Adding “contrib” Extensions to MacPorts PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL is my database of choice. The main reason is that a standard distribution comes with just about everything one could ask for in a free RDBMS, and if what you want isn’t already installed, it’s often in the “contrib” directory. In particular, now that I’m doing a lot of iOS development, and location awareness is a big part of mobile apps, it’s useful to be able to work with coordinates. PostgreSQL does this using the cube data type and earthdistance functions, both in “contrib”.
MacPorts, however, doesn’t include much of the contents of “contrib” in a standard install, including both of these extensions. This makes it a lot harder to develop code using them unless I want to set up a development database on my production server, something I am not eager to do.
Thankfully, there is a solution: disable auto-clean, and after installing the postgresql83 (or 84, depending on the version you want), you can install the extra “contrib” extensions by hand.
- Edit /opt/local/etc/macports/macports.conf and set portautoclean to no.
- Install PostgreSQL (sudo port install postgresql83) or, if you’ve already installed it, re-install it (sudo port upgrade --force postgresql83).
- Change into MacPorts working directory: cd `port work postgresql83`/postgresql-8.3.11/contrib. Your specific version will differ from mine if you’re reading this more than a few months after I wrote it.
- For each extension you want installed, cd into the directory, make all, then sudo make install. This compiles C code, if any, into a shared library, then copies the library and supporting SQL files (to create types, functions, etc., and also to drop them) to /opt/local/share/postgresql83/contrib.
- Change into /opt/local/share/postgresql83/contrib and run the SQL files associated with the extensions you want. This probably needs to be done as the PostgreSQL super-user. For example, psql -U postgres dbname <cube.sql.
- Enable auto-clean again by editing /opt/local/etc/macports/macports.conf and setting portautoclean back to yes.
- Clean the postgresql83 port: sudo port clean postgresql83.
Web Roulette 1.0.1 is on the App Store
Apple approved the 1.0.1 update to Web Roulette earlier this week. It fixes a potential crash when submitting links back to us and addresses a UI glitch on the “about” screen.
One interesting statistic from the first couple weeks of sales is that iPad users are the large majority of daily users. It’s hard (impossible?) to say if this is because there is less competition in the iPad part of the App Store or if people prefer to use a web-centric app like Web Roulette on an iPad.
How to Set Up Internet Sharing on Mac OS X
These days, it’s not uncommon to be faced with the situation of having two or more Wi-Fi devices you might wish to use in a hotel room when the hotel does not provide free in-room Wi-Fi. The hotel doesn’t know that those devices are all yours and in one room, so using them means paying per device, which is crazy.
This explains how to easily set up Internet connection sharing in Mac OS X 10.6 so you can pay once, and piggyback the rest of your devices off that one laptop. These instructions assume that you have a wired Ethernet connection available in the room.
- Plug in your laptop to the Ethernet, pay and get it working.
- Go to System Preferences -> Network. Take note of the IP address, router and one DNS server.
- There are three IP address ranges reserved for private use: 10.x.x.x, 172.{16-31}.x.x and 192.168.x.x. Looking at the IP address, router and DNS address from the previous step, pick one of those ranges that is unused. You’ll use this for the wireless network you create shortly. For example, the router is in 10.1.x.x and the DNS server is in 172.16.x.x, so I’ll use 192.168.x.x.
- You may find it easiest if you’re moving between locations to create a new network location for this Internet sharing configuration. You can do that in the Location drop-down at the top of the System Preferences window.
- Still in the Network part of System Preferences, choose AirPort, then click Advanced. Go to the TCP/IP tab.
- Pick any IP address in your chosen range, with a matching subnet mask. 10.x.x.x should use 255.0.0.0, 172.16.x.x should use 255.255.0.0, and 192.168.x.x should use 255.255.0.0. Enter the same router address you copied down from the Ethernet configuration. For this post, I’ll use 192.168.1.1.
- Go to the System Preferences -> Sharing. Click the Internet Sharing item, but not the checkbox next to it. This should show “share your connection from” is Ethernet, and “to computers using” has AirPort checked. Click AirPort Options.
- Pick a network name. I also recommend turning on 128-bit WEP. It’s not great, but it’s better than nothing. You need to pick a password, which unfortunately must be exactly 13 characters.
- Click the checkbox next to Internet Sharing and Start in the scary warning dialog that follows.
- From one of your other devices, you can now connect to your new wireless network. You will have to configure its IP address manually, since your Mac is not running a DHCP server to supply it.
- Use another, different address for your wireless device, but in the same network as the AirPort you just set up. Since it’s using 192.168.1.1, I’ll use 192.168.1.2. Use the same subnet mask, but use the AirPort’s IP (192.168.1.1) as the router. Use the DNS IP you copied down in step #2.
That’s it: you should now be able to use the Internet from your wireless device, via your laptop plugged into the Ethernet.
Automatic Subversion Revision Stamping for iPhone Projects
Early during development of a new iPhone OS application, I discovered that App Store submissions must use a strict format for the CFBundleVersion key in the Info.plist file. It can only be numbers and dots. This left me a little frustrated with how to version pre-1.0 releases to testers. I didn’t want to use an open-source style “0.9″ and yet it wasn’t 1.0. What I really wanted was “1.0 b1″ or similar.
I stumbled on Daniel Jalkut’s post about automatically stamping the Subversion revision into Info.plist and thought that might be a good way to go. I also created a new key in Info.plist, LYSApplicationDisplayVersion, that I use as a human-friendly version string, which is where I get my preferred “1.0 b1″ form. CFBundleVersion now takes the form of major.minor.revision, where major and minor are the important parts of the human-friendly version (“1.0″) and revision is the Subversion revision number that produced the binary.
I like this method because it solves one problem raised by commenters on Daniel’s post. Because the Subversion revision is the third component, it doesn’t matter than r3999 is a mature 1.2 point release and r4000 is a risky pre-2.0 alpha for testers. Those versions end up 1.2.3999 and 2.0.4000 and it’s clear that they are from two different branches of development. For iPhone Ad Hoc distribution, iTunes also parses the version properly and knows that 1.0.100 is newer than 1.0.95.
Here is the script to paste into your custom script build phase:
# Xcode auto-versioning script for Subversion # by Axel Andersson, modified by Daniel Jalkut to add # "--revision HEAD" to the svn info line, which allows # the latest revision to always be used. use strict; die "$0: Must be run from Xcode" unless $ENV{"BUILT_PRODUCTS_DIR"}; # Get the current subversion revision number and use it to set the CFBundleVersion value my $REV = `/usr/bin/svnversion -n ./`; my $INFO = "$ENV{BUILT_PRODUCTS_DIR}/$ENV{WRAPPER_NAME}/Info.plist"; my $version = $REV; # (Match the last group of digits and optional letter M/S/P): # ugly yet functional (barely) regex by Daniel Jalkut: #$version =~ s/([\d]*:)(\d+[M|S]*).*/$2/; # better yet still functional regex via Kevin "Regex Nerd" Ballard ($version =~ m/(\d+)([MSP]*)$/) && ($version = $1); die "$0: No Subversion revision found" unless $version; die "$0: Modified, switched or partial working copy, you sure about that?" if $2 && ($ENV{"BUILD_STYLE"} eq "Ad Hoc" || $ENV{"BUILD_STYLE"} eq "App Store"); open(FH, "plutil -convert xml1 \"$INFO\" -o - |") or die "$0: $INFO: $!"; my $info = join("", <FH>); close(FH); $info =~ s/([\t ]+<key>CFBundleVersion<\/key>\n[\t ]+<string>\d+\.\d+).*?(<\/string>)/$1.$version$2/; open(FH, "| plutil -convert binary1 - -o \"$INFO\"") or die "$0: $INFO: $!"; print FH $info; close(FH);
There are a couple of other changes to this script for Subversion 1.5 and later, and for iPhone OS targets.
The first is that the regular expression allows for a trailing P in the Subversion revision. This signals a working copy from a sparse checkout, which I never use and therefore may be a problem. I have the script fail if any letter is appended to the revision when the BUILD_STYLE is “Ad Hoc” or “App Store”, which are two new configurations, cloned from Release, that I use for Ad Hoc and App Store distribution, respectively. Especially for modified working copies: I never want to accidentally hand out a build made from a modified working copy. Should the day come that I really do, I can comment this line out, make the build, and uncomment it again.
The second is that iPhone projects convert Info.plist to the binary plist format in the application bundle. In order to extract the existing CFBundleVersion key, it must be converted back to XML. When writing the plist back out, it is again converted to binary. Both of these steps use plutil, which is part of the Developer Tools.
Remember HTTP Password in Mobile Safari
In iPhone OS 3.0, Apple allowed Mobile Safari to save usernames and passwords in web forms. Unfortunately, Safari does not offer to do the same thing for HTTP Basic and Digest authentication. I’ve become fond of using HTTP authentication because it is very easy to set up, either in your Apache virtual host configuration or within a Rails application. There are many times that a full-fledged user database is unnecessary for a simple administration back-end.
There is a work-around, though it does mean storing your user and password in plaintext in your device’s bookmarks. HTTP allows you to supply authentication credentials as part of the URL, in the form http://username:password@example.com/.
In the last few days, I’ve considered building a form-based login for one of my sites, just so I can do basic management from my iPad. I’m comfortable that since the device rarely leaves the house, and the data on this site is not sensitive, that leaving the password in plaintext in the bookmark is an acceptable trade-off.
malloc Debugging
Bill Bumgarner posted a nice tutorial on using malloc to debug memory misuse in Cocoa. I’ve run across these before when reading the malloc(1) man page, but it’s nice to have a tutorial that shows how to use them in practice.
ssh-agent on Mac OS X 10.5
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been using a tool called SSHKeychain on Mac OS X to manage ssh-agent and my identities, to make logging into remote servers secure, yet password-free.
Lately, however, something has changed and SSHKeychain isn’t able to keep track of my keys. The result is that instead of rarely typing my passphrases, I’m doing it constantly. I think it started around the time I updated to 10.5.8.
Turns out that Leopard has much better support for ssh-agent built-in and SSHKeychain isn’t necessary. Dave Dribin’s blog lays it all out: ssh-agent on Mac OS X 10.5 and, for the security conscious, Securing ssh-agent on Mac OS X 10.5.
A couple of things to watch out for:
- If you are switching from SSHKeychain, remove the environment override for SSH_AUTH_SOCK from ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist.
- To get the GUI passphrase dialog and the option to save the passphrase in your keychain, you must use the system ssh, not one from Fink or MacPorts.
Code the Phone
I’ve started a new blog, Code the Phone, with a friend of mine. The purpose of it is all things related to application development and the business of selling apps on smartphones. Not surprisingly, we aren’t talking about anything other than the iPhone at the moment.
Announcing In Season 1.0
I am pleased to announce the immediate availability of In Season 1.0 for the iPhone and iPod touch. In Season is a produce shopping guide, inspired by a couple of recent books that address the problem of missing flavor in most produce found in American markets.
Here in America, we’ve become rather used to the idea that fresh fruits and vegetables are available whenever we want them. What we don’t always realize is that this convenience comes at the cost of flavor and price. Plants grow according to a schedule, and while we can force things somewhat (hothouse tomatoes, for example), if you want peaches in the dead of winter, they aren’t coming from the northern hemisphere.
Shipping produce from South America is a long trip to an American market, though, so food has to be bred to survive the journey and someone (the consumer) has to cover the costs of that travel.
There are even disadvantages to strawberries grown and sold in season. Strawberries are so fragile, growers have had to breed them exclusively for shipment, resulting in a berry that has only a pale shadow of true strawberry flavor left.
I created In Season to help my own family, and hopefully others, with this problem. Food tastes better when it’s grown according to its natural schedule, and even more so if you can find a local farmer supplying produce to your market. It will take less effort to grow it and supply will be higher, so you will pay less. Locally-grown produce also means less fuel is burned bringing that food to market, further bringing prices down and reducing your carbon footprint at the same time.
The economics of the App Store being what they are, version 1.0 is a toe in the water. If it is well received and I can justify further development, I have some great ideas to make it an extremely useful and educational app.
If you are interested in those books I mention above, they are terrific reads: How to Pick a Peach: The Search for Flavor from Farm to Table, by Russ Parsons and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, by Barbara Kingsolver.
Apple Sanctioned Developer Forums
Hallelujah: Apple is now offering official developer forums for the members of the iPhone Developer Program. It’s tied to your Apple ID, so they know who’s in and who’s not, and part of the usage agreement implies that they may provide forums for the discussion of pre-release software.
I hope they extend this to Mac development, too. The Apple mailing lists are great, but up until Leopard was released, the moderators on cocoa-dev were constantly fighting the tide of questions about Leopard-only APIs.
(Seen on Daring Fireball.)
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