“Cliclick” is short for “Command-Line Interface Click”. It is a a tiny shell / Terminal application that will emulate mouse clicks or series of mouse clicks including doubleclicks and control-clicks at arbitrary screen coordinates.

via Cliclick – Carsten Blüm: Mac Development.

This is such a nifty little tool. Want that shell script to do something?

Of course in the words of John Lennon – “Imagine there is no right-click”

This one goes out to all the night owls. As much as I love my iMac, I was surprised to see how little control it gave me over the screen’s brightness. I often work on my iMac late at night in an otherwise darkened room, and even at the lowest brightness setting, the iMac is really, really bright. All of the Mac laptops I’ve used have the ability to dim the screen down to completely dark, but the iMac does not.

via Monitor too bright? Put on some Shades:

A debugger is a program that facilitates debugging, which may be casually defined as the process of finding and fixing “bugs” in the object of interest: usually a piece of software, firmware, or hardware (although debugging may apply to any domain).

via hfsdebug: A Debugger for HFS Plus Volumes.

My daughter’s music CD for her skating short program got badly scratched and because it was the last-but-one copy as skater you need many copies, in case you loose/forget/scratch/misplace it,  I was confronted with the task to create a new copy. Rather than starting Nero on Win-XP notebook, I have decided to learn finally how to do it on Mac. It must be simple, intuititive and much easier than on Windows. Right ? Wrong To my big surprise, there was no easy, idiot proof, very obvious way mac-ish drag and drop way how to acomplish it. It was not exactly hard either, but it actually took consulting the omniviscent Google to find it out. To save the search for the next time, I’ll write it down. Here is what you have to do:

1 Create a disk image from source CD

Insert the source CD the one you want to copy

Open the Finder, open Applications, then Utilities, and start the Disk Utility program

In Disk Utility, select File -> New -> Disk Image from Folder

The Finder will appear – select whole CD and click on the Image button

A new dialog box will appear. In the Where box, choose Desktop. In the Image Format box, choose DVD/CD master

Click Save

Now a new file will be created on your Desktop, titled the name of your CD with a “.cdr” extension. This file is a disk image of your CD. Btw, it works even if you do not select cdr format and write disk as generic Disk Image .dmg.

Now you need to burn it on new, blank CD:

2 Create new CD from a disk image

Eject your original CD from the CD drive

Return to the Disk Utility program.

You should now see the disk image of your CD on the left hand side, typically at the bottom of the list. Select the image, and then click on the Burn button

Follow the directions and insert a black CD-R disc when prompted

You can repeat step 2 as many time you need, of course . Next time I am going to use the image, of course assumed that it will be still the same music. Thanks to Spotlight magic, I am sure I will be able to find it, because I used proper, descriptive and obvious name “track 86.cdr”. Just kidding .

What do you think – why did not Apple make this process easier – as they did for many other chores ? Has it maybe anything to do with the fact that copying CD can be and quite often is used for copyright violation activities ?

via How to duplicate CD on a Mac « Miro’s World.

As with any other network service, Screen Sharing has a set of virtual “ports” which isolate network traffic for that protocol since it and web traffic and other network services are all using the same IP address and connections. These ports must be opened in all network devices for all computers involved in the screen sharing sessions. This means firewalls on the local computer, as well as any routers or hardware firewalls must also be set up to pass traffic on the following ports:

TCP: 5900 – 5902, (3389 for connecting to Windows machines)

UDP: 4500 (for Back to My Mac users)

Depending on the network devices used, these ports can either be opened completely, or forwarded to the local IP address for the desired computer, but you will have to consult the documentation for your router to see about how to change these ports. Additionally, if your router supports “UPNP” (Universal Plug & Play) or “NAT-PMP” (NAT Port Mapping Protocol), then it should work for Back to My Mac. The list of routers in this Apple Knowledgebase article are some that support Back to My Mac and other screen sharing.

via Tutorial: Screen Sharing in Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5): How it works and how it doesn’t – MacFixIt.

I really need to get around to making the firewall behave for screen sharing.

When using iChat with NAT routers and firewalls, certain ports must be open to allow video and audio conferencing behind a firewall. Some devices have these ports open by default, while others require configuration.

via Using iChat with a firewall or NAT router.

Check out the cool things listed under
Go>Front / Back Matter

Fun

Date-shifting in iPhoto 08

I get a lot of requests to add date-shifting support for iPhoto 08 to my iPhoto AppleScripts. But in most cases, the scripts would be completely unnecessary, iPhoto finally built this feature into the application. Here’s how to use it.

Date-shifting in iPhoto ‘08.

This is a nice and handy thing. I can finally get all of my “web-saved” images into a sensible spot.

Sed is the ultimate stream editor. If that sounds strange, picture a stream flowing through a pipe. Okay, you can't see a stream if it's inside a pipe. That's what I get for attempting a flowing analogy. You want literature, read James Joyce.

Anyhow, sed is a marvelous utility. Unfortunately, most people never learn its real power. The language is very simple, but the documentation is terrible. The Solaris on-line manual pages for sed are five pages long, and two of those pages describe the 34 different errors you can get. A program that spends as much space documenting the errors than it does documenting the language has a serious learning curve.

Do not fret! It is not your fault you don't understand sed. I will cover sed completely. But I will describe the features in the order that I learned them. I didn't learn everything at once. You don't need to either.

Sed – An Introduction and Tutorial.

This HOWTO covers how to enable building with ccache. It is a compiler cache. It uses the gcc -E switch and a hash to detect when a compilation can be satisfied from cache. The effect is that packages frequently compile 5-10 times faster than they would otherwise.

We’ll see how this changes behavior – installed 2008-06-06 05:00:00

To prevent events from being logged at all for changes to a particular volume, simply create a file named no_log in the .fseventsd directory on that volume. And in case it doesn’t go without saying, FSEvents honors the Mac OS X access control rules; you cannot receive events about directories that you don’t have permission to read.

I wonder if I could place a no_log on my clone volume and keep it when the rsync happens?

The description of FSEvents is short and to the point. Something a deep-down OS geek can appreciate

I knew that *something* had to be keeping track of changes – 20 seconds for an hourly Time Machine backup is nice and unobtrusive.

This advanced article describes how to perform some common Mailman tasks:

Reset Mailman to defaults
Back up Mailman data
Restore from a Mailman backup
Migrating from one server to another

Remote Desktop Connection Client lets you connect to a Microsoft Windows-based computer and work with programs and files on that computer from your Macintosh computer. Remote Desktop Connection Client for Mac 2.0 (Beta) includes the following new features:

The Image Events application is used by AppleScript to control the SIPS architecture. It has no visual interface and presents no menus, windows, or dialogs for user interaction. It is intended to run invisibly as a background process, only accessible via AppleScript commands.

Automator is a powerful technology for building custom workflows. But sometimes you need functionality that the existing actions don’t provide—functionality that could be easily accomplished using the shell with a scripting language like Perl, Python, or Ruby. With Custom Shell Script actions, script developers can quickly turn their work into Automator actions.

Top 15 free SQL Injection Scanners
Friday, 18 May 2007 – 15:05 EST  |  Tools, Web Security, Network
While the adoption of web applications for conducting online business has enabled companies to connect seamlessly with their customers, it has also exposed a number of security concerns stemming from improper coding. Vulnerabilities in web applications allow hackers to gain direct and public access to sensitive information (e.g. personal data, login credentials).

Just wanted to say thanks to Michael Wise for taking time out today
and providing me with a great set of forensic tools and techniques
for locating message queue IDs, and using postcat on the queue to
view actual messages/headers. Now I can start the real investigation.
Haven’t found the offending script yet, but am getting closer.

Notes from my conversation with Michael, for the archives:

* First, find suspicious looking lines in /var/log/mail.log

* Look for the smtp ID, such as: postfix/smtp[25897]

* Grep for other instances of that ID in the log: grep 25897
mail.log

* From there, youÂ’ll be able to see postfix queue IDs, such as
159A347C89C

* You can use this queue ID to find deferred messages in the
postfix queue

* cd /var/spool/postfix/

* Find where in the queue directory hierarchy this message
lives: find . -name 159A347C89C

* The messages are stored in a format not easily readable. To
make them readable, use the postcat command, e.g. postcat deferred/E/
E9B8F4F0E7C

* Now you can see the real message, with all of its headers,
which should give you a lot more info about its origins. You can see
whether it came from outside, or if it comes from a process ID, there
should be some indication. If user is www, you know itÂ’s coming from
a web script.

* To delete a message from the queue, use e.g.: postsuper -d
E9B8F4F0E7C Do not use the path with this command – just the queue ID.

Other tools:

Monitor incoming network connections, filtering out legit traffic on
port 80:

netstat -na | grep EST
netstat -na | grep EST | grep -v ‘\.80 ‘
netstat -na | grep EST | grep ‘\.25 ‘

To find files or dirs owned by www (that might be illegitimate):

find / -user www -ls

In case attacker named directories with spaces or other weird chars
in them:

find / -user www -ls | cat -vet -

(take your cat to the vet – itÂ’s sick)

Thanks also to others who responded on this.

Best,
Scot

–
Scot Hacker, Webmaster
Graduate School of Journalism
UC Berkeley

http://journalism.berkeley.edu

Readline shortcuts
GNU Readline is the library used to make advanced command-line wizardry convenient and conistent across a multitude of command-line applications. These programs include bash, bc, ftp, gnuplot, gpg, ksh, mysql, psql, python, smbclient and xmllint.
The cheatsheet at the right contains a summary of many of the useful line editing command shortcuts which are available in all applications that use libreadline.