Right now I am running:

• Safari
• Xcode
• Terminal
• Thunderbird
• Adium
• NetNewsWire
• iTunes
• OmniGraffle
• ecto
• Textmate
• InterfaceBuilder
• Quicksilver

1. On the local machine run this (when it asks for a passphrase just hit return):
   
   ssh-keygen -t rsa


2. Copy the newly created file from the local machine to the remote machine and append the key to the correct file:
   
   scp ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub remotemachine:~/.ssh/new_key
ssh remotemachine
cat ~/.ssh/new_key >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
rm ~/.ssh/new_key

What a steal deal, $7 for a whole year of hosting over at Dreamhost. When it took my old host, Hostcentric, over a week to rebuild and restore the server that my website was on I decided it was time to switch. Based off of a friends recommendation, I signed up with Dreamhost and I’ve been very impressed. Want to setup a blog? Then sign up with Dreamhost. They have a one button install of WordPress that kicks ass.

And oh yea, about that deal. Sign up for the Crazy Domain Insane plan for a year and enter the promotion code 777. There you go, $7 for the year.

There is a cool article at MacDevCenter on writing Spotlight plugins. While it’s great that 3rd party developers are writing spotlight plugins, I do have a few qualms with some recently released plugins. For example, the OmniGraffle spotlight plugin includes an attribute called Number of Shapes. How is this ever going to be of use? How is knowing the number of layers going to help filter a search? It beats me. Maybe someone out there has a clever use for it? Also, OmniGraffle includes an attribute named Number of Layers. Uh oh, OS X already has an attribute Layers that is supposed to be for the number of layers in a document. I think Omni has just created a duplicate attribute by mistake.

So I hope:

1. Developers include attributes which are going to be of use
2. They do not create duplicate attributes

For while now, I’ve been dissatisfied with Mac OS X backup apps. There are too many apps that claim to backup, when all they do is sync. In my book synching and backing up are two different things, yet the market is filled with shareware apps that synch. The apps that do perform incremental backups are limited, like where’s the search? Worse yet they are cumbersome to setup and restore from. So for the last couple of years I’ve stuck with Retrospect, which is a piece of garbage (would someone please tell me why it breaks with every major OS update?) What is my solution to this? Well, try writing my own app, of course. My goal was to design a backup app that would have a Mac feel to it (why do none of the apps have searching? Retrospect’s doesn’t count, it sucks too much to be called searching) A few friends and I have been working on putting something together until we saw this. Damn, that’s pretty much exactly what I had in mind, damn you Apple. So for now I’m holding off on development and I’m going to see what Apple releases.

Lately I’ve been doing file system work in cocoa and I was using NSFileManager, but that quickly got out of hand as NSFileManager is lacking in regards to symbolic links. So, I factored out the often used code and created a class which uses FSRefs internally. However, I’ve since had a problem: I don’t want to resolve symbolic links but almost every method out there automatically resolves them. I’ve been able to work around many of the methods that resolve symbolic links by using Carbon, but there are still a few pesky problems. The biggest one is: How do you determine your read/write privileges for a symbolic link and not what the link points to? I’ve played around with a number of different ways to get the access privileges, here’s of taste of what I’ve tried:

[NSFileManager isReadableAtPath:] This is no good because it automatically resolves links

access() function Also a no go because it automatically resolves symbolic links.

FSGetUserPrivilegesPermissions(); This one seems fairly promising, if only I could get it to work right. It’s a function from MoreFilesX that goes out to the files/folders catalog info and retrieves/creates a userPrivileges int which contains what the current user has access to. However, it is not reliable whatsoever. It frequently tells me that directories which are marked no access are read only? So maybe it’s something I’m doing wrong, and it looks to me like I’m not the first to experience this. So what is going on? Here’s a snip of code:

OSErr    err;
UInt8    userPrivileges;
bool     isReadable;
err = FSGetUserPrivilegesPermissions( &ref, &userPrivileges, NULL );
if ( err != 0 )
{
   //error stuff
}
isReadable = !( userPrivileges & kioACUserNoSeeFilesMask );

Any one know another way besides reading the file permissions and checking if the user is part of that group and etc?