dfbills.com blog

Well-known industry trender, Netcraft, has recently observed a spike in popularity of the Lynx web browser- particularly since the recent Pwn2Own competition.

Apparently growing concern over vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari are driving users to the hardcore Lynx browser.

“Lynx has not once suffered a buffer overflow in its image processing, and indeed has suffered no security vulnerabilities at all in the last 2 years.”

More details (and laughs) on my favorite April fools story of the day over at Netcraft in “Deluge of Browser Security Issues Drives Mass Migration.”

The LaunchAgent file “com.google.keystone.agent.plist” is used to activate the Google Updater on each boot and every 2 hours while logged in.  The file is located here:

~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.google.keystone.agent.plist

Pretty sneaky to slip it in as a LaunchAgent without notifying the end-user, but hey- it gets the job done.  I’d guess that Keystone was the internal code name for the product.

Today, I noticed that my Transmit favorites were not properly syncing across computers.  Upon closer inspection, one machine did not have the “Transmit Favorites” entry in the MobileMe PrefPane. 

I fixed this by unregistering, then re-registering the sync client using the following two commands.

~/Library/Application\ Support/Transmit/TransmitSync.app/Contents/MacOS/TransmitSync—unregisterClient

~/Library/Application\ Support/Transmit/TransmitSync.app/Contents/MacOS/TransmitSync—registerClient

While researching how to get the Firefly Media Server working on iPhone firmware 2.1, I found the answer (yet again) on RupertGee’s iBlog.  This time, he’s included resources for controlling the server with BossPrefs.

Because I do this so infrequently and always wonder why I haven’t posted it before-

Editing a crontab:

crontab -e

i for insert mode
esc to command mode
ZZ to save and exit

Dan Frakes has a nice writeup on AppleJack 1.5 as part of MacWorld’s Mac Gems series.

It’s surprisingly easy to get remote applications up and running in Apple’s X11 environment.  Once installed on your Mac, fire it up and add one additional parameter to your remote SSH connection +X.

ssh -X .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Once you’re in, just start the application you want from the command line.  Here, I typed “firefox” and now I have firefox 3 running in its full X11 glory on a remote computer.

More detailed information can be found on Apple’s Configuring and Running X11 Applications on Mac OS X page.

My favorite system maintenance tool, AppleJack, has finally been released for Leopard.

AppleJack down and dirty, but user-friendly troubleshooting tool for Mac OS X.  It runs in Single User Mode and runs as a menu-based app for ease of use.  This allows you to troubleshoot a computer even when the GUI isn’t available and without using a boot CD. 

I’ve been spending a large amount of time in the MacOSX terminal lately.  Naturally, I had to install a few fun terminal toys: (yes, I know both been out for a while)

Visor: gives you keyboard shortcut and slick animation to reveal a terminal window, similar to the Quake console

GeekTool: is a PrefPane that can overlay terminal output on your desktop.  Very useful for watching system logs, graphs or any long-running process

To run a cron script every 30 minutes, specify minute intervals of both on the hour and 30 minutes past the hour separated by a comma.

0,30 * * * * wget http://dfbills.com > /dev/null

And to suppress email notifications:

0,30 * * * * wget http://dfbills.com >> /dev/null 2>&1

The >> /dev/null 2>&1 part sends the standard output to /dev/null and redirects standard error (2) to the same place as standard output (1).