OS X 10.4.6 Gives Momentary Heart Failure

I've just downloaded and installed the latest update for OS X via the Software Update utility. The update requires a system restart which isn't unexpected. What was unexpected was the second restart in the middle of the reboot sequence.

After my heart resumed something approaching its' normal rate I did what I should have done in the first place and read the update documentation. If I'd done this I should have spotted the key phrase:

With the Mac OS X 10.4.6 system software update, PowerPC-based Macs will restart twice, instead of once, after the initial installation.

No explanation as to why this was neccessary though.

This was also spotted, with similar cardiac effects, by todays edition of The Register.

win-ssh-askpass Version 1.05 Released

Downloadable from here.

Clearing Your Outlook Forms Cache

You're working in Outlook, minding your own business and someone sends you a meeting request; you check your schedule, you're free at the given date and time so you click on Accept only to see this:

Restarting Outlook doesn't help, nor does rebooting your machine; you've fallen victim to a corrupted forms cache. But don't fret, there's a straightforward, if not entirely intuitive, way of clearing the cache.

Standard disclaimer: YYMV, this worked for me, using Outlook 2003 on XP Professional Service Pack 2, it might work for you, it might not.

From the Tools menu, select Options and click on the Other tab.

Click on Advanced Options, which is in the General section of the dialog.

Now click on Custom Forms.

Keep going, we're getting somewhere with all of this so click on Manage Forms.

And finally, click on Clear Cache. There's no visual feedback, no indication that Outlook has done anything at all. Click on Close, OK, OK and OK to close all of the dialogs. Now if you now try to reopen your original meeting request you might glance a dialog flashing on your monitor which informed you that the form was being reloaded, but then again, you might have blinked and missed it. But either way, all should be well again.

SSH Bits & Pieces

RTFM. Really.

Although this is free advertising, before you use SSH for anything other than a drop in replacement for telnet buy a copy of O'Reilly's SSH: The Definitive Guide, and then read it. It's a rare O'Reilly book which doesn't make you realise just how little you actually know about a subject and this one is no exception. To be honest, it was only after reading this book that I realised just why I shouldn't use SSH as a drop in replacement for telnet, which in turn proved how little I knew about SSH. Which kind of proves my point I guess.

Neat Hacks

To populate a remote accounts's authorized_keys with a public key from your local machine, in a single command try:

$ cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | ssh \
user@remote.host 'cat - >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys'

One gotcha is that you do need to have password authentication enabled (PasswordAuthentication yes) in your /etc/ssh/sshd_config for this to work.

Windows Agents

As for most UNIX agents, Cygwin comes with an implementation of ssh-agent, which is fine if you'll be working entirely within a Cygwin environment but like the UNIX versions it means that all apps which you want to inherit the agent's environment need to have Cygwin at their process root. Unless you do some fairly fundamental changes to the way in which Windows starts apps which you start from Task Manager or the Start Menu won't be aware of the agent's environment.

You could use PuTTY, which provides its own agent implementation, called Pagent or Pageant (the spelling varies) but this suffers from the safe drawbacks as Cygwin's agent unless you're happy to use on PuTTY's suite of apps.

There is another way though, the criminally underrated and underused win-ssh-askpass; although you have to have Cygwin, make and g++ installed to build this, as it's provided in source only form.I came across this app when Googling for a way of integrating Cygwin's SSH implementation of SSH Agent into Windows as a wholeand it seems to bridge the gap, from what I've seen so far. While the main site is in Japanese there's an English language readme online here.

This app really deserves better publicity and better exposure.

Mac Agents

As OS X is built on top of a variant of BSD UNIX called Darwin it comes with the open source version of SSH, OpenSSH, built in. Which is fine and good is you'll only need SSH access from within Terminal.app. Otherwise you'll find yourself in the same situation as for Cygwin. You can start up an instance of ssh-agent in a variety of methods, including those mentioned here and here.

SSHKeyChain; works fine integrating the OS X keychain with SSH keys but only if other apps are keychain-aware. Which SSH Tunnel Manager isn't. Ho hum. On the plus side though, the source for SSH Tunnel Manager is available and this could be just the impetus I need to get to grips with Objective C, Cocoa and OS X development in general. Maybe.

Do You Know These People?

I get spam email; so does everyone I know with an email address. My mail client of choice is currently Apple's Mail.app and this includes a Bayesian junk mail filtering system which, after a bit of training, is very effective.

About once a week I check my junk mail folder. Just in case. There's one spammer who seems to think that a ficticious name, made up of real words, will get past people's filters. Naive and touching. But occasionally you see some classic names. Here's the latest bunch in my junk mail folder.

• Inner. T. Windiest
  
• Costly. V. Property
  
• Procession. T. Somme
  
• Shagginess. K. Acutest
  
• Recurring. V. Husbanding
  
• Paperweight. V. Savant
  
• Dreamiest. K. Loopy
  
• Icurably. E. Methodists

More Artic Driver Than Road Warrior

First there was the paperless office which was going to free us from the drudgery of sheets of paper. That was first mooted as an idea in 1975 and my desk is still covered in the stuff. Hmm.

Then there was wifi which was going to liberate us from wires and turn us all into wireless road warriors. A quick rummage through the contents of the laptop bag I carry with me each day does tend to disprove that idea somewhat.

Firstly there's my iBook, shown here snoozing with that gently-pulsing-behind-the-fascia light that's Apple's trademark.

To make sure my iBook doesn't get scratched by all the other kit, it lives in a nice neoprene sleeve and travels with another of Apple's trademarks, a single button mouse.

The iBook cares, feeds and nourishes my 3rd generation iPod, which of course, comes with a supply of cables, plugs and adaptors.

Like my iBook my iPod get protected from scratches by a generously donated iPod Sock which coincidentally coordinates nicely with the iBook sleeve.

After verging dangerously into interior design territory, what with matching socks and sleeves, it's a bit of a let down to come back to earth with some good old generic PC hardware, courtesy of a Dell Latitute D600 laptop. I seem to continue to have issues with Dell's battery life which is probably the reason the laptop top isn't booted up in this photo.

Then there's a variety of cables and stuff; a Dell power brick and Microsoft Wheel mouse for the Latitude and the mains to mini USB charger for my phone.

Ah yes, my phone, that's also a piece of kit I lug around but which was taking these photos rather than appearing in them. It's a Razr for Motorola, the company which suffers from occasional vowel loss syndrome, which is why its other phones are called things like the Rokr and the Slivr. I think it's supposed to be hip, or groovy or something.

That's a lot of kit to carry; I guess that's why we're still at the stage where it looks like we need an artic to carry everything, rather than being fully fledged road warriors.

Blosxom "Sticky" Plugin

A while back when I was using Blosxom to power my blog I wrote a plugin called sticky which forced given articles to appear as the most recent.

When I changed my blog over to WordPress the plugin got temporarily misplaced. The plugin is still referenced online at the Unofficial Blosxom User Group plugin registry so now it's back and can be downloaded again. It's better to give than receive apparently.

Look Behind You

There used to be a time when, if you were driving on a motorway or dual carriageway, you looked in your rear view mirror and you would see, approaching rapidly, very rapidly, a Bedford Astramax van. You would be safe to make at least one of the following assumptions about this van.

• It would be white.


• It would be dirty.


• Someone would have written, with cutting and incisive wit, in the dirt on the back of the van with their finger "also available in white", "clean me" or possibly "I wish my Missus was as dirty as this van".


• It would have its headlights on whatever of the hour of the day or night.


• It would be trying to overtake you, regardless of the car you were driving and what speed you were currently doing.

I'm not the first person to comment on the fact that the Astramax was in fact the world's fastest production vehicle.

You don't see that many Astramax's on the road these days and even less of them in your rear view mirror. This is because they have been forced into near extinction by their successor; the British Gas van.

Like the Astramax these vans will be capable of outpacing the fastest vehicle on the road.

Unlike the Astramax these will not be white as they are painted in the blue, white and red corporate colour scheme of British Gas. They are frequently clean. But most of all, their drivers obviously have a special dispensation from the Government to drive in any way they so choose.

Whereas the Astramax driver would impatiently wait for you to move into a slower lane, often helping you to make the decision with a friendly flash of the headlights, the British Gas driver has no truck with such niceties as their speciality is the noble art of undertaking, especially if doing so causes another driver to slam their brakes on in order to avoid a collision.

The photo above was taken last night on the northbound M3, between Junction 3 for Lightwater and Junction 2 for the M25. You'll have to take my word for it but in front of the Jaguar which I was following is a British Gas van which had just undertaken both of us. The same van proceeded to undertake another 5 cars before staying in the fast lane until the last moment before cutting across 3 lanes of traffic to join with the westbound M25 towards Heathrow.

I can only imagine the importance of the customer they were rushing to meet which gave them the ability to break so many of the rules of the Highway Code in so little a period of time. It is indeed a marvellous sight.

What’s That Process?

When I'm working on a Windows machine I like to keep Task Manager running minimised in my task bar so I've got immediate visual feedback on how hard my system's working. That way, when I think my system's not running as fast as it should be I can immediately see if the system's maxed out at 100% CPU usage.

When this happens, which is a fairly common occurence, Task Manager's Processes tab will normally point a finger at the culprit process, which is all well and good if I see a process like firefox.exe soaking up all the resources it can but if the process name isn't as intuitive how can you tell if this process needs to be killed or restarted?

Whilst a Google search is always worthwhile, a combination of What Process? and Greatis' Startup Programs Database have proved indispensible in the past. Whilst What Process? can be as apocryphal as the Wikipedia the combination of the two sites have yet to fail me.

As a nice side effect, checking all of your running processes against the Startup Programs Database can dramatically increase the startup speed of your Windows machine. For example, if you've got a version of Java installed, then you've probably got a copy of jusched.exe running to check for updates; if you'd prefer to check manually then this process can be prevented from starting at boot time without any problem.