langui.sh

I installed the 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx) 64-bit alpha 3 this morning to check out some of the new features. And since I’ve done a few other articles about running Ubuntu in a VM I thought I’d share the experience yet again.

If you’re running VMWare Fusion 3.0+ (or the current release of Workstation 7) then the version of VMWare Tools you have with your software can successfully install with no manual intervention. Simply pick easy install and let VMWare do all the work.

If you’re running an older version you will want to take a look at my Ubuntu 9.10 instructions for help with getting open-vm-tools running for you in 10.04.

I’ll update this article if anything changes (the kernel freeze for Lucid Lynx is not until March 11).

As of r39934 Chromium now supports the server_name TLS extension (server name indication) in OS X (latest build). This support requires OS X 10.5.7 or later. Hopefully it’ll make its way into a dev/beta/stable release of Google Chrome itself soon.

For those who are more curious than they ought to be about how I wrote this patch… Apple added support in their Secure Transport library for the server_name TLS extension, but has not updated their documentation. As of 10.5.7 (or possibly 10.5.6) the SSLSetPeerDomainName function — which is ostensibly used for OS level certificate verification — causes OS X to send the server_name extension in the TLS client hello. However, since Chromium doesn’t use OS X’s built-in verification it wasn’t passing this data through prior to the patch.

To test you can hit up my IDN SNI site https://☣.ws/ or https://alice.sni.velox.ch/. The former will throw a certificate error if you are on a non-SNI enabled browser and the latter will have text stating that the SNI extension is missing.

When I purchased my 5D I told myself I’d try my hand at a video. Well, one year later I’ve finally worked up the ambition to learn some video editing and publish something This video represents the past year of owning this camera. I learned a great deal in the process (mostly about how to shoot better source footage for the future), but I hope you all enjoy it. Click here to go to the Vimeo page to view in HD or download the original 1080p source. The non-HD (bleh) version appears below¹.

5D Mark II One Year from Paul Kehrer on Vimeo.

Many new Wireshark users on Mac OS X run into an issue where no interfaces show up when trying to begin packet capture. If you attempt to manually input an interface (such as en0) this error will occur:

The capture session could not be initiated ((no devices found) /dev/bpf0: Permission denied).

To have the interfaces show up properly you’ll need to widen the permissions on the Berkeley packet filter (BPF). By default they look like this:

crw-------  1 root  wheel   23,   0 Jan 31 13:47 /dev/bpf0

We need the filter to be readable by non-root, so open Terminal.app and run this command:

sudo chmod 644 /dev/bpf*

Unfortunately every time you reboot this will reset, but if you are a frequent user of Wireshark you can add the ChmodBPF StartupItem to alter them automatically (available in the Utilities folder on the Wireshark disk image). To install you’ll need to follow two steps.

First, drag the ChmodBPF folder to the StartupItems alias in the same folder (or drag it to /Library/StartupItems directly). Type your password to authenticate and move the folder into the correct location.

The second requirement is only for 10.6+ users. Starting with Snow Leopard the security permissions of StartupItems are being enforced. Scripts that do not have the proper owner and group will receive this error:

Insecure Startup Item disabled. – “/Library/StartupItems/ChmodBPF” has not been started because it does not have the proper security settings

The proper security settings are ownership of the scripts by root and group of wheel.¹ To set them:

sudo chown -R root:wheel ChmodBPF

I have returned from my trip to Costa Rica! Typically I don’t write about my personal experiences on this blog, but I’ve decided to try a photo journal style entry this time. Don’t worry, your regular nerd posts will resume shortly. As always, click the photo to go to the Flickr page. From there you can view any photo in much larger sizes. Be sure to view the set in its entirety as well.

Sunday, January 24

This bird was sitting near the patio of my hotel room in the morning

A boy picks something out of the water at sunset on the beach

Monday, January 25

Barbed wire coiled on a trail 3km from Arenal Volcano

The skeleton of a leaf impaled on a broken post

Tuesday, January 26

An early morning finds a mother monkey and her child running across the branches

The mast of a catamaran juts up towards the waxing moon

Night falls on the beach near Tamarindo

Wednesday, January 27

A bird rests on a downed palm. Seen from a small boat down a river in Palo Verde National Park

A crocodile suns itself near the bank.

Birds liked to stay hidden within the dense trees lining the water.

To see more from each day (31 total) view the entire set.

Bash is an extremely powerful shell, but its shortcuts are not readily apparent. Here are a few shortcuts and tips that I’ve noticed many (already proficient) bash users are not aware of. You can also check out Improved Bash History and More Useful Bash/Terminal Settings for more ideas for improving your bash productivity.

Bash Navigation Shortcuts

When editing a long command, there are quite a few navigation and editing shortcuts. By default bash typically operates in emacs mode.

• Ctrl-A to go to the beginning of the line
• Ctrl-E to go to the end of a line.
• Ctrl-W will cut the current word (searching backward)
• Ctrl-U will cut everything before the cursor
• Ctrl-K cuts everything after the cursor
• Ctrl-Y pastes the last text that was cut
• Ctrl-T swaps the order of the last two characters entered¹
• Meta-B will move the cursor back one word
• Meta-F will move the cursor forward one word

Meta keys are a bit tricky since they can differ based on your terminal application. On Windows/Linux it is typically Alt and on Mac OS X Terminal.app defaults to using Esc (but you can change it to option/alt in the preferences).

However, bash also has a vi/vim editing mode. To enable this type “set -o vi”. At this point all the typical vi shortcuts are available if you enter command mode (by hitting Esc). I don’t recommend using this unless you are very comfortable with vi already.

reverse-i-search

You can search through your history and rapidly find a command used previously with reverse-i-search. To invoke, press Ctrl-R and start typing. If you have multiple matches, hit Ctrl-R to cycle through them all. When coupled with an improved bash history this is an extraordinarily useful tool.

Controlling Tasks in Bash

Bash allows you to stop, background, and foreground tasks. To background a process before it starts simply add & to the end of your command.²

mycommand &
[1] 1922

If you have an already running task and you’d like to stop it press Ctrl-Z. This task will obtain a job number (the number in brackets).

[1]+  Stopped                 mycommand

You can then resume the task in the foreground with fg # or background it with bg #. To see a list of jobs that have been backgrounded or stopped type jobs.

Redirecting stderr/stdout in Bash

Bash has two main output buffers: stderr and stdout. Both of these, by default, output to your terminal window.

• To redirect stdout to a file add > /path/to/output
• To redirect stderr to a file add 2> /path/to/output
• To redirect stderr into stdout add 2>&1