Mac Code Monkey

Free SSL Certificates

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 10:29:04 -0600

Free SSL Certificates:

need to check this out…

Secure Authentication without SSL

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 10:12:05 -0600

Secure Authentication without SSL:

Article that talks about how to add some basic security to authenticating when SSL encryption is not available.

I really hate Virus Barrier’s alerts… the first...

Mon, 29 Aug 2011 14:31:46 -0500

I really hate Virus Barrier’s alerts… the first couple of times I got them I thought they were some kind of phishing attack.

Pixel Union - skins for Tumblr

Sun, 28 Aug 2011 11:03:22 -0500

Pixel Union - skins for Tumblr

Talk Dirty to Me, Paul Krugman

Sun, 28 Aug 2011 11:02:00 -0500

Talk Dirty to Me, Paul Krugman:

drcairns:

So, Steve Jobs has left his role as Apple’s CEO. Like, for good this time. It’s a shame, but it was inevitable, and it sounds like everything’s running pretty well down in Cupertino anyway.

For the purposes of this anecdote, it’s worth noting that I grew up entirely surrounded by Macs. My mom is…

Reading Binary and XML PList files in PHP

Tue, 23 Aug 2011 16:55:00 -0500

For a generic solution to reading both XML PList files and Binary PList files check out Rodney Rehm’s CFPropertyList a PHP Implementation of Apple’s PList (binary and xml).

It has a nice object oriented API to read in, traverse, access, modify and save PList files.

Here’s a quick example that I used to read in the iPhoto binary PList file and get the directory where the iPhoto Library is stored.

require_once('CFPropertyList/CFPropertyList.php'); $plist = new CFPropertyList( '/Users/xxxxxxx/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iPhoto.plist', CFPropertyList::FORMAT_BINARY ); $pa = $plist->toArray(); print $pa['RootDirectory'] . "\n";

rentzsch.tumblr.com: HOWTO Use UTF-8 Throughout Your Web Stack

Tue, 23 Aug 2011 00:22:26 -0500

rentzsch.tumblr.com: HOWTO Use UTF-8 Throughout Your Web Stack:

Wow I’m not the only one that has suffered though the pain of UTF-8… though I wonder why he suggests using —default-character-set=utf8 but fails to mention the use of SET NAMES ‘utf8’; after connecting to MySQL to set all of the related character set / collation for the connection, the client, etc. Doing so when using languages such as PHP is very helpful. See my previous post on MySQL and character set here. I also wonder why he chooses to use the collation of utf8_unicode_ci instead of the faster utf8_general_ci?

More on iPhotoMain.db / iPhotoAux.db - Date Formats!

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 23:47:17 -0500

There seems to be a dearth of information about the iPhoto SQLite3 database, so I am going to continue to post what I find out in hopes that it will help others. This is a follow up to my other posts about iPhotoMain.db SQLite3 database, which can be found here:

Additionally, I found the information I needed from the following blog posts on Punctuated Noise.

The key info I needed that came from the last post above was:

update SqGlobals set modificationDate = (julianday(\"now\") - 
julianday(\"2001-01-01 00:00:00\")) * 60 * 60 * 24;

From this I was able to determine how to ‘decode’ Apple’s floating point date representation. Not only does Apple use a floating point number to represent a date (it actually form a julian day), but they apparently have 2 different forms of it. UGH!

For those of you who just want the info, check this query out which selects records from the iPhotoAux.db table, SqPhotoInfoOther.

select primaryKey, 
archiveDate as rawArchiveDate, 
datetime((archiveDate / (60 * 60 * 24)) + julianday('2001-01-01 00:00:00')) 
   as archiveDate, 
originalPhotoDate as rawOriginalPhotoDate,
datetime(originalPhotoDate + julianday('2000-01-01 00:00:00')) 
   as originalPhotoDate, 
originalFilename
from SqPhotoInfoOther;

If you execute the following SQL with values from the SqPhotoInfoOther.archiveDate and SqPhotoInfoOther.orgiginalPhotoDate - you’ll get some nonsensical values back.

select datetime(335385037.045712) as archiveDate, datetime(4239.64527777778) 
as originalDate;

archiveDate: 913540-11228636-08 13:05:49
originalDate: -4701-07-04 03:29:12

From my Date Format used in iPhotoMain.db database post above, you can see I figured out the 2nd date (original photo date) a while ago… you just need to add the julian day for Jan 1st 2000 @ midnight to the floating point value, then use the datetime() function on the new value.

I tried this for the first date (archiveDate) and no luck: 920252-11228637-15 01:05:49. No improvement. When I came across the update statement above from the Punctuated Noise blog. I knew I had it!

For some strange reason you had to divide the floating point value by the number of seconds in a day (60 * 60 * 24 or 86,400) before adding the julian day for Jan 1st 2000 @ midnight. BINGO!

Now if some one could tell me why Apple, in there infinite wisdom, did it this way. I suspect its something to do with how the Core Data API handles time stamps fields versus date time fields as I have noticed that I have to adjust the archive date by -5 hrs (current offset from GMT for the Central Time Zone), that is the number is GMT, and I don’t have to do that for the original photo date…

Or may be it has something to do with iPhoto knows to store the archive date in GMT and then converts it to the local time zone when displaying it. But for the original photo date, the EXIF data from camera doesn’t have the time zone, so it stores it as it comes in.

Pity, it would be nice if both dates were stored in GMT for consistency.

iPhotoMain.db Table Relationships

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 09:27:36 -0500

I’m currently working on a program that reads iPhoto’s (version 8.1.2 [424] aka iPhoto ‘09]) main SQLite3 database, iPhotoMain.db. As part of the development I needed to determine the relationships between the various tables. The following SQL query shows the relationships between the following tables:

SqEvent (list of events in your iPhoto Library)
SqPhotoInfo (the photos in your iPhoto library)
SqFileImage (one or more images used to represent each photo)
SqFileInfo (additional information about each SqFileImage record)

To retrieve all information about the photos belonging to a specific event (name) in your iPhoto library execute the follow SQL SELECT statment:

select * 
from SqEvent     as e 
join SqPhotoInfo as pi  on pi.event       = e.primaryKey
join SqFileImage as fim on fim.photoKey   = pi.primaryKey
join SqFileInfo  as fi  on fim.sqFileInfo = fi.primaryKey
where e.name = 'At the Beach Hargar Park Coloma, MI 2011';

The above query will return multiple records (usually 3, but it can be more than 3 records if the photo was modified) for each photo.

One record for the Original (unmodified) photo, another record for the Thumbnail and a third record that only references the file name (not sure of the function of this record yet).

how to determine the default character set of a MySQl database

Fri, 05 Aug 2011 18:07:39 -0500

To show the default character set of a MySQL database use this query:

SHOW CREATE DATABASE `DB_NAME`

NTTP and Character Sets - News.GigaNews.com

Fri, 05 Aug 2011 15:27:33 -0500

I’m working on writing a news reading client in PHP and I use GigaNews as my nntp provider. My first hurdle came quite early in trying to get a list of the news groups.

One of the news groups groups returned was:

milf.dream.movie.german.komodie

and another was:

milf.dream.movie.german.komödie

only different by one character… problem was that I was using MySQL with a UTF-8 with the utf8_general_ci collating sequence… which it happens to turn out that ‘o’ and ‘ö’ are equal :-(

Not sure what I’m going to do about that, but during my analysis and trouble shooting I did find out that the character set being used by Giganews is Latin-1 (aka ISO-8859-1).

Text Editors for OS X

Thu, 05 May 2011 22:01:46 -0500

Text Editors for OS X:

All the major Mac text editors are mentioned in this blog article.

Packetfence

Wed, 02 Mar 2011 10:48:14 -0600

Packetfence:

Make sure to go back and check this out…

Best looking stand for iPad yet

Mon, 31 Jan 2011 09:19:19 -0600

Best looking stand for iPad yet

Cake - A PHP Framework

Mon, 31 Jan 2011 07:53:00 -0600

Cake - A PHP Framework

More on Hierarchical Data

Thu, 20 Jan 2011 09:00:46 -0600

Just 3 little words...

Thu, 20 Jan 2011 08:58:00 -0600

Who would have thought that 3 little words could do so much, solve so many problems, accomplish so much…

No. Not “I love you,” silly. “set scan off;”

Good write up here about set scan off, which is now considered obsolete, set define off and set escape on.

Hierarchical Data in MySQL

Tue, 18 Jan 2011 13:37:22 -0600

Hierarchical Data in MySQL:

very good article on how to manage hierarchical data in MySQL, even includes example queries.

Opening a folder in Mac OS GUI from Terminal

Fri, 19 Nov 2010 00:42:40 -0600

In terminal navigate to the directory you want to open

Then just type

open .

This is useful for opening hidden folders that start with a dot (.) character.

Oooooos and Ahhhhs

Wed, 10 Nov 2010 21:58:41 -0600

Ooooooo…

Ahhhhhh…

FTW!

Some one just upgraded their iMac to 8GB of RAM!!!