The uncomfortable marriage of the UNIX command line and Mac GUI, and its implications for my sudoers file

I’m a longtime Mac user. A “power user,” you might say. Not so much a power UNIX user, though I do a fair bit of Linux-based command line tomfoolery as part of my job.

But things get ugly when the two come together. At the command line I am a bit too inclined to treat my Mac like a Linux server. It may have UNIX at its core, but it’s not Linux. And Apple has put some effort into de-UNIX-ing it as well. Things you expect to work don’t work the way you expect them to. (Yes, I just wrote that sentence. See what this is doing to my brain???)

For reasons I don’t care to get into, I decided today that I needed to modify the sudoers file on the studio’s Mac mini file server. And in my own inimitable and slightly stupid way, I handled this task as I typically do anything involving changing buried system files, not by struggling through using a command line text editor, but by copying the file to my desktop (where it is magically released from the prison of UNIX file permissions in which Apple has… uh… imprisoned hidden UNIX system files). I edited the file and put it back in the /etc folder where it belongs.

Only problem: in the process, the file’s ownership and permissions got changed. No problem, I thought. I’ll just sudo that sucker. Only problem is, when the permissions on the sudoers file aren’t what the system expects them to be, it doesn’t let anybody sudo anything.

Well… crap.

But then I remembered… Mac GUI solutions to the rescue! I opened up Disk Utility and ran “Repair Disk Permissions.” Problem solved! Apple has saved me from myself.

Now I can go back to my delusion that I am a power user.

Ode to the locker room

Being a runner in Minnesota can be difficult, because it forces you to make one of three choices:

  1. Run outside in subzero weather.
  2. Get a gym membership and run on a track or treadmill for 4-5 months.
  3. Stop running altogether in the winter.

Since #3 is not a viable option, you’re left with either bundling up with many layers and tiptoeing hesitantly along icy sidewalks or park paths with blustery winds buffeting your face, or paying a monthly fee for the privilege of driving to a building and running indoors on a treadmill or (if you’re lucky) a track, a tedious but climate-controlled solution.

Being an uncharacteristically wimpy Minnesotan, I’ve gone with the gym membership. I’m very fortunate, I suppose, to live close to the Midtown YWCA in Minneapolis, where I have access to first-rate facilities including a 1/6 mile indoor track. I loathe running on a treadmill. The track can be tedious, but at least I’m actually moving. And if I pick the right soundtrack, I can even visualize running around Lake Nokomis instead. (I’ve run Nokomis to the sounds of my own The Long Run enough times that I know precisely where I am in relation to the lake as each of the 11 sections of the 40-minute piece comes on.)

But as much as I can trick myself into enjoying (or at least tolerating) indoor running in the winter, there’s one aspect of Y membership that I will never like or be able to reconcile with my desire to be outside and alone when I run: the locker room.

I was not a jock in school. In fact, I was pretty much exactly whatever the opposite of a jock is. So what little time I did spend in a locker room was an exercise in taunting and humiliation (real or imagined, and probably more imagined than I believed at the time). I’m no longer afraid of the locker room. I just don’t like it.

I don’t like how crowded it is. I don’t like having to find a space on a bench to put my stuff while I change, or coming back to the locker room after my run to see someone else has chosen bench space directly in front of my locker.

I don’t like listening to other people whistling in the showers. What is so great about this experience to make them want to whistle their tuneless little non-melodies?

I don’t like people who are too comfortable being naked in the locker room, and I also don’t like people who are too uncomfortable with it. Be naked in the shower, the sauna, and at your locker, but nowhere else. Don’t be afraid to take off your swim trunks in the shower. Conversely, don’t stand at the sink naked while you shave, or at the counter by the hair dryers, reading a newspaper. (It kind of just seems logical to me to cover up certain parts when you’re wielding a razor blade, electronics, or paper. Especially paper.)

I don’t like listening to other people’s conversations, even when I am deliberately eavesdropping. I don’t want to be eavesdropping. I especially don’t like listening to teenagers swear loudly. And get off my lawn.

I don’t like how hot it is in the locker room, and how by the time I’m done drying off after my shower, I’ve started sweating again before I can even put on my shirt.

Given my dislike of winter in general, and especially my dislike of the compromises it requires (like spending so much time on the corollary disliking of myriad characteristics of spending time in the Y locker room), I’ve been asked by certain individuals in my life why I want to live in Minnesota at all.

They just don’t understand.

I’m not sure if it’s the harsh conditions of life in the Upper Midwest, much like the harsh conditions in the Scandinavian countries where many of our ancestors came from, or whether we’re just resentful of how easily our existence is ignored by the rest of the country, but part of the joy of being Minnesotan is to be able to complain about being Minnesotan. For us, to love something is to feel comfortable complaining about it.

Of course, that would suggest that perhaps I really love the locker room. But love and hate are not opposites. The opposite of love is indifference. And whether I love the locker room, or hate it, the one thing I clearly am not is indifferent.

But whatever the reason for my strong feelings, there is one that is stronger than all. Spring can’t get here soon enough.

Did Adobe actually mock up these Mac OS X screenshots on Windows? (Yes… I’m pretty sure they did.)

So, for reasons I’d rather not get into, I had to break down and install Flash Player in Safari today. (OK, I’ll get into it briefly… due to a rather obscure bug, Chrome — my preferred browser — has been crashing repeatedly on me whenever I try to upload a file. Long-term solutions aside, I had an immediate need for a way to use a Flash-based file uploader, so I had to install Flash in Safari.)

On the final page of the Flash Player download process on Adobe’s website, they offer a series of helpful screenshots to guide the most novice of Mac users through the process of locating and running the installer. Only… no, wait. Those can’t be real Mac OS X screenshots. The fonts are all wrong! So is the anti-aliasing, if you want to get really geeky about it. They’re mostly Arial, with the trademark overly-hinted anti-aliasing of Windows. Strangely though, it looks like the text label under the disk icon in the first screenshot is in Helvetica.

The real telltale sign for me though was the white mouse pointer arrow. Mac OS X has a black arrow. (The Mac has always had a black arrow, and Windows has always had a white one… presumably one of Microsoft’s infringement-suit-skirting superficial changes to the GUI in the early days of the Mac/Windows rivalry.)

I have come to expect subpar user experiences from Adobe, a company whose products I once loved so dearly. But this really takes the cake. I can’t even quite comprehend how screenshots like these were produced. It’s impossible to get results like this on a real Mac. Do they have some weird proprietary in-house Mac emulator that runs on Windows? (Actually, that might explain a lot.) Did they actually meticulously create these “screenshots” in (the Windows version of) Photoshop? Or do they have a Windows application specifically designed to generate fake Mac screenshots for all of their documentation? I’m at a loss to explain it, but there’s no way it wasn’t significantly more work than simply, you know, taking screenshots on a real Mac.

See for yourself… (Note: The image is slightly scaled down here to fit the page. Click it to view at full size.)

adobe_screenshots

SPF for dummies (i.e. me)

For a while I’ve known that (legitimate) outgoing email messages originating from my web server were occasionally not reaching their intended recipients. I also knew that there was a DNS change you could make to help prevent this problem, but I didn’t know any more about it and it was a marginal enough problem that I could just put it off.

Finally today I decided to deal with it. And I was (re)introduced to the SPF acronym. No, that’s not Sun Protection Factor, or Spray Polyurethane Foam, or even Single Point of Failure (although in my case perhaps that last one is accurate). No, it stands for Sender Policy Framework, and it’s an add-on to the core capabilities of DNS that provides a way to positively identify the originating servers of outgoing email messages.

My situation is simple: I have a domain name that needs to be able to send mail from either my mail server or my web server. Most of the tutorials I found for SPF were far too convoluted to address this simple arrangement. Then I found this post by Cyril Mazur which provided the very simple answer:

v=spf1 a mx ~all

Simply add the above as a new TXT record in your DNS zone file, and you should be set.

Defense Against the Dark Arts (of iMessage Configuration)

Ever since upgrading to iOS 6, I’ve had a problem. The glorious promise of iMessage with its seamless integration of SMS/MMS and Apple’s messaging services between iPad, iPhone and Mac has mostly worked, with one infuriating, deal-breaking exception.

Texts to my phone number go to my iPad and not to my iPhone.

Look, all of this integrated messaging is cool. Being able to have text messages show up not only on my phone but on my other devices is awesome. But they have to at least show up on my phone or the whole thing is a failure.

I’ve researched the problem and found some people with somewhat similar issues, lots of stuff involving jailbroken iPhones (which mine is not), etc. but no clear answers to my exact problem. Several people in forums suggested shutting off iMessage on the various devices, deleting accounts, full-blown factory restore, you name it. All of which were either things I tried and found didn’t work, or wasn’t willing to try due to the amount of time and tedious work involved.

iMessage SettingsSo I began experimenting. There was one distinct problem I could see in settings. On both iOS devices and my Mac, the Messages app was showing both my phone number and email address. But in some cases one was grayed out. Infuriatingly, on my iPad and Mac, the phone number was grayed out and checked, and on the iPhone the phone number was grayed out and not checked. I could easily add or remove the connection of my email address to any of the devices, but my phone number was stubbornly locked into my iPad only. (Or, well, my iPad and my Mac… I guess. Honestly I hardly ever use Messages on my Mac so I haven’t really paid attention.)

I wish I could give a clear account of what came next, but I started tapping various buttons and clicking various boxes with such a fury that it all became a blur. What I do remember is that I clicked the checkbox next to my email on my Mac, which un-grayed the phone number. I was then able to uncheck the phone number, and the email now became grayed out.

So, if I understand correctly, the way iMessage settings work, at least one receiving phone number/email address must be checked at all times, so if only one is checked, it’s also grayed out so you can’t uncheck it. Then, if you check the other one, you may be able to uncheck the first.

That wasn’t working on my iPhone, however. Strangely though (at least as I recall from the aforementioned blur), when I repeated the process from my Mac on my iPad, then took a look at my phone, it was already switched to having the phone number checked and grayed out.

So then I began running some tests. This is where things get muddy, and since all of this just happened a few minutes ago, I still may not have a complete solution. I tried sending a text to my phone number from SLP’s iPhone. Never got it. Then I tried sending a text to my phone number from my iPad and it went to my phone within seconds. Cool. Then I tried sending a text to my email address from SLP’s iPhone, and it immediately showed up on all three of my devices.

Everything then is working as expected except that I did not get the text from SLP’s iPhone to my phone number at all, on any device. It’s hard to say what that’s all about. Are things working now? I don’t know.

Here’s another weird thing to throw into the mix. SLP and I share an iTunes Store account, but we have separate iCloud accounts. I also have a separate iCloud account apart from the iTunes Store account. The iTunes Store account uses my “real” email address, and I have a separate me.com email address I use on iCloud. So that’s all kind of a big mess, yes I know. Anyway, whenever I made these various changes to my configurations, the iOS devices would pop up alerts regarding the change. These alerts also appeared on SLP’s iPhone, even though her Messages settings don’t have any of my account info associated with them.

The bottom line here, for me, is that Apple really has not dealt with the reality of multiple users on the same device, multiple family members sharing an iTunes Store account but needing their own iCloud accounts, etc. They may be trying to deal with it all, but they’re trying to integrate too many things that had developed for too long as independent products. And they’re not having as much success at it as they think they are.

This post began as many others here do, as an attempt to share my solution to an Apple conundrum. Unfortunately in this case I just can’t quite make sense of what’s happening, and it seems to be one of those dark-clouds-on-the-horizon portents of more trouble to come with Apple’s tendency for its ambitions to exceed its capabilities in the realm of networked services.

I just want it to work. Isn’t that the Apple promise?

Follow up: Just after posting this I had our neighbor — who also has an iPhone but of course does not share our iTunes/iCloud accounts — send a text to my phone number, and I got it. So the problem seems mostly resolved. But let’s leave it at this: if you share your iTunes Store account with another family member and you both have iPhones, you might need to send your text to each other’s email addresses instead of phone numbers, if you’re running into the same problems I’ve been having.