danielbeck.net

One-click BootCamp activation using AppleScript and Keychain

Another in a series of “I better post this before I forget how I did it” code snippets.

Switching from a bootcamp Windows partition back to OSX is easy; there’s an icon in the system tray you can click and just choose “restart in Mac OS X”. Going the other way around is not so simple: you either have to open System Preferences, find Startup Disk, select your windows partition, and click Restart; or you have to reboot and hold down the Alt key and hope that it pops up the OS picker which I don’t know about you but for me that only works about one time in ten — most of the time it just goes straight back into OSX and I have to wait through the whole boot process before I can try again.

You can download BootChamp if you don’t mind cluttering your menubar with another icon, or Flipside which is better than the default, but still not quite handsfree.

Or you can save this AppleScript snippet as an application, and trigger it using Quicksilver or Spotlight or the Dock or however else you feel like doing it:

do shell script "bless -mount /Volumes/[your windows partition]/ -legacy -setBoot -nextonly" password "[your password]" with administrator privileges
do shell script "shutdown -r now" with administrator privileges

(Omit the [brackets] and plug in your own windows partition and administrator password. Incidentally, if you want to change the name of your Windows partition, you can do that from inside Windows: go to My Computer, select the C: drive, right-click, “Rename”, etc.)

Of course, now what you’ve done is created a security hole by storing your admin password in plaintext. You could just leave the password out of the script, but that means you have to retype it every time you want to run Windows — that’s no fun. So if you don’t want to live dangerously, use Keychain to manage the password for you; that’s what it’s for, after all.

The process is only slightly convoluted:

Launch Keychain Access (in Applications/Utilities/).
Create a new password item (in the file menu, or just hit apple-N.)
Name the item “Switch To Windows,” or something equally memorable. Enter the username and password of an administrator account for the computer. (I’ve only tested this using the same account that I’m currently logged in as, but theoretically it should work with any valid admin username/password pair.)
Save the password item and quit Keychain Access.

Now change your applescript to the following:

tell application "Keychain Scripting"
    set myKey to first key of current keychain whose name is "Switch To Windows"
    set myUser to account of myKey
    set myPass to password of myKey
end tell

do shell script "bless -mount /Volumes/[windows partition]/ -legacy -setBoot -nextonly" user name myUser password myPass with administrator privileges
do shell script "shutdown -r now" with administrator privileges

Save this as an application, and give it a fancy icon if you feel like it. The first time you run this it’ll give you the standard “such-and-such application is trying to read your keychain” warning; click “Always allow” and from then on you’ll be able to reboot into windows with one click.

Photo: Good boy

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Why it’s a waste of time to search for recipes on the internet

Even if you ignore all the recipes that are basically “open a can/jar of whatever you’re cooking. Heat. Serve”, and the ones written by people under the mistaken impression that velveeta is made of food…

…you still have to wade through recipes like this one, from which I quote the important part:

Ingredients

1 1/2 pounds cod fillets

Directions

Serve 1 pound of the fish and all of the potatoes with this meal. Reserve 1/2 pound fish for another recipe.

Photo: Pigman’s Property

They’ve torn down most of what used to be the pigman’s land, but this fence is still there.

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Photo: Ta-dah!

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Photo: Branches

For those looking closely, no, the photo is not upside-down. I guess the icicles formed before the tree fell over.

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Photo: Our lawn, preserved in ice

This is how funky the weather has been. Every blade of grass on our lawn was coated in its own individual casing of ice.

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Photo: Grumpy tree

I don’t know why; that tree just looks grumpy to me.

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Photo: Ice

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Photo: Ice Storm

That low-hanging branch on the left? That used to be a tree. Which stood upright.

Ice is heavy.

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A few small catastrophes

There had been this new gurgling noise in the pipes for a few days, which I had chosen to ignore.

Then the exterminator came upstairs and said hey, do you know you’ve got a big puddle of water down in the basement? And in fact the furnace was in the center of its own small lake and the heating guy shook his head and shut all the valves and asked do you have any space heaters? So Emily and Stellan packed off to a friend’s house for the night while I stay home to keep feeding the fireplace and hope it doesn’t get cold enough outside to freeze any pipes.

The ice storm starts in earnest at around eight o’clock. This will make getting the new furnace up the hill tomorrow an interesting project, but that’s tomorrow’s problem.

Some of this part is actually kind of fun, I have to admit — it’s the first time I’ve been alone in the house for more than a few hours at a time since our son was born, and I get to turn the volume up on my videogame and play the drums in the living room and do all the things you do when you’ve got the house to yourself.

At eleven o’clock the power goes out. This is inconvenient but not altogether surprising, and our house does look really beautiful by candlelight. No power means no water either, since the well pump won’t run, but I do have a swimming pool and a bucket at my disposal, and therefore am able to flush the toilet. So that’s good. It feels a little like camping.

At 6:30 when I wake up because the fire has gone out, there’s still no power and the automated emergency phone line promises restoration of service by midnight next Monday. For most customers. This is the power company’s way of saying, dude, have you looked outside lately? It’s a freaking ice storm out there.

It is. Our road is a worst-case scenario of fallen branches and ice-coated trees bent double; I spend the morning cutting them apart with a handsaw and dragging them out of the way. (note to self: be better about keeping a supply of gasoline for the chainsaw.)

It’s not actively raining anymore, but the wind is picking up, and every few minutes I can hear another tree splintering its way to the ground somewhere in the woods. At one point a branch hits the ground just a few feet away from where I’m standing.

This is the point when I start questioning how long I can really continue living in a landscape that actively wants to kill me.

The gas company explains that some roads are closed, but they’ll take the long way around. I have to clear the road again before they arrive, because some new trees have fallen to block it once more, but eventually they get their trucks up to the house, use flashlights to install the new furnace, and finish just as it’s getting dark outside. They tell me to call them when the power comes back on, so they can do the last bit of wiring and get the heat running again. I hadn’t thought of that part.

And so on. I could continue the play-by-play whingefest but it’s not that interesting. It all could have been much worse: we still have a propane heater for the basement which works without electricity, which seems to be enough to keep the house above freezing at least, and Ethan convinced me that keeping my vigil with the fireplace really wasn’t making much difference. So I (and my computer) have moved in with them too. It’s obviously going to be a long time before power gets restored — our whole town is out; powerlines are literally sitting on the ground in three different places I could see, and the spur line that runs to our house is down (and has a large tree leaning on it as well) so our place may be among the last to get lit up again. But the weather has warmed up, it’s not snowing anymore, and we have good friends who are gracious hosts who have power and heat and water and frankly better internet connectivity than we have at home. So it could be a lot worse.

This is all by way of saying that I’m a little behind on my christmas shopping this year.

Certain phonemes are scary

If you have nothing to talk about but the baby, may as well talk about the baby.

A couple nights ago he cried, which is nothing new, except that for the first time he was obviously doing it on purpose instead of as an instinctive response to hunger or whatever. Using the sound of his own crying as a word, in an extremely low-vocabulary language. It didn’t sound much like real crying because he’d do it, then stop and look intently at us to see if it was getting any reaction, then do it again, then stop and study us again.

That didn’t last long; the very next day he discovered phonemes. Can’t pronounce most of them yet, but you can see him thinking hard beforehand, and testing out different mouth shapes to see what different noises they make.

Which naturally leads to his parents encouragingly trying to help him along by saying things to him like GOOOAAAAOOAAEEEEAAAEEE! EEE! Which might not be all that helpful in the long run.

Last night we were having exactly that conversation, and after a while I started making other noises just to demonstrate that he could try something other than a long vowel every once in a while. Which had him rapt with attention. Whistling: wow. Popping my lips: woooow. Every new noise I made was more fascinating than the last. Until I made one final noise (a sort of donald duck quacking sound) that is apparently, if you’re eight weeks old, the most terrifying sound any living creature could possibly make. Either that or it was just one sound too many, as in “I’m never going to learn how to make all those noises! Never never never!” ::pounds face on piano::

There was much wailing and tears, and that was the end of elocution lessons for the night.

Signifiers of failure

One thing I have to stop doing is leaving my office full of signifiers of failure: little stacks of unfinished projects, piles of papers or tools.

I go in there ready to do some work and immediately I’m surrounded by things I meant to do or things I’m putting off or things I know I’ll never finish and the impetus to do whatever it was I was psyched about doing just drains away in the face of all those dusty stacks, all those tasks undone.

Photo: I can never reset this now

I went to set my alarm clock for the first time since Stellan was born, and discovered that the stopwatch, which we had been using to time Emily’s contractions, has been running since, well, the beginning of Emily’s contractions. This photo is already out of date; as I post this it’s up to 1,027 hours and 35 minutes.

(This also means we have a record of the contractions themselves — they started out less than two minutes apart, and stayed right there for the two hours it took for us to decide it was time to go to the hospital. Fun times.)

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Photo: Stellan does not like his halloween costume

This one’s a keeper; I can show it to his prom date.

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Photo: Emily is unfazed by Stellan’s opinion

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COINCIDENCE???

Obama gets elected president. Mere days later, our baby smiles for the first time. COINCIDENCE?? You be the judge.

In other news, babies are kind of boring.

Seriously. Once you get over the fact that they’re really tiny and cute, and that their fingers and toes are even tinier and cuter, and that sometimes they wave them around in tiny cute ways, there’s not a whole lot of entertainment value to be had.

There are only so many times you can sit there and watch your kid intently try to stuff his hand in his mouth and miss and poke his eye with his elbow instead and then flail around in frustration a little bit and then try sort of nudging that arm towards the mouth using the other hand except that the other hand isn’t any more coordinated than the first one was so he flails around in frustration again and screams once or twice for good measure and then accidentally whacks the hand into his mouth and is so obviously startled that he immediately drops it again, which is admittedly all kinds of funny the first six or seven times it happens.

But I am seriously ready for the guy to learn English already, so we can have a decent conversation.

Or at least so I can tell him to be quiet already, because I heard him screaming and I’m getting the bottle out now, it’s on the way, message received, so there is no need to keep complaining so loudly because it’s early and I haven’t had my coffee yet either. Actually I can tell him that, and often do. But it doesn’t seem to make much difference. Other than making me feel stupid for arguing with someone who’s only six weeks old.

Some more milestones, while we’re at it:

I got some work done. Actual thinky-type work, of the paid variety.
I read a book. This is probably the longest I’ve gone without reading something since I learned to read. It (Consider the Lobster) was a very good book, and made me feel a tiny bit sorry for John McCain. I’m also about halfway through Anathem, which is nowhere near as complex — nor as good — as I’d heard it would be.
Last night was my first bout of insomnia since Stellan’s birth. This is good news, because it’s a result of the fact that he now routinely sleeps about 8 hours a night, which everyone except my mother-in-law tells me is bizarre and unheard of at this age. But it’s bad news because it means I haven’t been cured of my chronic insomnia. But it’s good news because it was only up-till-1am insomnia, not up-till-dawn insomnia.

So these are all getting-back-to-normal kinds of milestones. Which is good. Because I’m kind of starting to think about being ready for that to happen.

How we voted

I posted this elsewhere, but it makes me happy and I want to remember it. So I’m posting it here too.

It was a warm and sunny day for November, so Emily and I decided to walk to our polling place — The town hall / library / post office is about a mile down the road. It took a while to get our act together enough to leave the house — she needed to shower, I needed to eat, Stellan needed to eat, she needed to eat, I needed to shower, he needed to eat again, etc… it wasn’t until about two o’clock that I finally slung him over my shoulder (we have a stroller, but it seemed silly to drive down the road to where the pavement starts) and we had a pleasant walk through town.

On the way we passed a snowmobile for sale ($300), another snowmobile for sale ($200), and two 1950’s trucks for sale, one pickup, the other dump. (I don’t remember how much they cost.)

The polling place was staffed by five little old ladies, all of whom cooed over Stellan. I’m pretty sure they’re the same five little old ladies who are there for every election. There was no line, though there was one voter just arriving as we left, and two voters just leaving as we arrived, who also cooed over Stellan. Stellan spent most of this time asleep.

Ballots in our town are simple folded sheets of paper with a square next to each printed name; to vote you draw an X using those little pencils you get at the mini golf place. They then go into an ancient-looking wooden box with an ornate handcrank and a mechanical counter on top. We were voters number 223 and 224 (in a town of population 700; I don’t know whether that indicates unusually high turnout by that time of day or not.)

On the way home Stellan got hungry and Emily got tired, so I walked up to the house and drove back down with the jeep to pick them up. Last thing I did before coming back up to the house was check the mailbox, in which was this perfect summary of my feelings about this election.

This was the first election in which everyone I voted for won, everything I voted for passed, and everything I voted against didn’t (except for prop 3, which I didn’t really have strong feelings about). As a MetaFilter commenter put it: “it’s a good day in Massachusetts to be a pot-smoking racing greyhound who knows it’s his civic duty to pay income taxes.”

It’s the first time in a long time that I’ve felt hopeful about our government, instead of deeply ashamed. There’s a long road to go, yet, but this was a damn good first step.

Clarification

A couple people who read this blog have mentioned “Stellan sure cries a lot, doesn’t he?”

The truth is, he really doesn’t. There have only been a couple of instances of him crying for no apparent reason or for long periods of time; mostly he’s a calm, quiet kid. I just write more about the crying because it’s funnier than “My baby! He is still asleep!”

Meanwhile, I have just had my first instance of waking up because I dreamed he was crying for his morning bottle. Emily first did this weeks ago. This (like so many things) is a sign that she is a more attentive parent than I.

Consider a cylindrical baby

Now with 30% more baby (by weight)!

At birth, Stellan weighed 7 pounds, 3 ounces, and was 19.5 inches long (At some point the “height” dimension will replace “length,” which will later take on another meaning entirely, but we have not yet reached that point.) As of his latest pediatric appointment two days ago, he weighed 9 pounds 1.5 ounces, and had grown to 22 inches long.

It’s difficult if not impossible to obtain an accurate measure of the volumetric area of a baby: all babies hate Archimedes and deeply resent displacement by immersion; this is a well-documented fact. Fortunately, we can make a rough estimate by assuming a cylindrical baby, using the circumference of the head measured at birth as 34 cm, and currently at 36 cm. (Why the maternity nurse chose to switch units for length vs circumference is unknown to me. We’ll continue in metric, because it’s classier.) This will be a maximal estimate, as the head is — memorably, to anyone present in the delivery room — the largest-diameter portion of the human body, but it’s good enough for our purposes. Anyway, it’s all we’ve got.

[Incidentally, and I forgot to mention this before: by most measurements Stellan is close to or slightly larger than average; his head circumference, however, is in the bottom 10%. Meaning that either my son has a teeny-tiny brain, or a large portion of the world is populated primarily by bobblehead dolls.]

A little half-remembered geometry, and Google, tells us that the volume of a cylindrical baby with circumference c and length l is (c²l) / (4π), giving us an at-birth volume of 4,554 cm³ and a present-day volume of 5,827 cm³.

From this we can easily deduce that the density of our baby has remained constant from birth to the present day, at roughly 0.72 grams per cubic centimeter (or if you prefer 0.025 pounds per cubic inch, or 0.4 ounces per cubic inch). This is reassuring, as any non-constant trend in density could have unfortunate implications for our son’s future buoyancy.

Awesome games you can play with your baby

Fun for the whole family!

When your baby is screaming uncontrollably, join right in, and narrate the baby’s inner experience at peak volume! Use as much profanity as possible, for extra enjoyment! Like this: OH MY GOD OH GOD OH MY GOD HOLY CRAP YOUR HANDS ARE COLD WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS TO ME WHY OH GOD WHY WHY WHY STOP DON’T TAKE AWAY THE SOFT THING DON’T TAKE AWAY THE SOFT THING I NEED THE SOFT THING I NEED IT I NEED IT OH CRAP I DROPPED IT GODDAMN IT WHY AM I NAKED NOW FUCK ITS COLD OH GOD OH MY FUCKING GOD I’M GOING TO PEE IN YOUR FACE RIGHT NOW IF YOU DON’T PUT SOMETHING WARM ON ME RIGHT NOW OH GOD I’M DYING WHY OH WHY SO COLD SO COLD

Moms especially love it when you play this game while they’re trying to have a nap.

Alternatively, there’s this:

[YouTube yanked the video; this version’s blurrier but has the advantage of still existing]

Mean Time

I’ve been timing. You get about 20 minutes.

From the time you set Stellan down to do something, to the time when he starts fussing and needs to be picked up again, that’s about how much you can reliably count on having to yourself. Sometimes you’ll luck out and get four hours, but since you can’t ever predict when those four-hour stretches will occur, you can’t plan on doing anything that will take longer than 20 minutes.

Which means I’ve gotten really efficient about certain tasks. Such as eating. We used to eat too quickly anyway, but now we can stuff down a full meal in approximately 5 minutes, which leaves a whole quarter of an hour for cleanup.

And cleanup. My dish-washing method used to be leave them to pile up until you run out of dishes, and then do them all at once. Then for years it was let Emily do them. Those were good years. Now it’s do them right away, get them in the dishwasher as soon as you’ve finished eating, because that’s all you’re going to have time for anyway. (And it turns out that in terms of total energy expended per dish, this is much more efficient: the ‘leave them in the sink’ strategy involves a lot of careful stacking for maximum sink density, as well as soaking to prevent hard-to-scrub-dried-on-crunchy-bits, plus inevitable scrubbing of dried-on-crunchy bits; all of which can be skipped now because there’s no time for things to dry or get crunchy. I kind of knew this already, but pretended I didn’t so I could leave them stacked up longer.)

Some tasks I’ve gotten so efficient at that I hardly do them at all. Shaving, for example. Or bathing. Most personal hygiene, in fact. But since I’ve worked as a freelancer for a dozen years, that hardly counts as a change.

Propaganda and Graphic Design

Look: it’s a post that isn’t about the baby!

Historically, fascist and totalitarian regimes have had pretty good graphic design, tending toward a clean, uncluttered style. The connection is so strong and well-known that it’s a common source of parody and even direct criticism about Obama, who also has some pretty good designers.

Should we consider it deliberate, then, that the current US administration has such an unbelievably cluttered, clip-art heavy design aesthetic?

(These are all from the Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive; past hits include the Total Information Awareness logo and the original Homeland Security design.)

Biology is unfair, part 2

I think I understand the origins of human civilization a little better now.

From the very day Stellan was born — from long before it, in fact — Emily has had an obvious, and intense, emotional connection to him. To the point where just the sound of him crying causes her active physical discomfort.

I haven’t got that. I think the little guy’s awfully cute, but my interactions with him so far are mostly logistical: insert food, remove diaper. While I’m sure I’ll develop that emotional connection with him over time, it just isn’t there yet. Babies are born so unformed — that whole idea of the fourth trimester is really dead on — that at this point there’s really not much personality there to connect with (and what is there is difficult to see, since he has no way to express it yet). So while I can intellectually relate to him as someone who is going to be a person someday, that deeper connection hasn’t happened yet.

One interpretation of this, of course, is that I’m just a heartless and unfeeling person, but I hope you’ll forgive me if I try not to dwell too much on that possibility. No, seriously, that isn’t it. No, really.

What it is, I think, is biology screwing with our brains again. Emily’s totally got the whole lioness-protecting-her-cubs thing going on: I don’t know if it’s hormones or the nine months of physical connection or some more subtle programming, but it’s happening on an innate, prerational level that just isn’t available to me.

If this experience is at all common, then I am completely understanding how it is we developed societies where the men go off hunting while the women stay home and take care of the kids. Because there have been more than a few occasions over the last few days when I’d have loved an excuse to grab a spear and head off into the wilderness for a while.

Which is really difficult for me to accept, because ideologically I’m completely opposed to that idea — gender equality yay, biological determinism boo. I very much don’t like the fact that blue-state-living, hippie-liberal me is basically re-enacting stone age social mores. But that seems to be how it’s playing out anyway. I guess the challenge is going to be figuring out how to get past that stage and on to something more palatable as soon as possible.

tiklooT::etalpmeT

Let’s say, purely as a hypothetical of course, that you’re using perl’s Template::Toolkit to control an application’s front end.

Reasonable enough. Let’s further posit that at a certain point in the application you realize that, while you of course know how to send variables and data from your perl scripts into your templates, you have no idea how to do the reverse: give your perl script access to the variables you defined inside the template.

Let’s assume that after quite a bit of googling you’re starting to have the sinking feeling that you must be either Doing It Wrong or Missing Something Really Obvious, because there doesn’t seem to be any discussion in the docs or on the net about what seems like it would be a really basic need.

But then let’s assume you somehow stumbled across this page. Now you no longer have the sinking feeling that you’re Doing It Wrong. Instead you have the comfortable feeling that While You May Be Doing It Wrong, At Least One Person Out There Is Doing It Wrong The Same Way.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use Template;
use Template::Context;
my $context = Template::Context->new();
my $template = Template->new({ CONTEXT => $context });
$template->process("foo.tmpl");
my $global = $context->{STASH}->get("global");

In other words, create a template object with a local variable for its context; process the template containing the variables you want to read; and finally use Stash->get() to read whichever variables you’re after.

Why would you do this? In my case, I wanted to have a single config file for an application that would be used in lots of different contexts — so I wanted to make a single config file containing all the variables that would differ between the various installations. These variables needed to be accessible in both the templates themselves and in the perl code which uses them.

The Toolkit documentation makes it very clear how to define variables inside the templates, or to define them inside perl and then pass them on to the template. What’s less clear is how to make them go the other way, to define the variables inside the template but read them from inside perl.

Obviously I could’ve (and possibly should’ve) just defined them inside the perl script and passed them to the templates as needed. But then I’d be modifying the scripts for every installation, which seemed to defeat the whole idea of using a template system.

I’m sure this is a no-brainer for regular users of Template Toolkit, but it took me long enough to work out that I figured it might be useful for somebody else. If it turns out I’ve managed to find a really convoluted or inefficient way to do something that could be done much more simply, then let me know.