Code
Unless otherwise indicated, the code I present here is © Joe Auricchio, in the year in which I wrote the code, and released into the Public Domain. Use, learn, share, and enjoy.
tinydns on Debian, Sanity Intact
I’ve gone through some trouble to turn Dan J. Bernstein’s tinydns DNS server into something usable in the real world. Read all about it: tinydns on Debian, Sanity Intact
TritonSchedule
I was primary developer for TritonSchedule, a web-based schedule assistant application for students at my alma mater, UCSD. The first beta of TS was written in PHP and very heavy JS/DOM hackery. In fall 2005, I completely rewrote it in Ruby on Rails. The project is now on hiatus; total lack of support from the UCSD administration made it difficult to continue our development, and in the meantime UCSD ACT has build their own Class Planner application that provides the same functionality. At the end of the day, students have a useful tool to help plan their class schedules, and that’s what’s important.
find_writable
Shell script to find all files a user has write access to. A file is considered writable if one of the following applies:
- file is owned by user
- file is in a containing directory owned by user
- one of user’s groups has write perms to the file
- one of user’s groups has write and (group or world) execute perms to a non-sticky containing directory
- file is world-writable
- file is in a world-writable world-executable non-sticky containing directory
Known bug: Permissions on directories above the one mentioned on command line are not considered. This can cause false negatives: if a parent directory is owned by the user but the target is not, the target will be incorrectly reported as unwritable.
I hear findutils 4.3 adds -writable which does this. Well, too bad, because this uses only POSIX-compliant find and mktemp, which means it works on Mac OS X.
bash_completion cdignore patch
I’ve already sung the virtues of Ian Macdonald’s bash_completion script. It’s totally sweet. I strongly recommend it for anybody who uses bash more than five minutes a day.
My only annoyance with the script is that it’s too eager to complete things like .svn working-copy directories and the .DS_Store cruft-files OS X leaves around. Things no sane human ever really wants to cd into. Ever.
So with some help from Richard on freshmeat, here’s a patch to make it drop any directories or files you ask. export CDIGNORE=( CVS .svn .DS_Store _darcs ) is a good starter set.
Download bash_completion.cdignore.patch
Opie for Mac OS X
Wouldn’t it be nice, from a security standpoint, if you never typed the same password twice? Suddenly you’re protected from cameras, microphones, prying eyes, and all manner of network eavesdroppers—by the time they steal your password, it’s out of date. And what if you didn’t have to memorize all these passwords; you could calculate them on your phone or PDA, or carry them safely in your wallet?
Opie is a library that lets you use one-use-only passwords to log into your system. I use it on my Debian Linux server, to log in from untrustworthy machines (airport kiosks and the like). Now I’ve ported it to Mac OS X, to run it on my other machines.
Public subversion: https://svn.definitelynotsafe.com:3680/jauricchio/opie-osx/