It wasn’t as much that iTunes was prompting me, as I knew why the application wanted to accept connections and had already taken steps at the BSD layer (using ipfw to limit connections on the appropriate ports). Rather, it was the fact that it kept prompting me, over and over. So, I did a bit of searching, and found the answer. I don’t recall exactly where I found the answer, so I can’t provide attribution here (sorry), but here’s the information.

First, use the codesign utility (a handy little tool to verify code signatures) to see if iTunes has been modified/damaged/corrupted in some way:

codesign -v --verbose /Applications/iTunes.app

If iTunes is fine, then you’ll get a response like this:

/Applications/iTunes.app: valid on disk
/Applications/iTunes.app: satisfies its Designated Requirement

However, if you’re experiencing the same problem that I was experiencing, you’ll probably get a response different than the one above. Your message will say something to the effect that iTunes is invalid on disk and is missing a required component (or something along those lines; I didn’t capture a screenshot with the exact message—sorry).

If that’s the case, here’s the fix:

1. Download the iTunes installation package from Apple again. You’ll find it at http://www.apple.com/itunes or similar.
2. Delete iTunes from the /Applications folder.
3. Reboot (it might be sufficient to just logout and log back in again).
4. Re-install iTunes.

After you’ve reinstalled iTunes, run codesign again to ensure that iTunes is reporting OK. Then, set the settings in the System Preferences Firewall GUI, and you should be good to go!

This article was originally posted on blog.scottlowe.org. Visit the site for more information on virtualization, servers, storage, and other enterprise technologies.

Fixing Repeating iTunes Firewall Prompt

• Stupid Tricks With The Mac OS X Firewall
• ipfw Rules for Bonjour
• The Adventures of OmniFocus Bonjour Sync
• Mac Firewall Wierdness
• Cisco PIX VPN and Active Directory Integration

Networking

• I think it was J Metz of Cisco that posted this to Twitter, but this is a good reference to the various 10 Gigabit Ethernet modules.
• I’ve spoken quite a bit about stretched clusters and their potential benefits. For an opposing view—especially regarding the use of stretched clusters as a disaster avoidance solution—check out this article. It’s a nice counterpoint, especially from the perspective of the network.
• Anyone know anything about sFlow?
• Here’s a good post on VXLAN that has some useful information. I’d just like to point out that VXLAN is really only intended to address Layer 2 communications “within” a vApp or a collection of VMs (perhaps a single organization’s VMs), and doesn’t do anything to address Layer 3 routing/accessibility for clients (or “consumers”) attempting to connect to those systems. For that, you’ll still need—at least today—technologies like OTV, LISP, and others.
• A quick thought that I’m still exploring: what’s the impact of OpenFlow on technologies like VXLAN, NVGRE, and others? Does SDN eliminate the need for these technologies? I’d be curious to hear your thoughts.

Servers/Operating Systems

• If you’ve adopted Mac OS X Lion 10.7, you might have noticed some problems connecting to older servers/NAS devices running AFP (AppleTalk Filing Protocol). This Apple KB article describes a fix. Although I’m running Snow Leopard now, I was running Lion on a new MacBook Pro and I can attest that this fix does work.
• This Microsoft KB article describes how to extend the Windows Server 2008 evaluation period. I’ve found this useful for Windows Server 2008 instances in the lab that I need for longer 60 days but that I don’t necessarily want to activate (because they are transient).

Storage

• Jason Boche blogged about a way to remove stubborn hosts from Unisphere. I’ve personally never seen this problem, but it’s nice to know how to address it should it occur.
• Who would’ve thought that an HDD could serve as a cache for an SSD? Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Normally, that would probably be the case, but as described here there are certain instances and ways in which using an HDD as a cache for an SSD can improve performance.
• Scott Drummonds wraps up his 3 part series on flash storage in part 3, which contains information on sizing flash storage. If you haven’t been reading this series, I’d recommend giving it a look.
• Scott also weighs in on the flash as SSD vs. flash on PCIe discussion. I’d have to agree that interfaces are important, and the ability of the industry to successfully leverage flash on the PCIe bus is (today) fairly limited.
• Henri updated his VNXe blog series with a new post on EFD and RR performance. No real surprises here, although I do have one question for Henri: is that your car in the blog header?

Virtualization

• Interested in setting up host-only networking on VMware Fusion 4? Here’s a quick guide.
• Kenneth Bell offers up some quick guidelines on when to deploy MCS versus PVS in a XenDesktop environment. MCS vs. PVS is a topic of some discussion on the vSpecialist mailing list as they have very different IOPs requirements and I/O profiles.
• Speaking of VDI, Andre Leibovici has two articles that I wanted to point out. First, Andre does a deep dive on Video RAM in VMware View 5 with 3D; this has tons of good information that is useful for a VDI architect. (The note about the extra .VSWP overhead, for example, is priceless.) Andre also has a good piece on VDI and Microsoft Outlook that’s worth reading, laying out the various options for Outlook-related storage. If you want to be good at VDI, Andre is definitely a great resource to follow.
• Running Linux in your VMware vSphere environment? If you haven’t already, check out Bob Plankers’ Linux Virtual Machine Tuning Guide for some useful tips on tuning Linux in a VM.
• Seen this page?
• You’ve probably already heard about Nick Weaver’s new “Uber” tool, a new VM alignment tool called UBERAlign. This tool is designed to address VM alignment, a problem with how guest file systems are formatted within a VMDK. For more information, see Nick’s announcement here.
• Don’t disable DRS when you’re using vCloud Director. It’s as simple as that. (If you want to know why, read Chris Colotti’s post.)
• Here’s a couple of great diagrams by Hany Michael on vCloud Director management pods (both public cloud and private cloud management).
• People automatically assume that “virtualization” means consolidating multiple workloads onto a single physical server. However, virtualization is really just a layer of abstraction, and that layer of abstraction can be used in a variety of ways. I spoke about this in early 2010. This article (written back in March of 2011) by Brad Hedlund picks up on that theme to show another way that virtualization—or, as he calls it, “inverse virtualization”—can be applied to today’s data centers and today’s applications.
• My discussion on the end of the infrastructure engineer generated some conversations, which is good. One of the responses was by Aaron Sweemer in which he discusses the new (but not new) “data layer” and expresses a need for infrastructure engineers to be aware of this data layer. I’d agree with a general need for all infrastructure engineers to be aware of the layers above them in the stack; I’m just not convinced that we all need to become application developers.
• Here’s a great post by William Lam on the missing piece to creating your own vSEL cloud. I’ll tell you, William blogs some of the coolest stuff…I wish I could dig in as deep as he does in some of this stuff.
• Here’s a nice look at the use of PowerCLI to help with the automation of DRS rules.
• One of my projects for the upcoming year is becoming more knowledgeable and conversant with the open source Xen hypervisor and Citrix XenServer. I think that the XenServer Design Handbook is going to be a useful resource for that project.
• Interested in more information on deploying Oracle databases on vSphere? Michael Webster, aka @vcdxnz001 on Twitter, has a lengthy article with lots of information regarding Oracle on vSphere.
• This VMware KB article describes how to enable centralized logging for vCloud Director cells. This is particularly important for HA environments, where VMware’s recommended HA strategy involves the use of multiple vCD cells.

I guess I should wrap it up here, before this post gets any longer. Thanks for reading this far, and feel free to speak up in the comments!

This article was originally posted on blog.scottlowe.org. Visit the site for more information on virtualization, servers, storage, and other enterprise technologies.

Technology Short Take #17

• A Collection of vCloud Director Links
• Technology Short Take #16
• Technology Short Take #14
• Technology Short Take #10
• Technology Short Take #18

In Part 1 of this series, I talked about how I’d leveraged Synergy to provide a shared mouse and keyboard across the three computers (two Macs and one Linux laptop) in my home office. In this part, I will discuss the solution I employ for keeping files synchronized between the two Macs in my home office. I’ll give you a hint: It’s not Dropbox.

No, it’s another open source application. It’s called Unison (not to be confused with the Mac Usenet reader of the same name), and it provides intelligent two-way synchronization of files between multiple computers across multiple platforms. In my case, I use it only to keep files synchronized between my two Mac laptops, but this is not due to a limitation in Unison; this is only because my Linux laptop is used for other purposes and I don’t really benefit from having all these documents available on it.

Specifically, I used a pre-compiled version of Unison available here for Mac OS X. While this provides a pretty GUI for Unison, there are some oddities to getting it to work as expected that I wanted to document here.

First, let’s take a quick look at “the big picture” for getting this running:

1. Configure public key SSH authentication between the computers involved. (More on this in a moment.)
2. Install Unison. (This is as simple as mounting the .DMG and copying Unison into the destination of your choice. I put it in /Applications/Utilities.)
3. Create the Unison profiles. The Unison GUI only gets you part of the way there—this is one of the oddities.

Configuring SSH Public Key Authentication

I’m not going to go into a lot of detail here; there are tons of sites that provide excellent instructions on how to create a public/private key pair and use that key pair for SSH authentication (here’s one). The primary goal for which we are striving is passwordless logins for Unison, so that it can leverage SSH to encrypt the connections between the computers during file synchronization operations. (You do want secure file synchronization, right?)

In my case, I’m leveraging what’s known as a “star” topology. That is, my two Mac laptops (a 2011 13″ MacBook Pro and a 2009 15″ MacBook Pro) don’t synchronize directly with each other; they synchronize through a third computer, which acts as the “server” in the center of my three-node “star.” Why this topology? I didn’t/don’t want to have to enable SSH connections into either of my Mac laptops, but I already have SSH connections established to the server. (In this case, the server is a Mac Mini running Snow Leopard Server.)

For my setup, then, I needed to configure public key authentication between the laptops and the Mac Mini. For your setup, it will depend upon your topology, and that will drive the specific steps you must take.

Installing Unison

As I mentioned above in the overview, installing Unison is like installing any other Mac app: mount the .DMG, copy the application to the desired location. The prebuilt Mac binaries of Unison that I used are no different, so I’ll skip any more details on that step and move instead to creating the Unison profiles.

Creating the Unison Profiles

While the Unison GUI provides a very sparse UI for creating profiles, you will most assuredly need to supplement the GUI with editing the profile yourself by hand. Profiles created by Unison are stored in ~/Library/Application Support/Unison as *.prf files that can be edited by any text editor (I use TextMate).

Follow this general procedure to get a Unison profile set up properly:

1. Launch Unison and create the profile. Supply the necessary information (the local root, remote username, remote host, and remote root).
2. Quit Unison.
3. Navigate to ~/Library/Application Support/Unison and open the .PRF file that corresponds to the profile you just created.
4. At the very least, you must add a servercmd statement to the profile, or Unison won’t work at all (you’ll get “fatal error”-type message about not being able to connect to the server). This is where I was stuck for quite some time—see below for more information.
5. Launch Unison, select the profile you just edited, and open it. It should now work.

Now, let’s talk about the servercmd statement. This statement tells Unison where to find the Unison executable on the remote host. With the prebuilt binaries of Unison that I use (and these are the binaries to which most Google searches will point you, found here), it will prompt you to install a command-line tool. If you opt to install this command-line tool, it places an executable at /usr/bin/unison. Naturally, you would think that this would be the value you’d specify for servercmd, right? You’d be wrong.

The executable at /usr/bin/unison simply launches the Unison GUI. If you try to run that via SSH (as Unison will attempt to do when you try to open the profile), it will report an error—you can’t launch a GUI app on a remote system via SSH. This is the root cause of the “unable to connect” or “fatal error” or “server not responding” error messages with Unison: it doesn’t know how/where to find the server-side executable.

The fix is to specify the full path the Unison executable that is buried inside the Mac application package. Let’s say you install Unison (which is an application bundle; bundles look like folders at the command line) to /Applications/Utilities, like I did. In that case, the right binary to point to is this one:

/Applications/Utilities/Unison.app/Contents/MacOS/Unison

When you specify that value for the servercmd statement in the Unison profile, everything works (assuming that your public key authentication via SSH is working as expected).

Therefore, you have two options to make Unison work. Both options involve editing the .PRF file and adding a servercmd statement:

1. In Option 1, you specify the full path to the Unison executable inside the application bundle (like specified above) in the servercmd statement.
2. In Option 2, you create a symlink between /usr/bin/unison and the full path to the Unison executable, and specify /usr/bin/unison for the servercmd statement. This is the route I chose.

I highly recommend you read this page on the Unison Wiki, as it provides a wealth of other information on what should or should not be included in your Unison profile. It also reminds you that you must edit your .PRF file in order to make Unison work.

Here’s a sanitized version of the Unison profile that I’m using to keep files synchronized:

root = /Local/Path/To/Files
root = ssh://username@remote.host.com//Remote/Path/To/Files
servercmd = /usr/bin/unison
fastcheck = true
sortnewfirst = true
confirmbigdeletes = true
ignore = Name .FBCIndex
ignore = Name .FBCLockFolder
ignore = Name .Apple*
ignore = Name *.tmp

There are a few more ignore statements in there, but you get the idea. Refer to the Wiki page for a more detailed listing of suggested ignore statements. Oh, and the double forward slash in the second root statement is intentional, not a typo (this is the right syntax).

Keep in mind that this profile assumes that you’ve created a symlink (using ln -s) to the Unison executable inside the application bundle, as I described earlier. If you didn’t create the symbolic link, the servercmd statement must have the full path all the way inside the application bundle.

Once you have your profile configured correctly, you can run the Unison GUI app, open the profile, and you should be off to the races. (In other words, it should work just fine.) In my case, I did an initial synchronization of around 6GB of data in a matter of minutes, and subsequent synchronization operations have been astonishingly fast.

If there are any questions, tips, clarifications, or corrections, please speak up in the comments. Thanks, and I hope you find this useful!

This article was originally posted on blog.scottlowe.org. Visit the site for more information on virtualization, servers, storage, and other enterprise technologies.

Some OSS with my Mac, Part 2: Unison

• Mac Users Must Be Careful Too
• Some OSS with my Mac, Part 1: Synergy
• PXE Booting VMware ESX 4.0
• Changing RDP Settings in VMware View Open Client for Mac
• Preferred Mac OS X Applications

The instructions on how to install this plug-in are vague, so here are the steps you need (verified on two different Mac laptops running OmniOutliner 3.10.3 on Snow Leopard 10.6.8):

1. Copy the Markdown.ooxsl folder (this is Fletcher’s plug-in) into the ~/Library/Application Support/The Omni Group/OmniOutliner/Plug-Ins directory.
2. Restart OmniOutliner, if it is running.

Once you install the plug-in, then you’ll see two new options for exporting documents when you select File > Export:

• Markdown (Text)
• Markdown (With Attachments)

Enjoy!

This article was originally posted on blog.scottlowe.org. Visit the site for more information on virtualization, servers, storage, and other enterprise technologies.

Exporting Outlines as Markdown

• del.icio.us API Change
• Formatting RTFs with TextSoap
• Content Creation and Mind Mapping
• OmniFocus for iPhone First Impressions
• Switching to EagleFiler

Since my move to Denver a couple months ago, I’ve had a home office large enough to do a full multi-computer setup. Space constraints in my home office in Raleigh-Durham had prevented me from being able to fully take advantage of the multiple laptops that I have. So, with the new space in Denver, I set out to go full-bore. At the time, I had a late 2006 era 15″ MacBook Pro, a mid-2009 MacBook Pro 15″, and a Dell Latitude E6400 running Ubuntu Linux. (I’ve since replaced the late 2006 15″ MacBook Pro with an early 2011 13″ MacBook Pro.)

Of course, the real challenge with a multi-computer setup is the need for a shared keyboard and mouse, and that was the first challenge I had to tackle. The answer was found in Synergy, an open source project that provides a shared keyboard and mouse across multiple computers.

For those unfamiliar with Synergy, here’s a little background: one computer (known as the “server”) hosts the keyboard and mouse. The server’s keyboard and mouse are shared with other computers referred to as “clients”. The server/client designation makes sense to me now, but I recall at the time it seemed a bit odd.

I messed around with a few different distributions or variations of Synergy (like SynergyKM) for a little while before realizing that only the “real” version of Synergy was going to give me the flexibility that I wanted. For example, I wanted a bit more control over how and when the cursor jumped from screen to screen, and none of the prepackaged versions of Synergy offered customizable controls, even though the underlying Synergy package did.

From this Synergy downloads page, I downloaded the Mac and Linux versions of the 1.4.x beta version of Synergy. Despite my best efforts, I could not make it work. Keystroke mappings were off, the screen switching was intermittent, and it was buggy. Finally, I dropped back to the latest stable release at the time (1.3.6). Using the exact same configuration files, the 1.3.6 release worked flawlessly the first time. Nice!

Here’s my setup:

• One of the MacBook Pro laptops (the 15″ 2009 MBP originally, now the 13″ 2011 MBP) is the Synergy server. It sits in the “center” of the three computers on my desk. It has a 24″ Apple Cinema display, external keyboard, Bluetooth Magic Mouse, and Magic Trackpad.
• The other MBP (formerly the 15″ 2006 MBP, now the 15″ 2009 MBP) sits to the left of the Synergy server. It is, of course, a Synergy client.
• The Dell laptop running Ubuntu Linux sits to the right of the Synergy server and is a Synergy client.

With that in mind, here is a sanitized version of the synergy.conf file I use on the Synergy server (currently the 13″ 2011 MacBook Pro):

section: screens
    center-laptop:
    left-laptop:
    right-laptop:
end

section: aliases
    center-laptop:
        center-laptop.domain.com
        center-laptop-wlan
        center-laptop-wlan.domain.com
    right-laptop:
        right-laptop.domain.com
        right-laptop-wlan
        right-laptop-wlan.domain.com
    left-laptop:
        left-laptop.domain.com
        left-laptop-wlan
        left-laptop-wlan.domain.com
end

section: links
    center-laptop:
        left = left-laptop
        right = right-laptop
    right-laptop:
        left = center-laptop
    left-laptop:
        right = center-laptop
end

section: options
    screenSaverSync = false
    switchCorners = bottom-right
    switchCornerSize = 20
    switchDoubleTap = 150
    keystroke(control+left) = switchInDirection(left)
    keystroke(control+right) = switchInDirection(right)
end

The documentation for Synergy is pretty straightforward, so I’d recommend you read the docs for more details on each of the directives and configuration options above and their function. What this configuration gives me:

• I can use Control+Left Arrow to move one screen to the left, and Control+Right Arrow to move one screen to the right.
• The switchDoubleTap option allows me to have to “double-tap” the edge of the screen before it will switch to the next screen; this prevents me from accidentally switching screens when I didn’t mean to.
• The Mac versions of Synergy didn’t support synchronizing the screen saver, hence the screenSaverSync = false statement.
• Although it’s not explicitly called out anywhere here, installing the stable 1.3.6 build of Synergy on my Ubuntu laptop was straightforward, and launching Synergy is as simple as /path/to/synergyc center-laptop.

On the Macs, launching Synergy (as either server or client) is handled via shell script called by ControlPlane, a handy Mac application that is a fork of the older (and apparently abandoned) Marco Polo project. The shell script is quite simple; it checks to see if Synergy is running and launches it if it isn’t. (Nothing special there.) On the Linux laptop, I launch it manually as needed.

If you use multiple computers in your office, I’d strongly recommend having a look at Synergy—I’ve found it to be quite useful. If anyone has any other tips or tricks pertaining to Synergy or any of the other topics mentioned in this post, please feel free to speak up in the comments.

This article was originally posted on blog.scottlowe.org. Visit the site for more information on virtualization, servers, storage, and other enterprise technologies.

Some OSS with my Mac, Part 1: Synergy

• Dead PowerBook
• Linux on Laptops
• Some OSS with my Mac, Part 2: Unison
• First Post from new MacBook Pro
• The Adventures of OmniFocus Bonjour Sync

Since the new laptop came preloaded with Lion, I decided that I should at least give the new OS an honest try and see if I liked it. With that in mind, I upgraded the new laptop to the latest Lion release, 10.7.2, and installed any and all applicable software updates. I then set out to migrate all my files, apps, and data, which I managed to complete just before leaving for Copenhagen for VMworld EMEA 2011.

Throughout the show and the accompanying travel, the new 13″ MacBook Pro was my primary system, and I used it for all my daily tasks: e-mail, browsing the web, posting to Twitter, writing documents, creating presentations, building mind maps, configuring network equipment…you get the idea. Here are some of the observations I gathered during this time:

• Even though I was able to unhide my user Library folder (using chflags nohidden), I wasn’t able to search the Library folder from Finder using Spotlight. I verified that the folder wasn’t excluded from Spotlight (there were no indications in the GUI that it was excluded). I was able to search the folder using mdfind.

• I found that even though Finder was configured to search the current window when performing a search, it always defaulted to searching my entire home directory. No amount of fiddling changed this behavior.

• Finder windows didn’t “remember” their toolbar/sidebar state. Just about every time I’d open a Finder window, the toolbar and sidebar were visible, even though I’d turned off the toolbar and sidebar the last time I had the folder open.

• AppleScripts that I’d written to manipulate mail messages ran significantly slower against the version of Mail in Lion compared to Mail in Snow Leopard.

• The new version of Growl from the Mac App Store would consistently crash under Lion. These crashes were typically caused by Twitterrific. A matching configuration on my older laptop never demonstrated the same behaviors.

• Little things here and there throughout the interface felt sluggish. For example, there was always a noticeable delay between the sending of an e-mail message and the “whoosh” sound. That delay did not exist with Snow Leopard. This implied, IMHO, some sort of performance issue that prevented snappier sound performance.

• I personally found the minor UI changes (smaller window controls, for example, and changes in window shading between active and inactive windows) made the OS harder to use. Distinguishing between active and inactive windows was particularly problematic.

• Active windows would, from time to time, open behind an inactive window. There did not seem to be any noticeable pattern as to when this happened.

Because of all these various things, I found that the “frictionless” experience that I’d enjoyed in Mac OS X for years no longer existed. Lion, for me, now felt like Windows—the operating system was “getting in the way” and making it harder for me to get my work accomplished. To be fair, there were a few features that I really did like (the new Spaces, some of the gestures, Resume), but those features didn’t and couldn’t outweigh the disadvantages. I was so disappointed.

By the time I arrived back in the States, I’d resolved that I would rebuild the laptop with Snow Leopard. Because this particular model of 13″ MacBook Pro originally shipped with Snow Leopard, I knew that it would run properly (not the case with the new MacBook Air laptops, for example—they won’t run Snow Leopard at all because of drivers that don’t exist in 10.6.x). This past Sunday night, I rebuilt the 13″ MacBook Pro with Snow Leopard. Since that time, the laptop and my applications have been rock solid and functional. It’s surprising to me just how much of a difference I saw in usability and reliability between the original factory Lion install and my own clean Snow Leopard install. Snow Leopard has been, for me, worlds better.

So what’s the key takeaway here? Apple wants to make Mac OS X “easier” and “simpler,” to grow their installed base via the popularity of iOS, the iPhone, and the iPad. To that end, they shifted Lion closer to iOS and away from the UNIX roots that originally drew me to Mac OS X. Snow Leopard, on the other hand, retains the power and flexibility that were the key drivers for me to switch so many years ago (back in the days of the PowerPC G4 and Mac OS X 10.2k “Jaguar”). I suspect—although I don’t have any hard facts—that many other technical professionals switched to the Mac for similar reasons. Will those users also be alienated by the changes in Lion? Is Apple pushing away the highly technical audience that has been one of their biggest proponents in the Mac market? For me, this shift toward iOS made Lion less appealing, less powerful, less useful for me. It introduced friction in my computing experience where previously there had been none.

Am I alone in my experience? Do you love Lion, or still prefer Snow Leopard? If you are a Mac user, I’d be interested in hearing your own experiences or thoughts regarding Lion and Snow Leopard. Feel free to speak up in the comments.

This article was originally posted on blog.scottlowe.org. Visit the site for more information on virtualization, servers, storage, and other enterprise technologies.

My Experiences with Lion

• Snow Leopard, Time Machine, and Iomega ix4-200d
• Growl Notifications with Snow Leopard Mail and Exchange
• Configuring Mail.app and iPhone with Google IMAP
• This is What Snow Leopard Needs
• New Folders with Quicksilver

Now that I’m trying eschew Microsoft Word for more lightweight applications and text-based file formats, I’m finding that I really miss styles. So, I set out to try and find a way to provide some of the consistent formatting I had with styles, but in a way that is in alignment with my goals. I built a solution using these tools:

• TextMate, for creating MultiMarkdown source files
• Pandoc, for converting the MultiMarkdown sources into RTF
• TextSoap, for applying some regex-based formatting to the RTF destination file.

It’s not the greatest solution in the world, but it does work (so far). Here’s the basic flow of the solution:

1. I create the source file in MultiMarkdown syntax using TextMate. Along the way, I add some user-defined markup in the document for formatting later. Specifically, I’ve placed “[h1]” at the start of level 1 headings, “[h2]” at the start of level 2 headings, etc. It’s almost like another layer of markup within the MultiMarkdown syntax. (Yes, I know this kind of goes against the spirit of Markdown.)
2. I use pandoc to convert the Markdown source document into RTF (a process I’ve automated using AppleScript and FastScripts). This creates a pretty plain and simple RTF document with my user-defined tags still present. Pandoc supports the idea of templates, but I’m not familiar enough with the syntax of RTF to create an RTF template.
3. TextSoap parses the document and uses the user-defined tags to modify the font family and font size accordingly. I use a regular expression (regex) to find lines with the user-defined tag at the beginning, and apply a certain format to that line. After the formatting has been applied, the user-defined tags are removed. After the file has been processed by TextSoap—which is a really handy tool, by the way; I recommend it for anyone who works with text a lot—then the document has the formatting that I want and I can proceed with generating a PDF or delivering the RTF file as is.

This process is by no means perfect, but it does allow me to generate all my content using Markdown in TextMate, then spin it off to RTF for quick and easy formatting using TextSoap. This splits the content creation and content formatting steps into separate steps, and allows me to focus on “content first, appearance later.”

The next evolution in the process will be to use AppleScript to tie the Markdown-to-RTF conversion and the formatting together in a single step (yet another reason to choose TextSoap: it supports and can be driven by AppleScript for automation).

This article was originally posted on blog.scottlowe.org. Visit the site for more information on virtualization, servers, storage, and other enterprise technologies.

Formatting RTFs with TextSoap

• Switching to EagleFiler
• Exporting Outlines as Markdown
• Content Creation and Mind Mapping
• A Bit of an AppleScript Kick
• TextMate Revisited

First, I’ve started using a new and different method to create presentations. So what is this “different” way of creating presentations? The real value of a presentation is the content, not the pretty fonts and colors (generally speaking). Therefore, it kind of makes sense to me that I should focus first on content, and after content is mostly finalized then worry about appearance. To accomplish this, I’ve started creating my presentation content first in OPML format, then exporting that content into the presentation application (Apple Keynote, so far) for final formatting. While Keynote’s file format isn’t as “open” as I would like, the real meat of the presentation is the content, which is already stored separately in OPML format. This keeps me from having all my information locked up in Keynote’s file format (which, admittedly, is XML-based).

The second shift is related to this focus on “content first.” As I’ve turned my attention toward content creation first and foremost, I’ve taken an interest in the use of mind maps. Since many mind mapping applications can import and export OPML, this means that I’m also not locked into any one specific mind mapping application, and it fits well into my new presentation creation workflow:

1. Do some brainstorming and idea creation using a mind map.
2. Transfer the information from the mind map to my outliner via OPML. In the outlining application, revise and organize the content into its final form.
3. Transfer the outline into Keynote for formatting and appearance.

The real problem so far has been finding the right mind mapping application. There are many different applications on Mac OS X: MindNode/MindNode Pro, Novamind, MyThoughts, MindManager, XMind, and Freemind, to name a few. I ruled out XMind and Freemind because they are Java applications; I much prefer native applications over Java applications for performance and integration reasons. That leaves MindNode (Pro), Novamind, MyThoughts, and MindManager. So far I’ve tried MindNode, Novamind, and MindManager. Of these, MindManager is far and away my favorite—it feels mature, polished, supports AppleScript, and seems to perform well.

Unfortunately, MindManager is also the priciest of the bunch. At $249, it is significantly more expensive than any of the other applications in this category. I’m still a bit on the fence with the decision, but I expect I’ll decide one way or another within the next week or so. I’d love to hear from any MindManager users on their likes, dislikes, and use cases. Speak up in the comments below!

This article was originally posted on blog.scottlowe.org. Visit the site for more information on virtualization, servers, storage, and other enterprise technologies.

Content Creation and Mind Mapping

• Mind Mapping
• Exporting Outlines as Markdown
• VI Java
• My Current Getting Things Done Setup
• Formatting RTFs with TextSoap

If you’ve read any of the posts I’ve published on my Getting Things Done setup, you’ll know that I used an application called Yojimbo as my “anything bucket.” Yojimbo is a native Mac OS X application that operated as part of the consumption phase of my workflow and provided a way for me to collect and organize all the various bits of information that pass in front of me. Yojimbo is a pretty handy application, and I made it even more handy with some home-grown AppleScripts that made it easier and faster to get information into and then back out of the application.

However, I recently started examining other applications in the same space as Yojimbo, in an effort to ensure that I was using the most effective tools possible. (Consider this a “sharpening the saw” exercise.) I evaluated DEVONthink Pro and EagleFiler, testing each of them within my workflow to see if either of them added some value above and beyond what I currently had with Yojimbo. This was occurring at the same time that I started shifting my text-based formats back to plain text, RTF, and Markdown, and so part of the evaluation process was testing how well those applications fit into this new way of managing my text-based data.

What I found, surprisingly, was that EagleFiler was a great fit for this new workflow. One of my long-time complaints of Yojimbo was that I couldn’t use my preferred applications (Skim for PDFs or TextMate for text-based files), an issue that was even more of a problem now that I was making greater use of TextMate with plain text files and Markdown. I explored ways of using AppleScript to modify Yojimbo’s behavior, but it was beyond my simple AppleScript skills. EagleFiler, on the other hand, simply leveraged the default applications I used with Mac OS X. PDFs opened in Skim, text files opened in TextMate (where I could then use TextMate bundles to convert formats between HTML, plain text, and Markdown), and RTF documents opened in Bean (which I’d adopted as a lightweight editor over the oh-so-bulky Microsoft Word). This made it a great fit for the new way I was working with documents. In addition, EagleFiler came with some useful capture functionality built-in, eliminating the need for some of my home-grown AppleScripts. Finally, EagleFiler used an “open” library format that stored my items as files in the file system. If, for whatever reason, I ever decided to ditch EagleFiler, all my information would be easily accessible. This was a real attraction for me.

So, after only a week or so of testing, I switched completely away from Yojimbo and started using EagleFiler instead. Thus far, I’ve been quite pleased with the results. While it seems simple, I like the ability to mark items as unread (something I couldn’t do in Yojimbo, so I had to approximate that functionality with certain tags). I still prefer the way Yojimbo displays metadata about bookmarks in the same window (in EagleFiler you have to open the Inspection window), but this has not been a significant problem.

I also anticipate that the use of the file system will make integrating tools like Pandoc into my workflow possible; it didn’t seem possible before with Yojimbo. Because EagleFiler’s library is file system-based, it should be possible to use AppleScript to manipulate records by manipulating the underlying files in the file system. This will be an area of exploration for me over the next few months as I also refine my Markdown-Pandoc workflows for document generation.

In my opinion, if you’re considering an “anything bucket” for your Mac to help keep your information organized, EagleFiler should definitely be on your list of applications to consider.

This article was originally posted on blog.scottlowe.org. Visit the site for more information on virtualization, servers, storage, and other enterprise technologies.

Switching to EagleFiler

• My Number One Yojimbo Complaint
• Formatting RTFs with TextSoap
• TextMate
• AppleScripts for Yojimbo, Camino, and Skim
• Revisiting Evernote

I can’t take credit for all of these; most of them were shared with me by Matt Cowger, fellow VCDX and vSpecialist.

If anyone has any additional commands they’d like to share, I encourage you to add them to the comments on this post. Enjoy!

To find the IP address of the default gateway:

netstat -nr -f inet | grep default | grep en | awk '{print $2}'

To find the interface name of the default route:

netstat -nr -f inet | grep default | grep en | awk '{print $6}'

To find the IP address assigned to the interface for the default gateway:

ORGGWIF=`netstat -nr -f inet | grep default | grep en | awk '{print $6}'`
ifconfig $ORGGWIF | grep "inet " | awk '{print $2}'

To find the default gateway network:

ORGGWIF=`netstat -nr -f inet | grep default | grep en | awk '{print $6}'`
netstat -I $ORGGWIF -n | grep -v : | grep $ORGGWIF | awk '{print $3}'

To find the subnet mask for the default gateway network:

ORGGWIF=`netstat -nr -f inet | grep default | grep en | awk '{print $6}'`
system_profiler SPNetworkDataType | grep -A 15 $ORGGWIF | grep "Subnet Masks" | awk '{print $3}'

To convert the subnet mask into CIDR format:

ORGGWIF=`netstat -nr -f inet | grep default | grep en | awk '{print $6}'`
ORGGWMASK=`system_profiler SPNetworkDataType | grep -A 15 $ORGGWIF | grep "Subnet Masks" | awk '{print $3}'`
echo obase=2.$ORGGWMASK | tr . \; | bc | tr -d 0\\n | wc -c | awk '{print $1}'

To determine the wireless SSID to which your Mac is currently associated:

/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/A/Resources/airport -I | grep SSID | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $2}'

CLI gurus and wizards are encouraged to share other useful commands in the comments below. Thanks!

This article was originally posted on blog.scottlowe.org. Visit the site for more information on virtualization, servers, storage, and other enterprise technologies.

Some Useful UNIX Commands on your Mac

• Changing the IP Address in Solaris 10 U3
• Configuring Inter-VLAN Routing
• Modifying DHCP Client Operation on OpenBSD
• A Couple GeekTool Scripts
• A Quick and Simple Guide to Building an OpenBSD VM