Downgrading from iTunes 11 to 10.7 on OSX

I decided to downgrade my iTunes from 11 to 10.7 for a number of reasons, top most was the fact the the new UI drives me barmy!

I followed the great instructions at http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/03/how-to-downgrade-from-itunes-11-to-version-10-7-on-your-mac/ and found that I couldn't open my iTunes library after the upgrade.

Since I didn't make a library backup before the iTunes 11 upgrade I thought I would be stuck, but to my surprise I found a Previous iTunes Libraries folder in my ~/Music/iTunes

Restoring was as easy as taking my swapping iTunes Library.itl with the file in the Previous iTunes Libraries folder from December and everything worked fine...

One thing I noticed was that my new iTunes purchases didn't show, but this was a minor inconvenience. Now I have the old iTunes back and I'm happy… for now...

Save multiple Artboards as indiviudal EMF or WMF files in Adobe Illustrator CS6

I've been creating a set of networking icons in Adobe Illustrator. To get these in a usable vector format for Visio and OmniGraffle stencils I need them in EMF or WMF format. Unfortunately the built-in Export function in Illustrator doesn't support Artboards for EMF/WMF but instead outputs one single file, so I needed to find a different solution...

First of all, I needed to split my main AI file in to individual files for each Artboard.

To do this, I went to File > Save As > Adobe EPS and selected the Artboard option.

Next was to individually export these to EMF and WMF.

First choice was to create a Workflow in Automator but for some reason. Automator's Watch Me Do action was unable to recognise that Illustrator was open - It returned some error about the application not being open (even though it was).

Second choice was AppleScript, but as it turns out Adobe don't have the EMF or WMF available as formats for the export action in their AppleScript library.

Finally I found the "Actions" menu in Illustrator.

I created a new folder called "My Actions"

Create a new Action called "Export to EMF" and started recording the Continue reading

Blast from the past: 10 reasons why JUNOS is better than IOS

Preface

Back in late 2009 I wrote my first ever blog post. It must have been ok because I got some comments, a few RT's on twitter and it made @Etherealminds Internets of Interest. Since technicast.net is no longer I thought I would post this here for future reference.

10 Reasons JUNOS is better than IOS - 7th July 2009

Last week I started on the JNCIA Fast-Track course and I was very impressed. JUNOS is a very good platform and I was amazed at the features and felt compelled to write this down. Maybe Cisco could take some pointers for the next incarnation of IOS…

1. The Candidate Configuration – While IOS has only a running and start-up configuration, JUNOS adds a candidate configuration to the equation. When you make changes, you make them to the candidate configuration. These changes must the be committed before they take effect. This means I can review all of my changes before writing them! (No more frantic notepad copy and pasting)

2. Handling of Multiple Shell Users – The candidate configuration also offer unique ways of handling multiple users wishing to edit a config. By default all users edit a common candidate Continue reading

Adding an image to DevStack

I had some time to play with OpenStack this week so I rolled a DevStack install on an Ubuntu VM running in Parallels on my MacBook Air following the instructions here. Once OpenStack was up and running I was able to log in to Horizon at http://localhost/ and started to poke about. I decided I wanted to try and create a compute instance just to see what all the fuss was about … as it turns out, you need to have an image to base this instance on.

With a little bit of help from the OpenStack documentation and a little bit of trial and error I was able to quickly upload an image as follows:

First things first. Create a directory for your images:

mkdir /tmp/images
cd /tmp/images

Then grab the latest CirrOs image with wget:

wget -c https://launchpad.net/cirros/trunk/0.3.0/+download/cirros-0.3.0-x86_64-disk.img

We can then upload to glance:

glance --os-username=admin --os-password=password --os-tenant-name=demo 
--os-auth-url=http://localhost:5000/v2.0 image-create --name 
cirros-0.3.0-x86_64 --disk-format qcow2 --container-format bare 
< /tmp/images/cirros-0.3.0-x86_64-disk.img

+------------------+--------------------------------------+
| Property         | Value                                |
+------------------+--------------------------------------+
| checksum         | 50bdc35edb03a38d91b1b071afb20a3c     |
| container_format | bare                                 |
 Continue reading

Applescript – Rename PDF to Title from Metadata

Today I downloaded a the full set of Configuration and Command references for the HP 12500 Series Switch from HP.com. When I looked in my download finder they were all helpfully named "cXXXXXX.pdf". Interestingly enough the title in the metadata seemed to be correct, so I wrote an AppleScript to batch rename them.

set theFiles to choose file with multiple selections allowed
repeat with theFile in theFiles
    set filePath to quoted form of POSIX path of theFile
    set theName to do shell script "mdls -name kMDItemTitle " & filePath & " -raw"
    set theName to theName & ".pdf"
    if theName is not "(null)" then try
        tell application "System Events" to set name of theFile to theName
    end try
end repeat

References: Apple Support Fourms

Grabbing IETF RFCs and I-Ds in ebook format using rsync

IETF drafts get no love from my Tablet. I 've tried sending drafts to Instapaper for offline reading, I've tried using Readability but all of these fail to render correctly. Is it too much to ask to be able to read RFC's on the go?

Fortunately I found that the RFCs and I-D's are published to tools.ietf.org in both epub and mobi formats. To pull the full list of epub:

rsync -avz --include="*.epub" --exclude="*" rsync.tools.ietf.org::tools/ebook/ /destination

And for mobi:

rsync -avz --include="*.mobi" --exclude="*" rsync.tools.ietf.org::tools/ebook/ /destination

These are pretty hefty downloads so you might want to tailor these to your current needs by creating using a txt file full of include rules, lets call it filter.txt

Working Group RFC & Internet Drafts

Add lines like this to your filter.txt to download the latest RFCs and I-Ds for the WGs you are following:

*lisp*.mobi
*conex*.mobi 
*nvo3*.mobi
*tsvwg*.mobi

Published RFCs

To download the mother load of RFCs add the following line:

rfc.mobi

Published RFCs by Area

To download RFCs by Area add the following:

area.rtg.mobi
area. Continue reading

My MacBook Air Docking Solution

I decomissioned my CustoMac to return it to its origins as a gaming rig. This was mainly due to the fact that trying to keep my MacBook and CustoMac in sync was turing out to be very labour intensive... This means I am using my Macbook Air as my main office PC but its limited I/O was proving to be a little bit of a problem!

I needed:

• 1 x DVI or HDMI to hook it up to my monitor
• 1 x 10/100 or 1000 Ethernet as Wireless is not fast enough (especially for Time Machine)
• 1 x Headphone and 1 x Mic ports to work with my existing headset
• 1 x USB for my Webcam
• 2 x spare USB for Memory sticks etc...

While the new range of Thunderbolt docks will be available later this year from the likes of Belkin and Matrox they will be priced in the £200-300GBP range (Expansys have the Belkin dock listed at £279). While it offers all the I/O I want over a high bandwidth connection I don't think I can justify spending over 1/4 the cost of the laptop itself on one... so I came up with a homebrew solution for under Continue reading