Ian Winter

Multiple “open with” entries on Mac fix

5 March 2013 10:14

If you’re running Mac OS you might have lots of duplicate entries in your “open with” menu. Thanks to a quick Google I found this post which details the fix, which, is nice and simple!

/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain user

You’ll need to the relaunch /force quit finder or reboot.

Only issue I had was a couple of default “open with” options had reset, but, get info on those types and reset takes no time at all.

Filed: General // No Comments

Submit for review

19 December 2012 21:13

If you run WordPress and have updated it, in my case to 3.5, you may have come across the bug where the “Publish” button disappears and all you can do is “Submit for Review”.

Now, a google search for this returns thousands of results, the fixes range from auto_increment values being full, harddrives being full, dodgy plugins, non-latest version plugins and DB corruption.

For me, non of those fixes worked. I started backing up the DB tables just by doing a simple duplication and on one table hit an error telling me that the default value (0000-00-00 00:00:00) wasn’t valid for a datetime column. I’m running MariaDB, but, it’s essentially MySQL – but fixed.

Turns out the fix is to remove NO_ZERO_DATE,NO_ZERO_IN_DATE from the sql_mode in the my.cnf. Restart and the issue goes away.

Interestingly on the previous WordPress version I had a plugin installed (Incorrect Datetime Bug Fix) but had to uninstall it because it broke 3.5.

WordPress need to get their date handling in order!

Filed: General // 1 Comment

Xcode Command Line Tools Install

22 October 2012 13:24

If you’ve upgraded to Mountain Lion you might not have Xcode’s command line tools installed anymore. Normally you can install via Xcode itself, but, if you’re going to be doing this remotely you’ll need command line instructions. It’s actually not to tricky. You’ll need a developer account for Apple though.

If you go to https://developer.apple.com/downloads/index.action, login and then (at the time of writing) download “Command Line Tools (OS X Mountain Lion) for Xcode – October 2″ you’ll be on the way.

Next, mount the DMG:

$ hdiutil attach -mountpoint /Volumes/xc xcode451cltools_10_86938200a.dmg

Then run the installer:

$ sudo installer -pkg Command\ Line\ Tools\ \(Mountain\ Lion\).mpkg -target "/"

Lastly, detach:

$ hdiutil detach /Volumes/xc

Filed: General // No Comments

Migration

8 June 2012 15:58

You might notice that you’re now being bounced to archive.ianwinter.co.uk for all posts. I’m planning to move home over to ian.io. Right now you’ll end up in a loop of death until the holding page is finished.

Plan isn’t set, but, I might move over to jekyll, I might stay with wordpress, I might just not blog as much, I don’t know!

Either way it’ll change and I don’t have a new design yet.

Filed: General // No Comments

A yummy replacement

14 September 2011 23:14

Had a need to quickly (and easily) replace some yum packages this evening, namely getting mysql5.0 to 5.5 and php5.1 up to 5.3. I wasn’t looking forward to doing this manually as keeping the dependencies in check is a faff at best. A quick Google however led me to the package yum-plugin-replace. This very easily sorts all the plugins out, flips them in out, shakes them all about and quicker than you can say Robert’s your mother’s brother sorts it all out.

Getting it going is easy:

yum install yum-plugin-replace
yum replace mysql --replace-with mysql55

Do the usual confirmations and you’re done! Same goes with php to php53. This does of course assume you’ve already installed the EPEL and IUS channels to get this packages from.

On a side note, if you do mysql don’t forget to run the upgrade script.

mysql_upgrade --password

Filed: Technology // Tagged: centos, mysql, php, yum // No Comments

Make me a sandwich

8 August 2011 16:05

One for the geeks.

Filed: General // 1 Comment

Ianteresting Info

27 July 2011 14:22

Nothing to do with Ian’s aside from the fact I found them. Also a post more for reference than anything else but a couple of interesting posts I’ve seen recently.

From ArsTechnica a comprehensive Lion review and particularly interesting stuff around encryption.
Mounting Rackspace Cloudfiles using cloudfuse (also here & for CentOS).
Hierarchical Rackspace Cloudfiles container structures.
Great post from ScoutApp on understanding load averages.
Four Lion terminal quick hacks.

News that Velocity are running an EU conference is also welcome news.

Filed: Technology // Tagged: ianteresting, links // No Comments

Bootable OS X Lion USB Drive

27 July 2011 14:16

This has been done to death on the vast expanse of the interweb, but, I’m blogging it anyway more for my own reference than anything else.

OS X Lion is distributed via the App Store however it’s really easy to make a USB drive that’s bootable which you can use to install Lion from.

Load up Mac App Store, login, purchase and download OS X Lion.
Once downloaded, open Finder and go to the Applications and locate the “Install Max OS X Lion” file
Right click on the downloaded file and select “Show Package Contents”.
Go to “Contents”, then inside the “SharedSupport” folder and you’ll find a file titled “InstallESD.dmg”. Copy this over to the desktop. Make sure you copy and paste rather than drag & drop this file.
Plugin the USB drive you want to use. 4GB is enough, but, I’d do it on an 8GB one. I used one of these with Amazon’s frustration free packaging, which rocks!.
Open up “Disk Utility” and drag InstallESD.dmg from wherever you copied it to in to the left-hand sidebar. Select the attached USB from left side and click on “Partition” tab.
Select “1 Partition” from the Volume Scheme dropdown menu. Choose “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)” from the left.
Now click on “Option” at the bottom. Select “GUID Partition Table” and press OK. Now click on Apply at the bottom right. Be warned this is will erase all data on your USB flash drive.
Once it’s done formatting click on ”Restore” (it’s right next to where you clicked on “Partition” in Step 6).
Choose the USB drive you plugged-in in Step 5 as “Destination” with the InstallESD.dmg file as “Source”.
Click Restore and type in your password. This will create the Lion bootable USB flash drive.

After it’s done, you’re pretty much set. You can either carry on and install Lion or you can reboot with your USB drive plugged in and whilst holding down the “Option” key select it and boot up to the installer.

Also, if you don’t back up your machine and loose everything, don’t blame me. Good article on backing up and more specifically cloning can be found over on Craig Grannell’s site.

Thanks to articles on Mashable, Information Week and Redmond Pie.

Filed: Technology // Tagged: install, lion, mac, osx // No Comments

CentOS and Dropbox

16 May 2011 22:21

Just because I can really I setup Dropbox syncing on one of my CentOS 5 servers. It’s a little bit of a faff, but, not that hard. The official guide is online, but, this is a shorten version and might not cover everything but it worked on my headless VM just fine.

First up su to whichever user you want to install Dropbox as. You’ll need two terminal’s open so fire them both up now. You’ll also need lynx, gcc and python installed so if you don’t have, sort that out with yum.

In your home directory grab the correct binary for you (x86 or x86_64).

wget -O dropbox.tar.gz http://www.dropbox.com/download/?plat=lnx.x86
wget -O dropbox.tar.gz http://www.dropbox.com/download/?plat=lnx.x86_64

Now unpack it and start it up in your first terminal window.

tar xvfz dropbox.tar.gz
~/.dropbox-dist/dropboxd

Now in your second terminal go to http://dropbox.com using lynx (lynx http://dropbox.com) and login, then using the key shortcut “g” paste in the URL that your first window should now be prompted you to go to. This is to register the machine with your Dropbox account. You’ll need to scroll down the page to re-enter your password. Once done the first window should say hello to you and it’ll quit.

Next up sort out the init.d script. Put the following in /etc/init.d/dropbox and chown 755 it when you’re done.

# chkconfig: 345 85 15
# description: Startup script for dropbox daemon
#
# processname: dropboxd
# pidfile: /var/run/dropbox.pid
# config: /etc/sysconfig/dropbox
#

### BEGIN INIT INFO
# Provides: dropboxd
# Required-Start: $local_fs $network $syslog
# Required-Stop: $local_fs $syslog
# Should-Start: $syslog
# Should-Stop: $network $syslog
# Default-Start: 2 3 4 5
# Default-Stop: 0 1 6
# Short-Description: Start up the Dropbox file syncing daemon
# Description:       Dropbox is a filesyncing sevice provided by dropbox.com
#                    This service starts up the dropbox daemon.
### END INIT INFO

# Source function library.
. /etc/rc.d/init.d/functions

# To configure, add line with DROPBOX_USERS="user1 user2" to /etc/sysconfig/dropbox
# Probably should use a dropbox group in /etc/groups instead.

[ -f /etc/sysconfig/dropbox ] && . /etc/sysconfig/dropbox
prog=dropboxd
lockfile=${LOCKFILE-/var/lock/subsys/$prog}
config=${CONFIG-/etc/sysconfig/dropbox}
RETVAL=0

start() {
    echo -n $"Starting $prog"
    if [ -z $DROPBOX_USERS ] ; then
        echo -n ": unconfigured: $config"
        echo_failure
        echo
        rm -f ${lockfile} ${pidfile}
        RETURN=6
        return $RETVAL
    fi
    for dbuser in $DROPBOX_USERS; do
        daemon --user $dbuser /bin/sh -c "/home/$dbuser/.dropbox-dist/dropboxd&"
    done
    RETVAL=$?
    echo
    [ $RETVAL = 0 ] && touch ${lockfile}
    return $RETVAL
}

status() {
    for dbuser in $DROPBOX_USERS; do
        dbpid=`pgrep -u $dbuser dropbox | grep -v grep`
        if [ -z $dbpid ] ; then
            echo "dropboxd for USER $dbuser: not running."
        else
            echo "dropboxd for USER $dbuser: running (pid $dbpid)"
        fi
    done
}

stop() {
    echo -n $"Stopping $prog"
    for dbuser in $DROPBOX_USERS; do
        killproc /home/$dbuser/.dropbox-dist/dropbox
    done
    RETVAL=$?
    echo
    [ $RETVAL = 0 ] && rm -f ${lockfile} ${pidfile}
}

# See how we were called.
case "$1" in
    start)
        start
        ;;
    status)
        status
        ;;
    stop)
        stop
        ;;
    restart)
        stop
        start
        ;;
    *)
        echo $"Usage: $prog {start|status|stop|restart}"
        RETVAL=3
esac
exit $RETVAL

Edit /etc/sysconfig/dropbox and add the following line to match your linux account where you’ve installed Dropbox.

DROPBOX_USERS="linux_user_name"

Make sure it starts on boot.

chkconfig dropbox on.

That’s it. Enjoy.

Filed: Technology // Tagged: centos, dropbox, sync // 6 Comments

Ian Winter

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Multiple “open with” entries on Mac fix

Star Wars traceroute

Submit for review

Xcode Command Line Tools Install

Migration

A yummy replacement

Make me a sandwich

Ianteresting Info

Bootable OS X Lion USB Drive

CentOS and Dropbox

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