Ok, MacBook Pro is an ugly name for a cool Machine. Missing PC-Card sucks.

But now for something completly different.

I often wondered why the all-UTF-8 MacOS X does not support out-of-the-box UTF-8 in the Terminal.

To enable UTF-8 in Termial.app that do the following:

Change .inputrc to

set completion-ignore-case on

set meta-flag ON

set input-meta On

set convert-meta Off

set output-meta On

set show-all-if-ambiguous On

and set the window preferences of the Temrinal windows to

1. Encoding has to be UTF-8
2. Change non-ASCII to Escape squence has to be set on

That's it. To bad all the OS X tools (ls, vim, etc.) don't use that, so you have to use DarwinPorts or Fink to build those from the source. Be sure to set the locales correctly.

Sometimes you have a application running wich you do not want to be shown in the Dock. In my instance it is HardwareGrowler a utility that shows changes of device configuration (IP, Cable Connection status, mounted volumes, etc.) via the Growl notifications. Very usefull!

But there was no option to disable the visibility of the Icon in the Dock. So did some research and it came up that the most easy way to do this is the following:

• Reveal the application bundle contents in the Finder (Ctrl-Click + Show package contents).
• Edit the file named Info.plist in a text Editor.
• If not present add an entry to this XML-File or change an existing entry till it reads:

<key>LSUIElement</key>
<string>1</string>

• Touch the bundle according to this hint: touch /applications/HardwareGrowler.app
• Relaunch the app
• Notice the abstence of any icon in the Dock and the Cmd-Tab bar
• Enjoy!

Update: Since I get a lot of Google hits for this article I thing I should add some infos:

• All the keys in the Info.plist and what they do is explained here
• LSUIElement can do more. Details here
• Dockless is a tool that conveniently takes care of the editing for you.
• HardwareGrowler really should get an option for this. If I would be better at Cocoa I would do it, but I will use it as an exercise.
• CocoaDevCenter has a Wiki page dedicated to this topic

As promised my backup script

#!/bin/sh
OPTIONS="-azqe ssh --delete"
HOSTNAME=hostname
BACKUPDIR="/backup/$HOSTNAME"
BACKUPUSER="auserforbackup"
BACKUPHOST="some.server.i.use"
TOBACKUP="/var /etc /home"


for item in $TOBACKUP
do
   rsync $OPTIONS $item $BACKUPUSER@$BACKUPHOST:$BACKUPDIR
done

Is run via /etc/crontab in the following manner:

SHELL=/bin/sh
PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin


m h dom mon dow user  command

42 4    * * *   root    /usr/local/sbin/backup

This way each night a backup of the most important stuff is refreshed. Each week a snapshot of this directoy is stored away onto another disk and at the end of each month the last snapshot is burnes to DVD. This should keep me safe from to much dataloss.

If this themes to extreme for you think about the basic rule of backup:

• Backup as often as you can afford to loose it all

The weekly and monthly scripts will be next.

...backups - they say.

From now on I will miss all the fun. A backup script rsyncs the important parts of my hosted servers to a external FireWire harddisc of my Cube. Every night.

Rsync rocks.

And the best is that each month another script automaticly creates the backup-DMG, splits it to nice 4.5 GB pieces then Growl messages tell me to put a DVD into my DVD-Recoder for each piece.

MacOS rocks (thats the reason I looked into launchd). I'll put the scripts up tomorrow.

After a very bad night - very very bad indeed I am happy to announce:
And of I go! In about 20 hours I will be on my way! Out! Away! To one of the most beautifull places in the world - sadly leaving behind the most beautifull women in the world.
Ich denke an dich.

I just did a short AppleScript to notify me of new files that are dropped in a folder via Growl. This is done via folder actions. Maybe someone would like to use the script, too, so here it is:

on adding folder items to this_folder after receiving added_items try
tell application "Finder"
set the item_count to the number of items in the added_items
end tell
end try
if item_count is greater than 1 then
set pluralor to "files were"
else
set pluralor to "file was"
end if

set the desc to item_count as text
set desc to desc & " new " & pluralor & " added to " & return
set desc to desc & POSIX path of this_folder

tell application "GrowlHelperApp"
notify with title "New file" description desc icon of application "Finder"
end tell
end adding folder items to


In realtion to my post yesterday about my failiure to open my PowerBook - i should have considered these instructions - that it should have worked. Very detailed instructions indeed and if something breaks you know where to get new stuff.

Thanks to Mr. DeCSS, you could free your - legally bought - DRM files from the iTunes Music Store, but now there is a convenient program, that does this for you in the background, without you having to know anything.
I am not allowed to use this, because braking copy protections is illegal in Germany since last year. One could argue, that a protection, once broken is void, but the lawyers think different of course, because that i where the money lies. That is how the system works.
But for those of you living in a country where it is still allowed to free your property of it's digital bounds, you could use iOpener.

Just a short note:

Ever wanted a Real One Player without the spyware and annoying "Get Plus Player" stuff?

Get it here - for Linux, OS X and Windows ;-)

Thank you BBC!

I finally found some time to configure my exim SMTP server. As I mentioned before I wanted secure connections to the Server. For that reaseon I told my Debian apt-get install exim-tls. This packege has (as you of course have guessed by it's name) TLS support compiled in. I still havn't unserstood where exactly the difference between SSL and TLS is; both are always mentioned together and sometimes even used as synonym (in Mail.app for instance where you can check the "Use SSL" Box for SMTP servers, but it does TLS). Both methodes (SSL and TLS) reliy on a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) with the common CA model, the same thing you need when you use https. OpenSSL is, as I mentioned in another posting, relatively complex, to say the least. I already have a certificate for the IMAP server, but I cannot use this one, because is has a diffent fomat - grr. When you use the Debian tool for configuring exim (eximconfig Who would have guessed that?) and you got the exim-tls package installed it offers you to create a certificate for you, wich is a Good Thing^TM - but for some reason the certificate is only valid 30 days, which is just a little bit to short for my tase. Well, it seems I need to fiddle a little bit with OpenSSL before I can really use the server in daily buissenss. Another problem if you want to setup a mailserver, which sends mail for each of your mail adresses, because all of those freaky little freemail providers an even my university mail server do not offer encrypted mail transfer (which is a real problem if you are in a lot of untrusted networks) is relaying. Normal people (even with static IPv4 adresses - Want IPv6. Want it now) are considered as possivble spammers by a lot of ISPs. Well you cannot really blame them, but with more than 60% (!) of al email communication being spam one could argue that it doesent really matter and that the real time blacklists and dial-up list etc. don't stop any spamer who really wants to spam, but makes a lot of internet peer a kind of second class internt peers. The problem is that most people don't care - as usual. There are a lot of good exim tuturials and mailsever tuturials around the net - the ones which helped me most are: http://www.debianhowto.de/howtos/de/exim3/index.html and http://sites.inka.de/~gaetano/exim4.html

So much for today - stay tuned I'll talk a little bit more about the exim configuration in the next couple of days and post the final configurations in a little howto when everything is done.