Winging It

This is for those times when you’ve got an OS X machine that needs to be pretty much “as it was”, but you have to get into it with Admin privs:

I just done the following and it reset the Administrators password anyways….

Restart the computer and while it’s starting up, hold command-S. This will start up in Single-User Mode, which gives you a root command line. At this point, type the following commands:

code:mount -uw /

cd /private/var/db

rm .AppleSetupDone

exit

Your computer should now allow you to create a new administrator just the same as the first time you turned it on. From here, you can do whatever fixes you need.

This time the plugin is called CollapseIt and is what is responsible for collapsing the Archive and Category lists in the menu (if you’re looking at the Default theme on the site, anyway).

Again, like Quick Post, not really something many of you will care about unless you run a WordPress blog. Althought, the CollapseIt plugin has some useful features even for people who don’t use WordPress but want to see a way to safely “hide” a content item (like those lists) and yet still have them show up for people who do not have JavaScript turned on.

Quick Post

Huh, will you look at that, a title that both describes the length of the post and the subject of the post!

Basically I’ve written a plugin for WordPress that lets blog administrators add a “quick post” form anywhere on their blog that they’d like. I use it on a site I run to give the authors a place that they can use to post quickly. It’s even hidden until and unless they want to use it!

Well, outside of working on web software, I haven’t developed much in the way of software that I think anyone else would want since the ChannelBar era (a plugin for ShadowIRC — back in the OS 9 days).

However, I’ve got a project that’s actually making headway (even useable!) for OS X. It’s called Gate Control and is a GUI for editing OS X firewall rules.

See, the problem is that the default OS X firewall "editor" isn’t very functional and I’ve not been satisified with any of the other firewall editing tools out there. I could go on, at length I think, on how the tools I’ve tried just don’t do enough.

The following are the least things that I think a competent firewall editor should be able to do:

• Read existing ipfw rules
• Edit those existing rules that were read
• Create (and edit) ipfw rules utilizing as many of the ipfw features as possible (preferably all of them)
• Apply the rules

Here’s an in-progress screenshot of Gate Control

It can read the existing firewall rules, edit them, and set them again. The GUI covers most of the available features for ipfw (it actually can parse all the options, they just aren’t available via the GUI yet).

[Updated 03/28/2005 @ 1:46 pm]
So it’s come even further in the short time since I posted the above little blurb. It’s more robust, can save and load firewall rule lists (in one of 3 formats - Native, ipfw [as it would come raw from ipfw list] and ipfw "script" which is suitable to be fed to ipfw as a file argument), supports comments in the Native file format, supports multiple open rule lists at once (I’m planning on adding drag & drop), handles lists of ports much better and then of course all the other minor little things here and there.

I’m hoping to add some cool features, like showing a list of current connections and letting you drag & drop those into the rule list ("why?" you ask, well so that you can lock down the machine to enable connections from only certains hosts and that kind of thing), supporting picking port settings from the items in /etc/services and, of course, saving the list so that ipfw can load it at system startup (that one’s a rather large necessity, all things considered). And lets not forget adding better validation of rule semantics (such as a protocol setting of ip doesn’t allow certain other options).

I’ve just released Dashboard Options version 1.3. The new version includes features to use the Custom Message area as PHP code instead of as text and the ability to display your own RSS feeds in the Dashboard.

Check it out if you’re a WordPress administrator and tired of the Dashboard taking forever to load or displaying content that you don’t really care about.

Winging It ?Ǭª Dashboard Options

I’ve updated the plugin to version 1.1. It handles another RSS feed that I didn’t notice the first time and adds an option to display a custom message on the Dashboard.

Winging It - Dashboard Options

For those of you who use WordPress and have upgraded to version 1.5, I’ve written a plugin to enable and disable the two rss-feed portions of the dashboard.