Not Apple

“The never-ending notary nuisance,” or, “infinite loop at Infinite Loop”

A couple weeks ago, Apple posted a note that says:

In an upcoming release of macOS, Gatekeeper will require Developer ID–signed software to be notarized by Apple.

Being a developer of Developer ID-signed (i.e., non-App-Store) software, I set out to vault Apple’s latest hurdle.

Xcode includes a command-line utility called altool that manages the notarization process. That seems appropriate since my app isn’t built using Xcode’s build system.

Tweaking Synology’s DNS Server For Great Justice

Years ago I purchased a Synology NAS (a DS1812+, if you must know). I also purchased some hard drives for it, and a 2GB stick of RAM (bringing its total up to 3GB). Under the hood it’s a dual-core Cedarview Atom x86 CPU, and it runs a Linux distro wherein the owner of the device also has root access (i.e., you own what you own, like in the good old days). It’s also got dual GB NICs, some USB ports, etc.

In addition to storing substantial slabs of data, you can install services on these devices, so in effect they’re more like mini servers than the NAS name might imply. It’s busybox-based though, so a lot of the normal Linux commands act weird or don’t have useful aliases (more, not less, only a subset of vi commands work, etc).

One of the services I opted to install was a DNS server, in the hopes that it would allow me to move some per-machine hosts file management stuff to it, and that our previously-rootless devices (read: iPads, iPhones, etc) would also be able to finally take advantage of a local caching name server with internal friendly names for devices that don’t participate in Bonjour.

ctools Modals and Vertical Tabs

The Chaos tool suite (ctools) is collection of useful methods intended to help Drupal developers create complex interfaces without duplicating too much effort.

Drupal 7 introduced a new Form API element: Vertical Tabs. When you set a parent element as this Form API type, then any child elements that are of type fieldset are displayed as vertical tabs instead of as in the traditional fieldset. Unfortunately for us developers, the documentation does not provide an example of how to use Vertical Tabs properly, but with some trial and error you can do it.

However, this new Vertical Tab Form API element doesn’t work in modal multistep wizard forms created with ctools.

A Tale of Two Chairs

It was the best of products and it was the worst of products. It was a tale of one man trying to find an affordable chair.

Several years back I shopped at WalMart and bought a card table with four folding chairs for around $50. I was really disappointed because I didn’t think a card table would be worth more than $30 or so. This story however is not about the card table, but about chairs.

90% Easy, 10% Impossible

90% Easy, 10% Impossible Pie ChartFrom time to time, I get these insatiable urges to read what other Cocoa developers blog about. Sometimes they’re informative, sometimes they’re funny, sometimes they read like college textbooks, and sometimes they’re just downright terrible, but I read them anyway. It comes and goes in waves, every 2 or 3 months. A couple weeks ago, one such binge happened, and I started reading Aaron Hillegass’ critique of NSController (since I was hating it at the time, and wanted to feel justified in hating it). In the critique, the following statement was made:

QTKit QCheatKit

QuickTime LogoApple has been busily working to 64-bit-ify all of the frameworks they plan to continue supporting into the future (Snow Leopard and beyond). However, QuickTime is scheduled for some nice Cocoaification, so it didn’t get much 64-bit love. QTKit, the 64-bit impostor, pretends to be the 64-bit way forward, but unfortunately this is far from useful.

QuickTime is all C function stuff, rather verbose and boring. It’s also 32-bit only. The 64-bit front end on it is a framework called QTKit. However, 64-bit QTKit is little more than an impostor that secretly makes things messier during the 32-to-64-bit transition.

Apple Mail Hack: Move Message To Sent Folder

In the year that has elapsed since I failed to explain why I was using PINE for email, I’ve switched to Apple Mail.

Well, it’s been alright, but much to my regret the improved latency due to keystrokes only traveling around my local machine – instead of through the interweb and back as was the case with PINE on a remote machine – makes it almost justifiable. Almost.

Is Smaller Better?

Epia EX small

In the past couple of months I thought about spending some money on either a Nintendo Wii or a multi-purpose media box (not to mention my anxiety over buying an unmodifiable blackbook). Over the past 3 years I’ve looked at smaller cases as “better”. Before that it was always the full tower case that provided more room and ease-of-use. In this vein I’ve been looking at the world of mini-itx for the past several months.

VIA created the mini-itx specification for itself, but since its creation other companies started creating motherboards with this spec and recently so has Intel. The spec allows for a low-power consumption CPU, which is great for point-of-sales machines, thin clients, and more. The other use of mini-itx, popular amongst personal users, is as a Home Theater PC (HTPC) or media center.

Zero Grams of Trans Fat Binaries

tons of xcode build targetsPeople like their applications to work. Even better, they like them to work, even when things change. For the WinTel world, this isn’t a big deal (Vista aside ;), because the underlying CPU architecture hasn’t really changed, from a program’s point of view, in the past two decades. Unless you have a weird program that’s designed for AMD’s 3DNow! instruction set and you switch to an Intel CPU, or perhaps an application designed for a more esoteric old SIMD architecture, your application should run just fine (as long as your Operating System is ok with it).

Mac OS X doesn’t have the luxury of working on the same underlying CPU though, so things need to be handled a little bit differently. The solution Apple came up with was

fAIL: The Self-Replicating Network Connection

Good morning gentle readers. I opened up my craptop this morning to witness the struggles of what seemed to be a laptop battling cancer. No, this was not another case of opteron cancer. Instead I found that Windows, unable to cope with my Cisco Aironet 350 wireless card, was creating network connections one after another in the system tray.