• Green Day - Know Your Enemy
• Green Day - Horseshoes and Handgrenades
• U2 - I’ll Go Crazy If I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight
• Bob Dylan - It’s All Good
• Bob Dylan - Beyond Here Lies Nothin’
• Iron and Wine - Love Vigilantes
• Discovery - Orange Shirt

Ahh…

I should point out that these scripts assume you’re running Mac OS X 10.5 with Developer Tools installed. Both scripts use the osx/cocoa library to interact with iTunes.

veto

the veto script pulls the track title that iTunes is currently streaming and appends it to ~/.itunes_vetoes_songs.

#!/usr/bin/env ruby -w

require 'osx/cocoa'
include OSX
OSX.require_framework 'ScriptingBridge'

itunes = SBApplication.applicationWithBundleIdentifier_("com.apple.iTunes")
`echo "#{itunes.currentStreamTitle}" >> ~/.itunes_vetoed_songs`

veto_watcher

veto_watcher runs in the background and looks for vetoes songs to appear the iTunes stream. When they do, it turns down the volume and spares your ears. When the vetoed track is done, the volume goes back up. Note: this should return the volume to it’s previous setting, but the instance variable kept breaking, so it just goes back up to 100% — careful!

#!/usr/bin/env ruby -w

# start a new thread
pid = fork do

  require 'osx/cocoa'
  include OSX
  OSX.require_framework 'ScriptingBridge'

  @itunes = SBApplication.applicationWithBundleIdentifier_("com.apple.iTunes")

  def itunes_is_running?
    return !`ps -A -o comm | grep iTunes.app`.empty?
  end

  def mute
    @itunes.soundVolume = 0 if @itunes.soundVolume > 0
  end

  def unmute
    @itunes.soundVolume = 100 if @itunes.soundVolume == 0
  end

  def check_for_veto
    vetoes = `cat ~/.itunes_vetoed_songs`.split("\n")

    if vetoes.index(@itunes.currentStreamTitle)
      mute
    elsif @itunes.soundVolume == 0
      unmute
    end
  end

  # main loop: check for a veto every 5 seconds
  loop do
    check_for_veto if itunes_is_running?
    sleep(5)
  end

end

Process.detach(pid)

I have the veto_watcher script start up when I log in and I’ve set up a Quicksilver trigger to run the veto script. What’s up now, Bono?

Command-line script

It turns out there’s a simple terminal command to do exactly what we want. The following command will hide your desktop contents and display a login window (along with a fancy screen-rotating animation).

Open your favorite text editor and save a file called lockscreen with the contents below. I saved mine in a directory called ~/bin/, but you can put yours anywhere. (Note: ignore the text wrap below—there is no line break in the command)

#!/bin/sh
/System/Library/CoreServices/"Menu Extras"/User.menu/Contents/Resources/CGSession -suspend

Now, we have to make the lockscreen file executable. In Terminal, type:

chmod 754 ~/bin/lockscreen

Set up a Quicksilver trigger

The built-in keyboard shortcut system in OS X can’t easily trigger a command-line script like our lockscreen script. We’ll set up a trigger in Quicksilver to accomplish the same effect.

In Quicksilver, go to the Catalog and add a your lockscreen script.

Next, go the Triggers section in Quicksilver. Add a new HotKey under the Custom Triggers section. Type lockscreen under ‘Select an item’ and click Save (it should automatically find this from the catalog). Then click on the Trigger column to set the keyboard shortcut. I went with Ctrl+Option+Command+L, but choose whichever combination you like.

That’s it—close the Quicksilver window and try out your new keyboard shortcut!

Apache according to Apple

My previous strategy of ignoring every line Apple included in httpd.conf and trying to write my own super genius configuration was a nightmare.  My new strategy would be to follow the guidelines and files that Apple includes with the 10.5 Apache.

Configuration files

As of 10.5, Apple arranges Apache configuration files in the following manner:

• /etc/apache2/httpd.conf - the über config file
• /etc/apache2/extras/httpd-vhosts.conf - virtual hosts
• /etc/apache2/users/your_user_name.conf - options and access control (IP exceptions)

We’ll use only these files to set up an individual site for each development app/website.

First things first

Before you start editing files, turn on your local web server by going to System Preferences > Sharing and checking the Web Sharing checkbox.

Clean up httpd.conf

Assuming you’ll want to do local Ruby on Rails (via Passenger), SSL (with a self-signed certificate), and PHP development, make the following changes to you /etc/apache2/httpd.conf:

Listen 443
LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so
Include /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf
# Rails via Phusion Passenger (mod_rails)
LoadModule passenger_module /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/passenger-1.0.5/ext/apache2/mod_passenger.so
RailsSpawnServer /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/passenger-1.0.5/bin/passenger-spawn-server
RailsRuby /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/bin/ruby

Add these lines to the end or your httpd.conf or just download this version with the changes already in place.

Add some virtual hosts

We’ll set up virtual hosts that respond to re-routed local DNS requests like acoolwebsite.local or companysite.local.  To do this, we’ll have to first add some lines to the /etc/hosts file to pick up these requests.

/etc/hosts

Add any local development websites to your /etc/hosts file and point them to the loopback IP address, 127.0.0.1:

127.0.0.1 sslwebsite.local
127.0.0.1 companywebsite.local

/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf

Now we’ll add corresponding virtual host entries in /etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf:

NameVirtualHost *:443
<VirtualHost *:443>
  DocumentRoot /Users/your_user_name/Sites/sslwebsite
  ServerName sslwebsite.local
</VirtualHost>
<VirtualHost *:80>
  DocumentRoot /Users/your_user_name/Sites/companywebsite
  ServerName companywebsite.local
 </VirtualHost>

Access control

Since you’re the only one developing on your machine, you can safely open up all Apache options and enable overrides in /etc/apache2/users/your_user_name.conf:

<Directory "/Users/your_user_name/Sites/">
  Options All
  AllowOverride All
  Order deny,allow
  Deny from all
  Allow from 127.0.0.1
  Allow from 72.14.207.99 # Joe's computer
  # Order allow,deny
  # Allow from all
 </Directory>

This only allows requests to be made from your own machine. You can add IP exceptions to allow access from coworkers’ machines or for demoing purposes. I leave the last two lines commented in case I need to temporarily open a site up to the world or if I don’t know the IP of a demo machine.

Restart Apache

That’s it—restart Apache with sudo apachectl restart and you should be in business.

First, make a home for the new SSL files—I use /etc/apache2/ssl.  Open up a terminal window, cd to the new directory and issue the following command to create a host key file.

sudo ssh-keygen -f host.key

Generate a certificate request file

This command will create a certificate request file. A certificate request file contains information about your organization that will be used in the SSL certificate. The command will ask you a bunch of questions; because this is for local development, nonsense will suffice.

sudo openssl req -new -key host.key -out reqeust.csr

Create the SSL certificate

Create a self-signed SSL certificate using the request file.

sudo openssl x509 -req -days 365 -in request.csr -signkey host.key -out server.crt

Apache

Add the following to your Apache configuration to use the new certificate:

SSLEngine on
SSLCertificateFile /etc/apache2/ssl/server.crt
SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/apache2/ssl/server.key

Restart Apache with sudo apachectl restart and try our your new certificate.

Important!

Please note that this script generate a LOT of files during the compilation. Create a temporary directory and execute this script from there. That way you easily delete the whole mess when you’re done.

fix_openssh source

#!/usr/bin/env ruby -w

`curl -O ftp://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/OpenSSH/portable/openssh-5.1p1.tar.gz`
`tar -zxvf openssh-5.1p1.tar.gz`
`openssh-5.1p1/configure`
`cd openssh-5.1p1 & make`
`cd openssh-5.1p1 & sudo make install`
`echo "#fix ssh bug in 10.5.5... temporarily change this to /opt/local/bin/ssh" >> ~/.bash_login`
`echo "alias ssh='/opt/local/bin/ssh'" >> ~/.bash_login`
`echo "alias ssh='/opt/local/bin/scp'" >> ~/.bash_login`
`echo "alias ssh='/opt/local/bin/sftp'" >> ~/.bash_login`

I know—there’s really nothing Ruby about this. I guess it could just be a shell script.

Update 10/10/08

My machine installs files to /opt/local/bin/, but it appears that on most Macs, it’ll install your new binaries to /opt/local/bin/. If this is that case on yours, just change the alias path in your ~/.bash_login.