Jon Simpson’s Weblog

The results of my summer exams & first year at university came out today, a pretty uneventful process but I was very happy with the outcome. I managed to achieve a Distinction from my first year of CS with a Year in Industry at UKC, and it seems like a good way to round out the year. Read the rest of this entry »

So the Free Speech Coalition managed to get a block from 2257 investigation of their members, as members seem to fall under the scope of ‘plaintiffs’ in the Free Speech Coalition et al v. Alberto Gonzales case which forms their main thrust against the legislation.

2257 is nothing new, and something the webmasters dealing in ‘primary production’ have been dealing with for quite some time to keep on the right side of the DOJ. This latest move, to qualify distributors and republishers as ’secondary production’ and classify them under the same record keeping statutes as primary producers, is absurd. It literally means US webmasters could face criminal charges and possible imprisonment over missing documentation for any pictures on their website, no matter what the source. European and foreign webmasters don’t escape lightly either, as 2257 compliance is increasingly urged by sponsors.

Here’s hoping this doesn’t stand and the situation is rectified back to record holding at the primary producer (something that I consider perfectly acceptable and *common sense*) rather than this documentation hell supposedly being enforced ‘real soon now’.

Recently, i needed to write some scripts to deal with large numbers of websites that needed screencapped, thumbnailed and uploaded. Not wanting to attempt to get Windows to peform this task, I obviously looked to my powerbook’s bash scripting capabilities to get the job done. In doing this, i was stopped in my tracks by a need to resize and change the format of images without user intervention. Of course, the first thing I started looking for was a build of imagemagick, but a few posts on mac specific bulletin boards pointed to a cleaner solution.

That solution is sips. The “scriptable image processing system” by self-description and a tool built right into Mac OS X, using all of the format support and output support available to the OS.

sips -s format jpeg test.png --out test.jpg
sips -s format jpeg --resampleWidth 100 test.png --out test_small.jpg

This powerful tool is quite obscure, and infrequently mentioned a lot, so I figured I’d flag it to the attention of anyone who may care. OS X users can type man sips to get a whole load of useful information about parameters and additional options.

In a fit of activity, I’ve upgraded this blog to the latest WordPress software, and the change seemed like a good time to change the design to make it more soothing to the eye. Exams are over and the summer break is kicking off, so I’m hoping to post more here in the coming months.

A few points (in no particular order) on the new version of Mac OS X, Tiger.

• Safari: I like the new error pages a lot more than the modal error sheets the previous versions had, works much better with the tabbed browsing ‘thing’. The RSS reading is nifty but I’ve found it pretty useless as it doesnt follow the subscription concept and seems to be more of an RSS ‘viewer’ than anything else. Rendering fixes and speedups were mostly delivered on 10.3.9 as Safari 1.3 anyway, so those aren’t as attractive as perhaps they might have been
• Mail.app: At first glance Mail.app seemed to have turned for the worse, with its odd new design, but as I’ve used it I’ve grown to like it. The interface design is clean and obviously its integration with the OS search has made it increasingly powerful. (I keep over 2,000 e-mails in my Inbox, mostly due to my faith in the abilities of OS X to let me find what i want quickly..)
• Finder: The rumoured improvements to the Finder were one of the main reasons I considered Tiger a ‘must-have’ upgrade. 10.3 handled networks badly, and doing file copies from SMB shares frequently caused the beachball of doom. The new Finder seems better on this account, and the way it updates folders in realtime has been helpful. (Previously the Finder seemed to update whenever it felt like it, and unlike windows, there was no forceful Refresh command). A bug that isnt too great is the way it ‘forgets’ about the Superdrive in my powerbook (giving 0×80020025 as an error when blank media is inserted, saying the disc drive is not supported). Force quitting & relaunching Finder fixes that, but its something that should have been addressed in 10.4.1 (which I’m running at this point)
• Dashboard: Dashboard has novelty value and the effects that make it the most obvious thing to show off on a Mac running 10.4. However, a lot of the default widgets are variably useless and have annoying problems (the clock changes to ‘night’ mode at 6pm fixed, the widgets take a while to wake up when activated). I find I’m not using Dashboard at all, which considering Expose took around a week to become essential to me, is not a good sign for its utility.
• Spotlight: *This* is the reason 10.4 is great, for me. It brings the ability to find information that I’d been enjoying in Mail (to avoid having folders & structure) to the entire operating system. Within 10 minutes of installing 10.4 I was finding things I didnt even know were on my PowerBook. Its ability to show all the different kinds of information about a keyword on one screen is incredibly helpful, almost creating tiny workspaces for what’s important/active right now.
• Keychain Access: This app is great, just because it allowed me to finally get certificates sorted on my powerbook. My mail server at UKC uses certificate issued from a non-standard root CA, and I’d had great pain trying (and failing) to get the certificate recognized under 10.3. A little work with Keychain Access on 10.4 (and knowing that you have to add a root CA to the X509Anchors keychain) managed to get everything working properly and Mail to stop prompting me about the mail server certificate finally. Trivial, but its the little things that sometimes matter the most.

The end, for now. I’ll probably add more stuff as I get to grips with it, but Tiger has been fun to use and toy with between my exams. A few little mishaps along the way haven’t really taken the shine off the new OS, and I’ll probably roll it out to the other few Macs in my household sometime in the near future. (I paid the extra for a family pack because I actually appreciate what Apple bring with these updates).

An entry to bring this weblog back to life.. About time.

I finally broke down and ordered Tiger. I read enough about it through Slashdot and several blogs that I decided it would be worth the cash. Apple’s decision to remove the Family (5 licence) pack from the education store was a bit annoying, but the extra outlay and lack of discount are bearable. Can’t wait to play with Spotlight and many of the other cool things (but mainly the improvements to file change notification in the finder).

The complete absence of any recent entries here is mostly due to 1) first year exams & 2) some pet projects, not sorted by order of time consumed. I’m working on webapps for the first time in a while, and its been strange coming back to PHP from Java. Thinking in OO when your language isn’t entirely capable of handling it can be frustrating at times, but the approach seems to work reasonably well.

Dokuro:~/sites/fp/classes jon$ cat *.php | wc -l
    3699

PHP isn’t a great language, but its practical in terms of web application building. The application itself works surprisingly well, and once the development storm is over, I might write about some of the interesting problems it’s posed during development. Its quite an elaborate system, and I intend to pick through it at some point to optimize as far as possible (plenty to do for the summer..)

I intend to pick up blogging again after my exams end in June, so I’m hoping there’ll be a more frequent flow of entries here.

(Addendum: I also have a new toy to play with. It’s been taking liberal chunks of my spare time away, but I’m not complaining.)

Ok, so the replacement for my previously damaged PowerBook arrived today. It’s as expected, and at this point I think I’m going to wait a few days before making any sweeping statements about its functional state.

Again, it seemed just as I had got used to the iBook, the PowerBook came along and impressed me with its vastly superior keyboard, screen and performance. Read the rest of this entry »

Further to my last post about spaced paths and SCP, I ran into SCP not particularly liking the laggy and low-bandwidth nature of the connection I was using it over. This caused some problems with it stalling in the middle of transferring files. As SCP seems to overwrite files it has already started retrieving, and this issue seemed to be cropping up quite a lot, I decided to look for a better way.

That better way is rsync, and its been working fine for the last 18 hours or so in retrieving a remote directory structure via ssh.

I’m using a command like
rsync -ave ssh --progress --stats 'user@host:/path/to/spaced directory/' /local/path/spaced directory/

Where I already had the path in /local/path/spaced directory/ existing. If the directory doesn’t already exist, a command like the following would probably have worked better.

rsync -ave ssh --progress --stats 'user@host:/path/to/spaced directory' /local/path/

Where /local/path/ is where the folder the target directory structure is meant to end up under. I’m using the progress and stats flags because of the nature of the link, and its handy to be able to see at a glance how far the transfer is through a particular file.

Getting this method working between my systems was a reasonably simple job. At first I assumed since the destination (iBook) had rsync, I might not need it on the other end, but that turned out to be wrong (rsync didn’t give a very helpful error about it though..) I grabbed rsync for the Windows system on the other end through Cygwin and everything worked a treat.

These last two posts will probably have seemed rather basic to anyone with decent Linux knowledge, but I keep finding more ways the Unix underpinnings of OS X can help me out like this, and it really adds value to the platform. Also since I seem to use these commands infrequently, these kinds of notes on syntax usually end up in tiny text files buried in my home directory. Letting them out onto the web, where I can find them again from other systems is more useful in my opinion, than having them hidden away somewhere.

Ok, so whilst trying to copy a directory structure from one of my Windows boxes at home, I had an issue getting scp to like the pathnames & filenames (they contained spaces). I’ve looked up the answer to this before as its affected me previously, but this time it took 10-15 minutes of googling. So I’m going to post it here for future reference.

scp 'user@host:/Path/Some Filename With Spaces' [destination]

As I was in the process of moving all of my e-mail, documents and other trivial pieces of data back to the iBook pending the PowerBook’s departure, the large difference between the two hit me. Having gone from the iBook to the PowerBook, I had obviously noticed the improvements that the new system had brought, but I hadn’t directly compared the two. This was mostly due to the iBook being used as an access point for the time being, so it had just been sitting around.

Using the iBook for serious tasks after using the PowerBook clearly shows the difference, and they’re worlds apart in my opinion. The best way I found to sum it up was the following:

The iBook is a good computer. The PowerBook is a good Mac.

So, here’s to waiting for the PowerBook’s replacement. Hopefully before the end of term? (March 17th).