Ethan Fast » Apple

Security: Simultaneously Weak and Amusing

Ethan — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 16:38:29 +0000

At the urgings of a friend, I recently set up a script that takes a picture (with iSight) every time the lid of his MacBook is opened. To be fair, the sense in which I actually did any work is quite marginal, as two tools — ImageSnap and Sleepwatcher — handle any aspect of the setup that might reasonably be considered complex.

As you might guess, ImageSnap is a command line tool for taking pictures with iSight. Likewise, Sleepwatcher is a system process that can be setup to watch for various events (e.g. startup, sleep, wake, ect.) and execute specified external scripts when such events occur. Effectively, all I needed to do was compose these two helpful utilities to get the ‘security system’ up and running. Here is the bash script that Sleepwatcher executes on wakeup:
tre=`date "+%Y-%m-%d--%H-%M-%S.jpg"`
~/Programming/ImageSnap-v0.2.4/imagesnap mv snapshot.jpg ~/Pictures/security/${tre}
To get Sleepwatcher up in the first place, setup launchd to run something like the following:
/usr/local/sbin/sleepwatcher --verbose --wakeup ./take_pic.sh
Of course, much more complex variations can be managed. For instance, if you think a mugging might be in the cards, then you can have the pictures sent to an externally accessible server (perhaps along with intermittent system screenshots). In any case, I recommend checking these tools out.

How I develop on OSX

Ethan — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 02:06:20 +0000

It recently occurred to me that I’m dumb. I certainly don’t mean this in any pejorative sense (after all, that would be abrasive to the ego), but rather I would suggest it as regards a behavioral pattern that I tend to follow. Roughly, said pattern goes like this:

Identify problem
On the grounds of theoretical purity, construct needlessly complicated solution.
Implement solution.

For instance, a few days ago I wanted to put together a small rails application. There was nothing earth shattering in this; I simply wanted to get a quick prototype up and running. So I update my gems, do a quick `rails prototype/` command, and boot up the empty app. It fails.

Ok, so I do the natural thing; I google the error message or whatnot; I search for a few minutes. Well, it has something to do with Snow Leopard, that much becomes clear. This begs the question: does any bug ever not have something to do with Snow Leopard? But I won’t adress that here. Anyhow, there is an obscure solution, under which I’d have to edit manually my rails installation — something like that, anyway. But I’m not going to do that. I try some earlier versions of rails and it’s dependancies — they fail for some other reasons.

I’m sure that I could have figured it out, had I dug around for a while. I might have, with work, discovered the vagaries behind why the same programs, with the same (nominally) installed dependancies exhibited opposite behaviors on different machines. But no, by next month I’d probably just have a new and similar problem. So I do just what any irrational fellow ought to; I decide to install a virtual Arch distro (my favorite) with VMware fusion, mount the machine as a disk via ssh, and develop from there. At least in Arch, I will know exactly what is installed, where it is, and how it ought to be working. Basically, I eliminate the free variable of imprecise ignorance regarding everything that’s on the machine, and whether I’ve hacked it up manually. Of course, god forbid that I give up TextMate and actually code directly on a linux machine. Emacs is awesome for my more lispy projects, but I like TM for rails.

To be clear, the blame here is almost entirely on me. However, given the recent announcement of the iPad, I feel that it’s become the custom to lay down some hate. So here goes: Apple, you ought to implement a decent package management scheme. Some inconsistency with something I had installed (or worse, you put there) was messing things up. Sure, one might say that I use pacman (or yum, or insert-reader-favorite) as a crutch, and I’m fine with that. In particular, said management helps prevent people like me — overly exuberant installers and occasional hackers of who-knows-what – from messing up systems.

So on the one hand, I get what I want. Things tend to work on Arch, and updating is only a `pacman -Syu` away. On the other hand — yeah, I’m dumb.

OSX Package Management

Ethan — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 13:45:10 +0000

A few days ago, I was discussing Snow Leopard with a recent OSX convert. For the record, this person remains primarily a linux user — a stalwart patron of Fedora — but he had very recently acquired a unibody Macbook. As I am similarly a user of both linux and OSX, this came as music to my ears. Curious, I asked him to name the biggest flaw in his shiny new laptop.

It did not take long to get an answer, and the answer I got left me decidedly unsurprised. Having come from the linux world, he was disappointed with the state of package management on OSX. My thoughts exactly.

Now, before every random reader writes me off as an idiot and troll, let me qualify this opinion. Yes, I have heard of Macports (so had the person with whom I was conversing). Macports, as awesome as it is, has always seemed to me a bit too much of a hack, and at its best, a less than ideal solution. I miss the feeling of complete integration I get with something like pacman and Arch. These thoughts have only gained strength since the release of Snow Leopard, where half the programs I need will not install — not simply, anyway — under the macports system. Why, when I first open the beautiful packaging of an Apple computer, can I not begin to explore all manner of open source goodness? Why is there no native management system, along the lines of apt-get, yum, or pacman?

I will readily admit that these complaints fall well within the I want a pony mentality. But that said, what difficulties (or possibly, incentives) prevent Apple from establishing an official package management system? Is it simply not worth the time required to do so? Legal issues? I am young and ignorant, so quite honestly, I’d like to hear more experienced thoughts on the matter.