My Tech Diary

Find Corrupted Fonts 10.5

admin — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 20:22:56 +0000

set fontsd to do shell script “mdfind ‘com_apple_ats_font_invalid == 1′”

display dialog ¬

“Corrupted Fonts” with icon 1 ¬

buttons {”About”, “Export to .txt file”, “Show Corrupted Fonts in a window”} ¬

default button “Show Corrupted Fonts in a window”

set button_pressed to button returned of result

if button_pressed is “Show Corrupted Fonts in a window” then

display alert ¬

“Corrupted Fonts” message ¬

fontsd

else if button_pressed is “Export to .txt file” then

do shell script “mdfind ‘com_apple_ats_font_invalid == 1′ < ~/Desktop/Corrupted_Fonts.txt”

else

display alert ¬

“About Script” message ¬

“This Script was generated by chris for macephemera.gr” as warning

end if

Give me my list.

admin — Tue, 06 May 2008 20:32:20 +0000

Suppose you have to get a list of your music. This is actually a huge problem the .pdf that itunes creates is huge especially if you have a large library like me.So fire up Terminal.app cd to your Music directory and paste this
find . -type d -mindepth 2 | sed -e 's#\./iTunes[\/A-Za-z0-9\ ]*##g’ -e ’s#\./##g’ -e ’s#/# - #g’ | grep ‘.’ > ~/Desktop/mymusic.txt

In a couple of minutes you will have a list of your Artist/Album in a list.

ACL’s What are they?

admin — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 17:49:25 +0000

I think many of you have tried to repair disk permissions using Disk Utility. But you have some errors like ACL expected but not found. What are these ACL is the first question?

From the Apple Security Configuration Manual

An ACL is an ordered list of rules that control file
permissions. Each rule or access control entry (ACE) contains the following
components:
User—owner, group, and other
Action—read, write, or execute
Permission—allow or deny the action

The rules specify the permissions to be granted or denied to a group or user, and how
these permissions are propagated throughout a folder hierarchy.

Hey I am not used to that stuff show me the money.

Fire up you Terminal.app
Last login: Sat Apr 26 20:32:40 on ttys000 beast:~ chris$ mkdir Desktop/acls beast:~ chris$ cd Desktop/acls/ beast:acls chris$ ls -le testacl.txt -rw-r--r-- 1 chris staff 0 26 Apr 20:45 testacl.txt beast:acls chris$ chmod +a "chris allow read" testacl.txt beast:acls chris$ chmod +a "chris deny write" testacl.txt beast:acls chris$ chmod +a "chris allow delete" testacl.txt beast:acls chris$ ls -le testacl.txt -rw-r--r--+ 1 chris staff 0 26 Apr 20:45 testacl.txt 0: user:chris deny write 1: user:chris allow read,delete

As far as you can this Terminal explains you a bit of how ACLS work.Be carefull of what you type always use a temp file to try things.

MySQL Install on Leopard

admin — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 19:17:43 +0000

MySQL install package on Leopard is quite a pain in the **s.It completes but never works. After hours googling for the solution I did write a script for your own convienience.

#Script by myapplehome.com
#Used to automate the starting progress of mysql
#!/usr/bin/env bash

exists1=$(ls ~/Library/PreferencePanes/MySQL.prefpane 2> /dev/null)
exists2=$(ls /Library/PreferencePanes/MySQL.prefpane 2> /dev/null)
cd ~ ;
echo -n "Welcome to MySQL Fixer.Make sure you are running this script with sudo" ;
echo -n "First we will start MySQL " ;
sudo /usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqld_safe --user=mysql & ;
echo -n "Ok That was fast lets move to the next step.MySQL Starts at boot" ;
sudo mv /usr/local/MySQLCOM/ /Library/StartupItems/ ;
echo -n "Problem fixed they all work" ;
echo -n "Let's download the right mysqlprefpane" ;
curl ftp://ftp.mysql.com/pub/mysql/download/gui-tools/MySQL.prefPane-leopardfix.zip -o ~/MySQL.prefpane-leofix.zip ;
echo -n "Downloaded.Unzipping........" ;
unzip ~/MySQL.prefpane-leofix.zip ;
echo -n "Don't know if this is right but \n let's you move to the right position" ;
if [ $exists1 ]; then
	rm -rf /Library/PreferencePanes
	mv ~/MySQL.prefPane ~/Library/PreferencePanes
else
    rm -rf /Library/PreferencePanes
    mv ~/MySQL.prefpane /Library/PreferencePanes
fi
echo -n "Done moving the correct Prefpane" ;
echo -n "OK.Done fixing all that.Now you need the tool \n to set mysql password" ;
curl http://mirrors.dedipower.com/www.mysql.com/Downloads/MySQLGUITools/mysql-gui-tools-5.0-r12-osx10.4-universal.dmg -o ~/mysql-gui-tools.dmg ;
echo -n "it seems that the package was downloaded successfully" ;
hdiutil attach ~/mysql-gui-tools.dmg ;
ditto -rsrc /Volumes/MySQL\ GUI\ Tools\ for\ 5.0/ /Applications/ ;
echo -n "We have succesfully mounted the disk image \n copied to Applications folder" ;
echo -n "And now we will launch it" ;
echo -n "Use 127.0.0.1 username root and password blank" ;
echo -n "Thank you for using mysql-fixer-0.1b" ;

Finder menubar disappears after a mail drag.

admin — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 18:57:02 +0000

This is a common problem seen on Tiger.While on Mail.app you have received an attachment you drag it from the Mail.app this is problem if you don’t “catch” that file correctly.Well instead of moving/copying you accidentally moved a character between the arrow and the attachment. The most secure for the client is to boot with safe boot log in as root if you have enabled that and remove that file from the Desktop. If you are not managing your users you could ask them to boot from an external hard disk and delete this file. If you can’t do it you could ask them to netboot if they can. But what if they don’t have all that to do it?

Here is the solution. Boot in Single User Mode. An do the following

mount -uw / 

mv /Users/THE_USER/Desktop/*.*Clipping /Users/THE_USER/.Trashes/

This is a problem if your customers don’t understand what do you say them.If you manage a lot of computers take this script for just in case.

Again boot in Single User Mode and run this.

mount -uw / ;

# If the the folder exists create it else leave it , also append the date

exists=$(ls /Users/YOUR_CLIENTS_USERNAME/Desktop/mailfixed 2> /dev/null)
if [ $exists ]; then
mkdir /Users/YOUR_CLIENTS_USERNAME/Desktop/mailfixed
else
mkdir /Users/YOUR_CLIENTS_USERNAME/Desktop/mailfixed_`date +%d_%m_%y`
fi

#Create a small receipt

touch /Users/YOUR_CLIENTS_USERNAME/Desktop/receipt.textClipping;

# Quick and dirty solution

mv /Users/macuser/Desktop/*.*Clipping /Users/macuser/Desktop/mailfixed* ;
echo "Done,press reboot to boot normally"

Synchronize that with that

admin — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 18:37:24 +0000

As I run one of the biggest Greek Mac Communities and hosting,administering that I have to keep backups.This is a huge problem as big communities mean a lot of data. So I dug into rsync and figured that I can do it easily from my mac.

Let’s do it

Open Terminal.app

 mkdir -p rbackup

cd rbackup

rsync -Ravz "username@host.com:." . --exclude '/mail'

Wait a little bit depending on your data. And synchronize between your server and local machine will be done.

compress each file inside a directory

admin — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 17:08:03 +0000

I used this command to upload some fonts on a webserver. It worked without problems

 for i in `ls`; do tar czvf $i.tar.gz $i; done

For each item inside the subdirectory compress the files.

Pretty usefull when you want to compress a lot of files inside a directory.

Hello World

admin — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 17:00:58 +0000

Hello world,this is my first post.

It’s a blog among the others.It’s my personal tech diary just to remember the problems that are difficult to solve. Hope to like it.