If you want to open the Sound-Pane in System Preferences then try this key combination:

⌥ – any of the keycaps to modify the volume on your Mac

The same goes for the Monitors-Pane:

⌥ – keycap to increase or decrease monitor backlight

Just a quick tip for the impatient. Works in 10.5.x and 10.6.x.

It seems that it is not that widely known, that you are able to launch Dashboard via AppleScript, as well. If you got an error message like ‘Dashboard got an error: Application isn’t running.’ while using activate, launch does the trick. It is as simple as that:

tell application "Dashboard"
	launch
end tell

Bonus: If you are administering one or more OS X servers, then check your available Widgets in Dashboard, there is one to give you information about the vitals of your server(s).

cron, the one available on OS X, is capable of handling the switch from daylight time to ‘normal’ without problems. Meaning jobs starting between 2 AM and 3AM won’t run twice. I always thought, that this behavior is built into launchd as well. Long story short: Three OS X Servers started the jobs twice last weekend.

Just an FYI in case you need to know.

• Don’t panic!
• There might be a way out of this.

What happened?

The passwords for the administrative account on OS X Server, I’m talking about the one created during installation, and the diradmin-account are the same, right? Are you sure? They probably are, if you didn’t change one of them. These two passwords are the same after the installation, because they have been synchronized during the installation. If you should change one of them later, then they won’t be synced again. Shouldn’t be a problem, though, everyone keeps records of vital data like this, most of the time.

On the other hand, if one of us sets up a machine, then said machine should get a healthy workout before deployment, to make sure the hardware is OK. This usually includes the installation and configuration of all needed hard- and software. So, in theory, the machine would be ready for deployment. But, during these tests, nobody cares about passwords; the system runs in a controlled environment and access from outside of this environment is either impossible or severely restricted. This could mean—if the Open Directory-user-accounts have been created during this phase—that nobody tried to connect to the directory-tree as diradmin after the change to the “real” administrative password. Same goes for periodic changes to the administrative password, depending on your policy.

It happened, I cannot login as diradmin any more…

Regardless how it happened, don’t do anything in a rush now; breathe. Spare yourself the trouble to try passwd diradmin as super-user, it won’t work; you need the old password to make changes. If you have access to the system, either physically or via ssh, ARD or screen-sharing, then the situation can be rectified.

If possible, make a backup of the system, seriously! Then retrace the steps in How to reset the Open Directory administrator password and you should be OK.

In a nutshell: The documents describes how to use Workgroup Manager to gather information about the password and uses mkpassdb to dump the password-database and overwrite the old password with a new one. It seems, that on 10.5 all you need to do is to use

sudo mkpassdb -dump

to get the slot-ID and

mkpassdb -setpassword [slot-ID]

executed as super-user, a.k.a. root (one way to get there is sudo su), to create a new password for diradmin.

The latter is my experience, your mileage my vary.

Disclaimer: The fact that it worked for me, does not necessarily mean it will work for you. You have to do it on your own risk, I’m not responsible if something goes wrong.

sudo tcpdump host [ip-address]

It lists the packets as they go by, regardless if [ip-address] is the source or the destination. The use of sudo is a necessity on OS X, you’ll end up with a tcpdump: no suitable device found-message otherwise and rightly so, “normal” users have no rights to snoop tpcdump packets.

The former is the location for Scripts available to the user of the account, the latter for all users of a machine. Don’t get fooled by the fact that you are able to choose any script via the context-menu of a folder if Folder Actions are enabled.

Just in case you need to know.

diskutil list

The device-node in question is in the column titled IDENTIFIER. The device-path to use is the one with the name of the volume, e.g. if the column reads disk0s2, then the command would be:

diskutil repairPermissions /dev/disk0s2

You should see some kind of progress-bar in ASCII.

One thing to note though: Using the command does not prevent the “meditation” of the program after 20%. I’d be interested what the system is doing while it seems to mull over something when it is supposed to repair the permissions.

Assume, that we need to get the dimensions of an image for further handling of said image. The command

sips -g pixelWidth -g pixelHeight [image-file]

returns the values (and a lot more if asked correctly).

Give it a try and take a look at the man-page (man sips) for further information. A really handy tool for all scripters.

Do not forget to specify the encoding when creating a new database, seriously. I suspect, that this depends on the language the system is installed in. The system that tricked me was using english, naturally. It didn’t help much, that WordPress thought writing to a databases using UTF-8 encoding. Everything worked fine until I dumped the database and restored it on another system.

Alternatively, there is no my.cnf in the standard-locations on a clean OS X Server 10.5.X install, create one and specify the right encoding there. But get in the habit of checking the current default encoding before creating a new database.

Just a quick FYI.

The emphasis is on I’m using. The bundle contains the entities I need for my daily work. Means, it does not contain all entities which can be used writing books and articles in DocBook. There are no templates, since I’m tweaking my DocBook-workflow at the moment.

You can use the bundle to ease the pain regarding spurious >-signs by writing e.g. application or systemitemnext to the </para>-tag and hit the ⇥-key, instead of typing <-⇥ and removing the additional > appearing next to the </para>-tag. There are indexterms, xrefs, ulinks, etc. Check it in the Bundle-Editor in TextMate.

On shortcut probably needs explanation, if you type entity followed by ⇥, a line appears copying the symbolic name used in the document, e.g. ch08 to the end of the same line with the extension .xml added. I tend to (especially late at night) introduce typos in the filenames. The result is a run-of-the-mill entity-declaration like this:

<!ENTITY ch08 SYSTEM "ch08.xml">

It’s your job to include the entity at the right spot in your master-document.

There is no sanity-check whatsoever, you have to make sure, that the structure is OK. The bundle is not a tool to teach anyone, it’s a tool to speed up my writing. If you are not sure about the “parents” or “children” allowed for a tag, take a look at DocBook: The Definitive Guide.

Templates will be included in one of the next incarnations. I’m thinking about adding the creation of PDFs using fop to the bundle, for the time being, you’ll have to use your own scripts. Watch this space.

I hope you can put the bundle to use. If there is anything you miss, drop me a comment (moderated).

If you have no idea what TextMate is and you are using a Macintosh running OS X to write in DocBook, check out the link, seriously.