Getting Started

Please excuse the virtual dust as I get things set up here. I am transferring these posts from another blog site. I was getting frustrated with their interface and was impressed by the WordPress… experience.

So if the page style changes and there are frequent edits, it is just the strange little man behind the curtain pulling the assoted chain, flipping the random lever.

Thanks for listening.

Stateful OS X firewall

In the interest of security in depth, you should be running the firewall on your OS X system. I know, I know there are so few vulnerabilities on the Mac. That doesn’t mean that nasty stuff still doesn’t happen.

If you are feeling that the standard firewall settings aren’t quite good enough, you are in luck, OS X comes with a serious firewall, IPFW.

To go with the fancy new trick mentioned in the previous post, I thought you might like to have a basic IPFW firewall to get yourself going. As always I recommend checking man ipfw for more information.

Automatically Load OS X Firewall Settings When Your Location Changes

Recently I changed my custom IPFW firewall settings on my laptop, making them specific for home and work networks, switching between wireless and ethernet. The problem was I needed to figure out how to reload the firewall script whenever the state of the network changed.

It turns out that Darwin has a special way to handle this. It uses a daemon called configd to monitor the state of the various services running. configd uses XML files located in /System/Library/SystemConfiguration/ to manage its configuration.

Speed Up Mail.app

My 4+ gigs of email were making Mail.app slow, but I found a great tip over at Hawk Wings (a great site for mail related tips) for cleaning up the databases the Mail.app uses to speed things up.
Basically it involves:

Quit Mail.app

From the Terminal type:
sqlite3 ~/Library/Mail/Envelope\ Index

When sqlite3 comes up enter:
vacuum subjects;

It will go away and churn for a few seconds to a few minutes and when it is done restart mail and it should be faster.

A script that automates this and more info is available at http://www.hawkwings.net/2007/03/01/a-faster-way-to-speed-up-mailapp/

In search of the bluetooth mouse: The Mighty Mouse and the Logitech V270

With plugging in my USB thumb drive and my iPod I found myself running out of USB ports. I went through a couple of different miniature hub tries but found it all a hassle. So I landed on the concept of going with a bluetooth mouse to free me of cable tangles (those with cluttered desks will hear me) and to properly ration the USB ports.

Being happy with other Apple products I walked around the corner to the Apple store and picked up a Bluetooth Mighty Mouse. My first impression was that it seemed a bit awkward, but it did look cool so I tried to work with it.

Right away I started having issues with the right click working properly. Since Apple is still obsessed with the concept of a single button mouse in form if not in function, they have created a mouse that relies on sensing very slight pressure differences across the mouse. I found some posts online that had tips about lifting you index finger completely off the mouse when right clicking, but even that didn’t make it work right and who the hell wants to work like that anyways.

So after about a week and a half I took it back and picked up a Logitech V270. For those who like a smaller portable mouse, the form factor is good. It doesn’t have the comfort of the MX series devices nor the comparable Microsoft assortment of mouses, but there aren’t a lot of options for bluetooth. Which brings me to another point, wireless does not mean bluetooth, so check the packaging.

The V270 connects and reconnects to my MacBook Pro without hassle, although if you leave it for long enough there is a brief hiccup while it powers up and reconnects. This is unlike the Mighty Mouse that didn’t seem to want to connect seamlessly.

The one problem that I did have was the mouse speed. Using the mouse preference pane left me with a mouse that was either too slow or too fast. There are options like USB Overdrive, et. al., but I didn’t want the additional clutter.

So I went with using the command:
defaults write -g com.apple.mouse.scaling -float .05

That seemed to give me the feel I had before with my previous mouse.

RegEx shortcuts for working with Classless Internet Domain Routing (CIDR)

I haven’t seen these posted anywhere, so I figured I would share. Here are some RegEx shortcuts for working with various CIDR blocks. They aren’t the most concise, but they are readable which is important to me when cobbling together complex combinations. They are POSIX regex so they should work in a bunch of places like egreps and MySQL REGEXPs.