Mac Hacking

If you ever have a problem with items autolaunching at login and cannot disable them, the following information might help.

The following files are parsed when the system has finished booting and is autologging in or displaying the login screen.

Property List Editor (from the developers tools) should be able to edit this in a GUI format, however an example of this file is listed below:

Remove the offending autolaunched application and enjoy faster, trouble free startups...

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
	<key>AutoLaunchedApplicationDictionary</key>
	<array>
		<dict>
			<key>Hide</key>
			<false/>
			<key>Path</key>
			<string>/Applications/ScanWizard 5 Folder/Microtek Scanner Finder.app</string>
		</dict>
	</array>
</dict>
</plist>

I've had a few emails asking how to create OS X packages via the command line. A solution to this question is outlined here: http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20030619213002144

Sometimes I surf to pages that are simply unreadable, usually on geocities or angelfire.

I'd long seen bookmarklets that would allow you to set individually background colour and foreground text colour, however there were few that allowed you to overide a background image, at least few that worked in safari.

So I threw a few different scripts together to produce a bookmarklet I dub: Sane Page. This resets a page to black text on white background and it's only been tested in Safari.

It only works with old skool HTML that doesn't use style sheets. generally because those who have enough nouse to work out style sheets generally pick colour schemes that don't suck.

Enjoy.

A while back I mentioned a way to slipstream all the Apple updates into the install CD, the details were for 10.1 but the same instructions apply for 10.2 despite the move to 2 CDs. You simply need to add the new packages to CD2 and edit the mpkg contents list on CD1

Also, I have been using the same strategy without burning a CD. Instead i've constructed a mpkg containing all the apple updates since 10.2 came out, including things like iTunes4 and iMovie 3.02. Of course the InstallationCheck and VolumeCheck scripts need to be disabled for each component pkg as described in the previous hint.

This has the advantage of reducing the repetitive optimisations and restarts.

Some are probably asking: but Apple puts out combo updaters now, why not use them?

My answer: sure, tack the latest Combo updater at the end of the mpkg install list and you will be assured of a more stable update. There is plenty of initial research which indicate that the combo updaters change more files than sequentially applying the incremental updaters. I suspect some of these changed files are due to small interim security updates being rolled into the combo updater.

This blog has gone pretty quiet recently, despite the fact there is plenty more to say.

Also, this blog is not limited to discussing Mac S/W hacks. The following hardware related news has caught my interest recently.

Core Box
Core Crib

The intent of these projects is to sell Apple Macs that are built from spare parts and assembled in non apple cases. This seems to work out cheaper than Apple's retail and is the closest I've yet seen to a legit mac clone solution in years.

As of 10.2.3, it's possible to have disk images that will mount and auto copy their contents to their parent directory then unmount and move the .dmg to the trash. This was demonstrated by Safari public betas. This is done via a special flag which is set after the disk image is mastered.

I wonder how this would work for dmg files mounted from a CD-ROM. Would this be a simple/smart way to do installs?

It definitely eliminates the need for stuffit expander, particularly in conjunction with the ZLIB compressed disk image format that is supported post 10.1

Although the much enhanced Disk Copy under OS X offers great support for various disk image formats, it is limited to supporting data disk images. Toast also can support making disk images of other CD types - especially Audio CDs

Toast makes use of a kernel extension to handle a lot of it's disk image magic, particularly the mounting of disk images as virtual disks on the desktop.

Under 10.2.x, Apple made changes to the kernel extension system to make it more secure and stable. Previously kernel extensions could be owned by any user, however as they run at such a low level in the OS hierarchy, this created a security loophole whereas an untrusted kernel extension could be installed and run with non admin rights.

These changes however have broken Toast's disk image handling kernel extension which is hidden inside the Toast application package so that it will no longer mount disk images.

The following procedure outlines how to fix this.