to iPad and iPhone users for a limited time. I signed up for an account and wanted to access this 50GB from my headless linux box. Box.net offers access through WebDAV so the first thing I tried was mounting via davfs2. Mounting worked but I was unable to access any of my directories. File access was fine but creating a directory resulted in an html file instead.

As a workaround, I stumbled across a FUSE filesystem called boxfs. Mounting my box.net account via boxfs works great and everything is working as it should. Here's how I got it working:

Install dependencies: $ sudo apt-get install libxml2-dev libfuse-dev libcurl4-gnutls-dev libzip-dev fuse-utils
Compile and install libapp:
- $ git clone http://github.com/drotiro/libapp.git
- $ cd libapp
- $ make
- $ sudo make install
Compile and install boxfs:
- $ svn co http://boxfs.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ boxfs
- $ cd boxfs
- $ vi Makefile (add -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 to the end of the FLAGS line)
- $ make
- $ sudo make install
- $ sudo ldconfig
Create box config file ($ vi ~/.boxfs) and add the following info: username = email@domain.com mountpoint = /mnt/box.net verbose = yes secure = yes password = password largefiles = yes
Change permission of config file: $ chmod 600 ~/.boxfs
Create the mountpoint you specified in the config file: $ sudo mkdir /mnt/box.net
Mount the directory: $ boxfs -f ~/.boxfs

Install OS X Client as a guest inside VMWare Fusion 4

2011-09-14T16:06:29-07:00

Today, VMWare released version 4 of Fusion. They add the ability to install Lion Client and Server versions but Leopard and Snow Leopard are only supported in the Server versions (due to EULA issues).

As an educational exercise, I installed Snow Leopard Client version as a guest. Here's how:

Create a new VM. Select Snow Leopard Server as guest type
Edit the .vmx file that's created and remove the line: firmware = "efi"
Download the modify.sh script attached to this post and run in like: sudo ./modify.sh
Start the Snow Leopard VM and immediatly press F8
You should get a boot menu with 3 options:
1. c: Boot DVD
2. h: Boot first Hard Disk
3. e: Eject DVD
At this point, control click the CD icon and change the drive to use the physical DVD drive (make sure you've already inserted your retail Snow Leopard disk first)
Back in the VM, press "c" to load from disk
Wait a few seconds and you should get the install screen
After installing, eject the install disk and reboot the VM
Install VMWare tools and the attached Ensoniq audio driver for sound

Adding a Software License Agreement to a DMG file

2011-07-28T15:16:34-07:00

This thread has moved to my new site here: http://pyhacker.com/archive2011/adding-software-license-agreement-dmg-file/

As part of the software distribution process I go through at my job (Qforma, Inc), I package up our software for both Windows and Mac. For Windows, I create an installer using NSIS which requires a user to agree to a Software License Agreement (SLA) before installing the software. For Mac, rather than using an installer, I have a customized disk image (DMG) that contains the app and a symlink to the /Applications directory.

Since we require a user to agree to our SLA before using our software on Windows, I wanted to require the same on Mac. I searched the internet for an easy way to add an SLA to a DMG and couldn't find a solution that didn't involve using a third party GUI program. Of course all my build processes are automated and run headless so those GUI programs won't work for me. I also wanted to use utilities built in to OS X (or available through Xcode).

Anyway, I figured out how to add an SLA to a DMG and was able to add it to my automated build process. I figured I'd create a simple python script that'll do it too and share it with everyone.

To use the script, make sure Xcode is installed to the default location (/Developer). Download the file, make it executable, then simply run:

./licenseDMG.py

where dmgFile is the path to your DMG file and licenseFile is the path to your plain ascii text license file.

Hopefully someone else will also find this useful.

Oh, and I use the with statement in the script so it's python 2.6 (or python 2.5 if you add from __future__ import with_statement to the top line). If you use the default system python, that means this script works on OS X 10.6+.

Fuse4X

2011-07-21T14:41:13-07:00

Last year, I started running the 64-bit Snow Leopard kernel so I had the need for a 64-bit compatible build of MacFUSE (since using sshfs is part of my daily routine). MacFUSE has been abandoned since 2008 so there was no 64-bit build available. I found some instructions to hack the MacFUSE source to allow it to build for a 64-bit kernel but there were some major problems with that, the main one being concurrency issues. Because of the instability of the hacked MacFUSE library, I stopped using it and had to revert to using the 32-bit kernel instead.

Then, in September of last year, Tuxera released some patches for MacFUSE that enabled a safe 64-bit build. They implemented some locks that fixed the concurrency issue of the other hack.

Early this year, MacFUSE was forked into a project called Fuse4X. Fuse4X implemented Tuxeras patches and brought the project up to date with the latest fuse sources. Fuse4X is actively being developed and works great on 32-bit and 64-bit kernels, Mac OS X 10.5 and up (Intel only). I'm running it on Lion and it's working great! Here's the link to download the latest build: Fuse4X

If you still want to use MacFUSE on 64-bit Snow Leopard or Lion, use this build: MacFUSE.pkg.zip

comcap.py - Comcast internet usage script

2011-04-21T08:37:34-07:00

This thread has moved to my new site here: http://pyhacker.com/archive2011/comcappy-comcast-internet-usage-script/

Yesterday I wrote a little python script that grabs your current Comcast internet usage and prints it to stdout. It depends on the excellent mechanize module so if you don't have it, install it with easy_install.py mechanize.

To run the script, simply execute comcap.py. You will be prompted for your Comcast username and password. Alternatively, you can create an entry in your ~/.netrc file with your Comcast credentials. The entry should look like:

machine login.comcast.net
login username@comcast.net
password password

where username is your Comcast username and password is your Comcast password.

I'll be running this in a cron job every few days to monitor my usage and send a warning email to myself if the usage gets near the limit. Hopefully someone else will also find this useful!

Hello

2011-02-06T15:41:42-08:00

It's been a while since I've posted anything on here. A lot has happened since my last post. The biggest news, of course, is the birth of our second son, Milo, on January 16th!

Some other things that have been going on are:

Grandma's birthday celebration in SLC in December
LOTS of work
New church calling

Anyway, be sure to check out our blog for pictures of Milo! If you've forgotten the address, it's http://blog.thehobbsfamily.net.

On an unrelated note but something I wanted to mention is we got a Guru Plug to play around with at work. I set it up with asterisk and FreePBX and now I'm in the process of trying to compile the ztdummy module for the default kernel it ships with. I've been running into some problems, the main one being the unavailablity of the kernel headers for the GuruPlug. If anyone can point me to those headers (or a ztdummy module compiled for the default GuruPlug kernel), let me know!

AT&T 3G in Santa Fe, NM!

2010-11-15T10:32:56-08:00

As of today, Santa Fe, NM now has AT&T 3G! It's about time! Now I might actually be able to use the data connection on my iPhone...

Backing up a directory over SSH

2010-09-10T13:27:08-07:00

Today I got an email from the IT department at UNM informing me that they'd be deleting my account in two weeks (I graduated December 2008 so I guess this was bound to happen eventually). Anyway, I still had a bunch of stuff on UNM's linux boxes that I wanted to keep so this is how I backed up my home directory:

ssh jmhobbs@linux.unm.edu "tar cfz - ." | cat > linux.unm.edu.tar.gz

What this is doing is tarring up everything in my home directory (with gzip compression) and sending it to stdout. I'm grabbing that info from stdin and writing it to a file.

Maybe someone else will find this useful.

PS. Here's how to do it in reverse:

tar cfz - . | ssh jmhobbs@myserver "cat > /home/jmhobbs/backup.tar.gz"

#FreeStuffFriday on twitter

2010-09-02T09:35:30-07:00

This thread has moved to my new site here: http://pyhacker.com/archive2010/freestufffriday-twitter/

So [@Sega][1] has been giving stuff away on twitter every friday in a promotion they call [#FreeStuffFriday][2]. All you need to do to win is direct message them with the key phrase at the right time. I wrote a script to help me win and it's actually worked a handful of times. The hardest part is trying to estimate the amount of time to wait to be the right respondent. Anyway, twitter just flipped the OAuth switch so I updated my script to work with that. I'm attaching it for whomever would like to use it. You need simplejson and oauth installed (easy_install works for both of those) and the python-twitter and oauthtwitter modules which I'm also attaching to this post.

[1]: http://twitter.com/sega [2]: http://twitter.com/#search?q=#FreeStuffFriday

To use this script, first you'll need to follow [@Sega][1] on twitter. Next, you need to register a twitter app by going here: http://dev.twitter.com/apps/new.

After that, fill in the consumer_key and consumer_secret variables in the script.

Run the script! Good luck!

YouTube

2010-08-13T19:58:29-07:00

It's official: Mario is addicted to YouTube. He loves watching it on the iPad and not on a regular laptop or on TV. What a funny kid.

Family BBQ

2010-07-25T13:18:02-07:00

So yesterday we had a fun family BBQ. Jenny cut up all the fruit and vegetables and made the sweet potato fries and I did the grilling. We cooked a bunch of hamburgers, bratwurst, polska kielbasa, bacon and green chiles over some nice charcoal briquetes. Half way through cooking the meat, it started pouring. You can't really tell from this photo, but it was really coming down hard. I looked like I had jumped into a swimming pool. That's the New Mexico monsoon for you!

Here's what my second burger looked like. Kind of hard to tell from this photo, but it's go everything on it: meat, cheese, bacon, green chile, tomato, onion, barbecue sauce, and avocado. I had two of these, a bratwurst with bacon and green chile, and some kielbasa with bacon and green chile. It was awesome.

We also had salad provided by my sister in law Shauna and jello salad made by my sister Jessica. My Mom brought cookies for dessert.

Thanks for the fun night guys!

Flexget configuration

2010-07-20T09:05:00-07:00

This thread has moved to my new site here: http://pyhacker.com/archive2010/flexget-configuration/

Here's how I've configured my Flexget install:

In ~/.flexget/config.yml:

presets:
  global:
    email:
      active: true
      from: siteowner@example.com
      to: user@example.com
    transmission:
      host: localhost
      port: 9091
      removewhendone: true
      ratio: 1.0
  movies:
    download: /path/to/Movies/
  tv:
    series:
      settings:
        hdtv:
          quality:hdtv
          timeframe: 2 hours
          set:
            path: /path/to/TV/%(series_name)s/S%(series_season).02d
        720p:
          quality: 720p
          timeframe: 2 hours
          set:
            path: /path/to/TV/%(series_name)s/S%(series_season).02d
        480p:
          quality: 480p
          timeframe: 2 hours
          set:
            path: /path/to/TV/%(series_name)s/S%(series_season).02d
    hdtv:
      - Series Name 1
      - Series Name 2
    480p:
      - Another Series Name
feeds:
  ezrss:
    rss: http://www.ezrss.it/feed/
    preset: tv

Make sure to change the email settings, feed settings, and show list!

And I have this line in my crontab: @hourly /usr/local/bin/flexget -v --cron > /home/<username>/log/flexget.log

Make sure to replace <username> with your own user name!

I can haz bumper?

2010-07-18T17:00:12-07:00

So even though I can replicate the iPhone 4 signal attenuation problem on my phone by bridging the antennas, I have yet to be affected by it. I received my phone a couple days prior to the official launch and have had nothing but positive experience with it. Voice calls are clearer than my previous two iPhones and internet service seems faster too. My only complaint is my fear that I'll drop the phone and shatter one or both of the glass panels; the oleophobic coating on the glass makes it extra slippery.

Which brings me to the point of this brief post: Apple announced at it's press conference on Friday that it would be giving away free iPhone bumpers as a gesture of good will. Sure they spent most of the conference pointing fingers and doing their best to not admit fault, but they finally did cave in and promise us a free case. I, for one, am looking forward to my free case, not as an ad-hoc solution to the iPhone signal attenuation problem, but rather as a way to keep from physically dropping my shiny, slippery, new toy. Thanks Apple!

Cartoons

2010-07-11T14:37:09-07:00

Here are the cartoons I've been watching:

Adventure Time! This show's great! Probably the best show airing right now.
Futurama Season 6!
SpongeBob Squarepants What can I say? SpongeBob is the coolest undersea invertebrate ever!
Phineas and Ferb This show is hilarious. Makes me want to get a pet platypus.
Flapjack Another great show from Van-Orman.

Jenny thinks it's weird that I watch cartoons even when Mario's not around. I disagree.

Flexget

2010-07-09T21:48:06-07:00

[Flexget][1] rocks! I setup flexget on our little [Sheeva Plug][2] media server a few months back and have to say I'm extremely pleased. All the TV shows we want to see are automagically downloaded to a NAS drive so we just fire up [Boxee][3] on the [Apple TV][4] and catch up on the shows we missed. If you haven't checked it out before, do it!

[1]: http://flexget.com/ [2]: http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/p-22-sheevaplug-dev-kit-us.aspx [3]: http://www.boxee.tv/ [4]: http://code.google.com/p/atvusb-creator/

New backend

2010-07-08T12:54:39-07:00

So I've wanted to move this website to Django for a while now (it was previously using Drupal) and I finally got around to doing it. I've migrated all the posts from the old site over but unfortunately I couldn't migrate the comments. Oh well. The new comment system is powered by Disqus. The Blogger integration is done using an awesome Django app called django-blogger. Since this site is new, there's probably gonna be a lot of bugs and some downtime. I'm keeping the old site up for the time being, and it's now located at . All new content will be posted here.

UPDATED: MacFUSE 2.1.7 BETA for 64-bit Snow Leopard and Macfusion 2.0.4 for Snow Leopard

2010-04-22T18:57:52-07:00

UPDATE: The MacFUSE build below was a quick hack to get it working but has some problems with locks. There's another build floating around with a working lock implementation, version 2.1.9 (download link here). However, another fork of MacFUSE popped up called Fuse4X which is actively maintained and has working 64-bit builds. I'm using it on Lion right now and it works great! Here's the link to the downloads: Fuse4X

If you were using the hacked build below, use this instead!

[MacFUSE][3] is currently compiled for a 32 bit kernel. If you're running the 64 bit kernel like me and need to use MacFUSE to mount sshfs, you'll need to compile the app from source. Or, you can download it here, along with a Snow Leopard build of Macfusion. [Macfusion][4] is a GUI frontend to MacFUSE which lets you easily setup SFTP and FTP mounts.

[3]: http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/ [4]: http://www.macfusionapp.org/

Back online!

2010-02-13T19:09:03-08:00

We're back! After about a month of downtime, we're back online! The site is now hosted off the amazing Sheeva Plug Dev Kit.

Published comments

2009-10-10T19:17:03-07:00

So I published a couple things today and noticed that I had accumulated pages and pages of (mostly spam) comments that had not been published. I went ahead and browsed through them, deleting most of them, but I came across a handful of real, legitimate comments and went ahead and published them. (For the record, they were from January to March of 2009). So I apologize for the tardiness and hope this won't happen again. I have been so busy with my new job and trying to sell our house that I had been neglecting this website. So for now, I turned on CAPTCHAs and turned off comment moderation. Hopefully the CAPTCHAs will deter the spam bots and the lack of comment moderation will ensure that any legitimate comments will be published immediately, and not 7-9 months late!

MacVim 64-bit nightly builds for Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard

2009-10-09T19:10:07-07:00

Since I couldn't find any prebuilt 64 bit MacVim binaries for Snow Leopard, I decided to provide a nightly build here. You can download it by clicking this link: MacVim nightly build

For more information, check out the MacVim Google code site: MacVim

UPDATE: The official nightly binaries are now being built as universal 32/64 bit binaries. You can get the official nightly binary here. However, the official nightly has no Perl support and uses Python 2.5. My nightly has Perl enabled and is build against the default Snow Leopard install of Python 2.6. The full list of enabled features in my nightly build is as follows: arabic autocmd browse builtin_terms byte_offset cindent clientserver clipboard cmdline_compl cmdline_hist cmdline_info comments cryptv cscope cursorshape dialog_con_gui diff digraphs dnd emacs_tags eval ex_extra extra_search farsi file_in_path find_in_path float folding fork() fullscreen iconv insert_expand jumplist keymap langmap libcall linebreak lispindent listcmds localmap menu mksession modify_fname mouse mouseshape mouse_dec mouse_netterm mouse_xterm multi_byte multi_lang netbeans_intg odbeditor path_extra perl postscript printer profile python quickfix reltime rightleft ruby scrollbind signs smartindent statusline syntax tag_binary tag_old_static tcl terminfo termresponse textobjects title toolbar transparency user_commands vertsplit virtualedit visual visualextra viminfo vreplace wildignore wildmenu windows writebackup xim

House for sale

2009-08-26T18:53:34-07:00

For those who don't know, our house is for sale! The house is listed for $112,000 and is a great deal! For pictures and more information, check out this page: http://house.thehobbsfamily.net UPDATE: We sold the house in December.

Call forwarding codes for AT&T

2009-08-19T19:18:23-07:00

When to forward	Enable	Disable	Check
Unconditional	21[10-digit-number]#	#21#	*#21#
Busy	67[10-digit-number]#	#67#	*#67#
No reply	61[10-digit-number]#	#61#	*#61#
Unreachable	62[10-digit-number]#	#62#	*#62#

Autism Awareness

2009-04-04T19:20:15-07:00

Watch for the Red Flags of Autism (The following red flags may indicate a child is at risk for atypical development, and is in need of an immediate evaluation.) In clinical terms, there are a few “absolute indicators,” often referred to as “red flags,” that indicate that a child should be evaluated. For a parent, these are the “red flags” that your child should be screened to ensure that he/she is on the right developmental path. If your baby shows any of these signs, please ask your pediatrician or family practitioner for an immediate evaluation: No big smiles or other warm, joyful expressions by six months or thereafter No back-and-forth sharing of sounds, smiles, or other facial expressions by nine months or thereafter No babbling by 12 months No back-and-forth gestures, such as pointing, showing, reaching, or waving by 12 months No words by 16 months No two-word meaningful phrases (without imitating or repeating) by 24 months Any loss of speech or babbling or social skills at any age

* This information has been provided by First Signs, Inc. ©2001-2005. Reprinted with permission. For more information about recognizing the early signs of developmental and behavioral disorders, please visit or the Centers for Disease Control at www.cdc.gov/actearly.

Private blog

2009-03-10T19:22:08-07:00

This is just a post to tell everyone that our blog is now set to private. So if you click on the blog tab at the top, the latest post you see will be the last public post that we made. If anyone wants access to read our blog, please contact us with your email address. UPDATE: It's public again.

Connect to an NFS share on Ubuntu from OS X Leopard

2009-01-05T19:23:03-08:00

This is another note to myself in case I forget. I still have a server at home running Ubuntu and I have a few shared directories through NFS. NFS support is built into OS X but there's some things you need to do on the server side to be able to connect correctly.

First of all, I'm assuming your NFS shares are all correctly setup and working. Maybe another day I'll write up a short tutorial on how to get that up and running. Anyway, to be able to connect correctly from OS X, some UID and GID maps need to be established. (Since your user and group IDs are most likely different on your linux and OS X boxes). Without setting this up correctly, you'll most likely get an error similar to incorrect username and password. To fix this, you simply need to add an entry to /etc/exports and add a static map somewhere (I put the maps in /etc/nfs).

Here's a sample entry from my /etc/exports file:

/mnt/fileshare wario(rw,async,insecure,map_static=/etc/nfs/wario.map)

/mnt/fileshare koopa(ro,async,insecure,map_static=/etc/nfs/koopa.map)

These two lines let both wario and koopa (both of these are the hostnames for two different Leopard boxes) access the directory /mnt/fileshare over NFS, but only wario has read-write access (koopa has read-only access).

The contents of wario.map and koopa.map contain the UID and GID of my accounts on the OS X boxes mapped to the UID and GID of my account on the linux box. To find out your uid and gid on both OS X and linux, open up a terminal and type id. Here's what wario.map looks like:

# remote local uid 501 1000 gid 20 1000

After making these changes, restart the nfs server and you should be able to connect to the linux NFS shares from Leopard without any problems!

(Command+K, nfs://server/path/to/share).

Install AnnWrapper (scikits.ann) on Windows XP

2008-07-31T19:24:31-07:00

This thread has moved to my new site here: http://pyhacker.com/archive2008/install-annwrapper-scikitsann-windows-xp/

ANN (Approximate Nearest Neighbor) is a C library for both exact and approximate nearest neighbor searching in arbitrarily high dimensions. I've been trying to use SWIG to wrap this library so I can use it in Python. Today I found out that someone had already done it! The project is called scikits.ann. They even have an already-to-use egg file for OS X 10.5. Since my primary operating system is Leopard, I installed the egg file and tried it out. Everything worked great! I needed to use this library under Windows XP also, however, due to some things at work. Here's how I got everything working.

First of all, make sure you have Cygwin installed (with the MinGW32 tools). We'll be using Cygwin to compile ANN. Also make sure you have Python 2.5 for Windows XP installed and Numpy. You'll also need configobj, and obviously setuptools to be able to install the configobj egg. After all those files have been successfully installed, continue as follows (all these commands are within a Cygwin shell).

Compile and install ANN

Download from http://www.cs.umd.edu/~mount/ANN/Files/1.1.1/ann_1.1.1.tar.gz Download the Windows XP Makefile from http://scipy.org/scipy/scikits/attachment/wiki/WindowsBuildInstructionsForAnn/annwinstuff.zip Untar ann:

$ tar xfvz ann_1.1.1.tar.gz

Copy the annwinstuff.zip file into the ann_1.1.1 directory and unzip:

$ unzip annwinstuff.zip

Edit the ANN.h header file:

$ vi include/ANN/ANN.h

Replace lines 75 and 77 with:

#define DLL_API

Build ANN with mingw:

$ mingw32-make -f Makefile.win

Copy ANN includes to Cygwin includes:

$ cp -r include/ANN /usr/local/include/.

Copy ANN library to Cygwin lib:

$ cp lib/ANN.lib /usr/local/lib/.

Compile and install AnnWrapper

Download from http://pypi.python.org/packages/source/s/scikits.ann/scikits.ann-0.2.dev-r803.tar.gz#md5=a0380cdc31fd705c15eb50f483bbe5fb

Edit site.cfg:

$ vi site.cfg

Change ANN_ROOT to:

ANN_ROOT = c:/cygwin/usr/local

Build and install AnnWrapper:

$ /cygdrive/c/Python25/python.exe setup.py build_ext --inplace build -c mingw32 install

Hopefully you'll now have a working install of scikits.ann to use with the Windows version of Python 2.5! See the ANN documentation and the AnnWrapper documentation for information on how to use this module.

Using RSA keys to login to a remote computer via SSH without using a password

2008-07-28T19:25:42-07:00

I tend to remotely login to various different computers through SSH a lot. Typing my password every time I login to a remote machine gets tiresome. This is how to generate public/private key pairs so you don't have to enter your password every time you login through ssh!

First, some terms.

The client computer is the computer you will be logging on from.

The server is the computer where you will be logging on to.

On the client, open a terminal and type:

$ ssh-keygen -t rsa

You will be asked where to save the keys to. Just hit enter to save the keys to the default location (~/.ssh/id_rsa and ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub). When it asks for a passphrase to use, just leave it blank and hit enter (this way we won't need a password). Protect your private key! Now you're going to want to copy your public key to the server. Login to the server and create a ~/.ssh directory:

$ mkdir ~/.ssh

Copy the public key from the client to the server:

$ scp ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub server:~/.ssh/clientname

Be sure to replace 'server' with the server name or address and 'clientname' with the name of your client box. On the server, go to your ssh directory:

$ cd ~/.ssh

If an authorized_keys file doesn't exist, make one now:

$ touch authorized_keys

Change the permissions of the authorized_keys file:

$ chmod 600 authorized_keys

Now copy the key from the client box into the authorized_keys file:

$ cat clientname >> authorized_keys

Again, make sure to replace 'clientname' with the name you gave the file. Now you should be able to ssh from your client box to your server box without having to enter a password. Make sure you protect your private key. If anyone gets a hold of your private key, they will be able to connect to the server box as you!****

Custom BASH prompt

2008-07-28T16:26:54-07:00

Here's the custom bash prompt I use. Copy the following line into your ~/.bashrc file to use it.

PS1='[e]0;wae[32m]nu@h [e[33m]w[e[00;$(($??31:00))m]n$ [33[00m]'

This will display:

username@hostname pwd $

where the $ prompt will be white when the previous command exited successfully and red when the previous command exited with an error code. The username@hostname is green, and the pwd is yellow.

Setting up a PXE boot server under Ubuntu Hardy

2008-07-28T14:27:55-07:00

I thought I'd put this little how-to together since I seem to need a PXEBoot server every once in a while. I have a Motion M1300 TabletPC with no external CD drive so I use my trusty linux box as a PXE server to install different distros to the tablet. This might be something somebody else out there might find useful so here's how to setup a PXE boot server on Hardy with a couple different linux distros.

First step we need to do is install the right packages on our Hardy box. Fire up a terminal and type:

$ sudo aptitude install lftp tftpd-hpa dhcp3-server openbsd-inetd

Now we need to configure the tftp server. Edit the config file with your favorite editor (mine's VI):

$ sudo vi /etc/inetd.conf

Add the following line:

tftp dgram udp wait root /usr/sbin/in.tftpd /usr/sbin/in.tftpd -s /var/lib/tftpboot

Now add this configuration to /etc/default/tftpd-hpa:

RUN_DAEMON="yes" OPTIONS="-c -s /var/lib/tftpboot"

Now it's time to start the daemon from the terminal:

$ sudo /etc/init.d/tftpd-hpa start

Make sure it's running:

$ netstat -lu | grep tftp

You should see one line:

udp 0 0 *:tftp *:*

Now we need to configure the dhcp server:

$ sudo vi /etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf

Here's what I have in my file:

option domain-name-servers 10.0.1.1;
default-lease-time 86400;
max-lease-time 604800;
subnet 10.0.1.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
    range 10.0.1.15 10.0.1.20;
    filename "pxelinux.0";
    option subnet-mask 255.255.255.0;
    option broadcast-address 10.0.1.255;
    option routers 10.0.1.1;
}

Note that I'm on subnet 10.0.1.* and my router is at 10.0.1.1. Make sure your config file is setup with your own network configuration. Start the dhcp server:

$ sudo /etc/init.d/dhcp3-server start

And verify that it's running:

$ ps ax | grep dhcpd

Now we need to download the netboot files from the distros we want to be able to boot. I'll just go through Ubuntu Hardy. Navigate to the tftpboot directory and download the hardy netboot files:

cd /var/lib/tftpboot/

lftp -c "open http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/hardy/main/installer-i386/current/images/netboot/; mirror"

Now boot up the client computer (making sure it's set to PXE boot) and you should be presented with the Hardy installer screen. To boot other distros, download the netboot files for them into the same directory, edit pxelinux.cfg/default to add the other kernels, and edit boot.txt with the alias you gave the distro in the default config file.

Windows XP Remote Desktop over the internet via ssh tunneling

2008-07-16T19:29:58-07:00

This was originally published to my personal blog a few years back when I had the need for some PCAnywhere type functionality but I wanted to do it for free! How to use Remote Desktop over the internet through SSH tunneling.

Requirements:

Windows XP Professional
SSH server and client (I use Cygwin with OpenSSH)
Broadband internet connection (we're displaying an entire desktop over the internet, not just text!)

Steps:

Setup a dynamic DNS forwarding address (or use your static IP address, if you have one)
Download and install Cygwin with the OpenSSH packages
Setup SSH server and open port 22 on firewall.
Make sure Remote Desktop is turned on and you can use it
Create a reverse SSH tunnel
Connect with Remote Desktop

Procedure:

Setup a dynamic DNS forwarding address: If you want to remember your IP address in order to connect to your computer you can skip this step but as for me, I wanted a simple web-style address that I could remember that would update if my IP changed. I used dyndns.com to create a name that would be easy to remember in order to login to my SSH server. You can setup an account with them for free and it allows you to alias a dynamic IP address to a static hostname.
Download and install Cygwin with the OpenSSH packages: Download and install Cygwin on your home computer (the computer you want to connect to.) When installing Cygwin, the default only installs minimum packages. I like to install all packages so click where it says "Default" and it will change to "Install". This way it will install ALL packages. Installing Cygwin with all packages will take a while (even WITH the broadband connection) so go find something to do for a while.
Setup SSH server and open port 22 on firewall: After installing Cygwin, set it up with the mkpasswd and mkgrp commands (type mkpasswd -l > /etc/passwd and after it's done type mkgroup -l > /etc/group). Type ssh-host-config to setup the SSH server on the computer you want to connect to. I usually just go with the default responses. Answer yes to the key generation question and yes to install it as a service. After the ssh-host-config program finishes running, type "cygrunsrv -S sshd" to start the service. Open port 22 on your firewall and/or router. If you use a router because there is more than one computer on your home network, configure the "Port forwarding" option to open port 22 for the IP address of the computer you want to connect to. (If you don't know your IP, click on the start menu, run, and type cmd. In the command prompt that opens, type ipconfig.)
Make sure Remote Desktop is turned on and you can use it: Make sure you have enabled Remote Desktop by right clicking on the "My Computer" icon and enabling Remote Desktop in the "Remote" tab. Click on "Select Remote Users" and make sure you have an account that is allowed to remotely connect.
Create a reverse SSH tunnel: Assuming you've successfully setup the SSH server you're now ready to connect! On your remote computer, (this could be at work, school, etc.; basically, anywhere with a high speed internet connection where you want to Remote Desktop to your home computer), open up a Cygwin prompt and connect to your SSH server like this: ssh -L 3390:localhost:3389 username@servername Accept the key and enter your password to connect. If you don't have Cygwin installed, download PuTTY open it and click on Tunnels under the Connection->SSH category. From there, enter 3390 as the Source port and localhost:3389 as the Destination then click on Add. After configuring the Tunnel, click on Session and enter either the IP address of your home computer or the dynamic DNS address you setup earlier in the Host Name box and click Open. Putty will ask you for your user name and password. If everything worked correctly you should now be logged into your home computer!
Connect with Remote Desktop: Don't close the Cygwin (or PuTTY) window or else the tunnel will collapse. Open Remote Desktop (Programs->Accessories->Communications->Remote Desktop Connection) and connect to 127.0.0.1:3390 Login to your computer!

Copy every nth file

2008-07-16T19:15:33-07:00

This thread has moved to my new site here: http://pyhacker.com/archive2008/copy-every-nth-file/

This is a little gui that copies files from one directory to another directory. You can specify a step to selectively copy files (such as every tenth file, etc). I originally wrote this code to copy every nth pair of stereo images from one directory to another so there's an option for that (if selected, the code assumes the stereo images have a trailing \_0 or \_1 to specify left image and right image. It will copy pairs of images and count each pair as a file). This code requires wxPython. The gui was created using wxGlade. To compile the source to a Windoze binary, make sure you have py2exe installed and run python setup.py py2exe. The executable will be in the dist directory. To compile the source into a Mac OS X app, make sure you have py2app installed and run python setup.py py2app.

Compiling PIL 1.6 for Cygwin and Python 2.5

2008-07-16T18:31:03-07:00

This thread has moved to my new site here: http://pyhacker.com/archive2008/compiling-pil-16-cygwin-and-python-25/

I'm not sure if this is still relevant today, but I had written this on my blog last year so I may find it useful again in the future, I was trying to compile PIL 1.6 to use with my Cygwin-installed python at work and had to do this:

rebase -b 0x1000000000 /bin/tk84.dll

python setup.py build_ext -i

python selftest.py

python setup.py install

After that, PIL built and installed just fine.

Fix kernel panic in my Athlon64 Ubuntu box

2008-06-26T19:33:50-07:00

I'm just posting this because every time I redo my 64-bit linux box, things work great for 5-10 minutes and then I get kernel panics where everything locks up and I end up having to reboot. The magic alt sysreq trick won't work either. (Note: if your linux box freezes up and killing the X-Server by doing a Ctrl-Alt-Backspace doesn't help, try holding down Alt SysReq and typing REISUB while holding down those two keys. It will try to give you back control of the keyboard, safely unmount your drives, and reboot.) Anyway, I'm not sure why but it to solve the kernel panics on my amd64 box, all I have to do is disable power management. Do this by appending acpi=off to each kernel line in /boot/grub/menu.lst.

Stream iTunes music over the internet via SSH

2008-06-26T19:33:00-07:00

At home, we have all our music stored on a linux box. The linux box is running Firefly Media Server to be able to stream the music to our Macs via iTunes. I have a Mac and a Windows box at work. I wanted to be able to listen to my music at work but ddn't want to have to copy the music over. We have a decent internet connection at home (it's serving this webpage) and I decided I might as well stream my music from home to listen to it at work. Here's how.

First of all, you need to be able to ssh into you're box at home. Install the OpenSSH server on you're Ubuntu box by opening a terminal and typing:

$ sudo aptitude install ssh

You'll need to set up firefly by typing:

$ sudo aptitude install mt-daapd

To configure firefly with your music, open a web browser on your linux box and browse to http://localhost:3689. Leave username blank and enter something like password or admin or something for the password (I don't remember what the default is, you can find it in the /etc/mt-daapd.conf file).

You'll also need a way to connect to your box from the internet, either through a domain name you own or a free service like dyndns.org or afraid.org. Now that the mt-daapd server is setup and running and you can ssh into your box from the internet, we need to setup the Mac or Windows box at work.

Mac: We're going to install a program called Network Beacon. It can be downloaded from http://www.chaoticsoftware.com/ProductPages/NetworkBeacon.html. After installing Network Beacon, add a new beacon. For service name, give it something descriptive like "music from home". This name will show up as the share name in iTunes. For service type, type "_daap._tcp." without the quotes. For port number, enter 3689. Check the "Enable Host Proxy" check box and type "localhost" for host name and 127.0.0.1 for IP Address.

Now that Network Beacon is configured and running, open a Terminal and connect to your linux box like this:

$ ssh -N -L 3689:localhost:3689 username@yourlinuxbox

where username is your login name on your linux box and yourlinuxbox is your IP address or domain name. Open up iTunes and you should see your music under shared!

Windows: Use a program called Rendezvous Proxy which can be downloaded from http://ileech.sourceforge.net/index.php?content=RendezvousProxy-Download. I'm not going to go through the process of setting it up but it's pretty much the same as the Mac instructions.

Read/write a hard drive attached to an Airport Extreme Base Station from Linux (Ubuntu)

2008-06-26T19:32:08-07:00

UPDATE 28 May 2013: I've updated the instructions below to work on the latest version of Ubuntu, 13.04 (Raring)

I have an Apple Airport Extreme Base Station with an external hard drive attached to it via the USB port (Air disk). This is how to auto mount it in Ubuntu via cifs.

My linux box is running Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy) and is connected to the Airport Extreme via ethernet. My wife's linux box is also running Hardy and is connected via wifi. Here's how I set it up.

First, we need to configure the Airport base station. Open Airport Utility and click on the Disks tab. Set up read/write support through accounts and setup an account. For this tutorial, I'll say the username was set to 'linux' and the password was set to 'password'.

After setting up the shared disk and accounts, save the configuration (this will reset the router).

In Ubuntu, open a terminal and install the required file like this (the '$' is the prompt):

$ sudo aptitude install cifs cifs-utils winbind

Now you need to edit /etc/nsswitch.conf:

$ sudo vi /etc/nsswitch.conf

Add 'wins' after hosts: files. In my /etc/nsswitch.conf, it looks like this (line 11):

hosts: files wins mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns mdns4

Create a directory where you want to mount the Air disk. I'm mounting mine in /media/video:

$ sudo mkdir /media/video

Now we need to create a credentials file that will be used in fstab:

$ sudo vi /root/.smbcredentials

In this file, we need to put the username and password that has access to the disk. In this example, I was using linux and password, remember? So in this case, .smbcredentials will contain this:

username=linux

password=password

After saving the file, change the permissions!

$ sudo chmod 600 /root/.smbcredentials

Now it's time to add the Air disk to our fstab file:

$ sudo vi /etc/fstab

Add an entry at the bottom like this:

//AirPort/Videos /media/video cifs credentials=/root/.smbcredentials,iocharset=utf8,rw,uid=UID,file_mode=0666,dir_mode=0777 0 0

'Airport' is the name of the base station. 'Videos' is the name of the disk that's plugged into the base station. /media/video is the name of the directory we created to mount the disk under. 'rw' mounts the disk as read/write. If you created a read-only account, this can be replaced with 'ro'. 'UID' should be replaced with your username in linux (or the uid number if you prefer). Now just save the file! Enter this command to make sure it works:

$ sudo mount -a

Assuming no errors, you can now browse your Air disk and read/write to it!

Get Photos

2008-06-26T19:12:58-07:00

This thread has moved to my new site here: http://pyhacker.com/archive2008/get-photos/

This is a simple program that will copy all photos off a memory card to a library directory. It organizes the photos according to date and creates a directory for each date in the following format: YYYYMMDD. After copying photos, it will ask if you want to delete the copied files from the memory card. Any file that the program could not read or copy will be presented in a dialog. This includes non-photo files such as movies. This program requires wxPython and kaa.metadata. It has been successfully tested on Mac OS X and Ubuntu 8.04.

In progress

2008-06-02T19:28:56-07:00

Well, we decided to start over with this website. I don't know how long it's going to take to get everything up and running the way I'd like it so until then, check out the links page and visit some of our other endeavors!