musicalgeometry » command line

Change Your Company Name In XCode

Jason Job — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 06:46:39 +0000

If you want your own company name to be automatically included in your XCode source files instead of this:

//
//  helloworld.m
//  helloworld
//
//  Created by John Smith on 24/10/09.
//  Copyright __MyCompanyName__ 2009. All rights reserved.
//

then it is time to open up your Terminal app.

OSX Terminal app

You will find it at ~/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app.

Enter the following in the open terminal (replacing the company name with yours):

defaults write com.apple.Xcode PBXCustomTemplateMacroDefinitions '{"ORGANIZATIONNAME" = "Smith Incorporated";}'

Now when you create new source files in XCode you will see this:

//
//  helloworld.m
//  helloworld
//
//  Created by John Smith on 24/10/09.
//  Copyright Smith Incorporated 2009. All rights reserved.
//

Much better.

How To Find What Linux Distro You Are In?

Jason Job — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 17:27:35 +0000

I was recently doing something over ssh on my hosts shared server and realized that I didn’t know what Linux distro I was working in.

My server was running Red Hat

I did some Googling and found a number of suggestions on how to find this information out. Only the last of these three actually worked for me but I thought I would include them because it seems that they work for others on different systems.

lsb_release -a

cat /etc/lsb_release

cat /proc/version

Hopefully one of these will work for you.

SSH Remote Access On Your iPhone

Jason Job — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 16:23:20 +0000

We are truly living in the future. Today while riding the bus to work I used my iPhone to log onto my web server using an SSH terminal app called TouchTerminal. As the bus made its way through the rain I was working at a command line logged on to a LAMP server implementing some PHP security measures that I had read about the night before. I was able to create and edit files with vi, move and copy files and folders, write and execute scripts and do anything that I could do logged onto my server from my computer at home. Did I mention this app is free?

An SSH terminal on your iPhone

I’m not going to do a proper review of TouchTerminal except to say that it is a phenomenally cool free app for all network nerds. To be able to log onto a command line on my server from anywhere with cellular service is amazing. The makers of TouchTerminal also make a Pro version which implements all kinds of goodies to make doing network admin from your iPhone even easier if you are so inclined.

While I can’t really see myself using TouchTerminal all that much, the geek factor is just too much to resist, and for free you can’t go wrong. The only problem I can see is that now I have no excuse for not doing that WordPress upgrade I have been putting off. I’ll just have to do it on the bus.

Serial Communication Tool For OSX

Jason Job — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 13:51:14 +0000

Coming from a Windows background I previously used HyperTerminal as a serial communication tool. When I moved to a Mac I tried an app called zterm that is a sort of HyperTerminal equivalent, but found it to be a bit cumbersome. The best, and my favourite way that I have found to accomplish communication over the serial port in OSX, is with a Terminal app called screen.

Don't fear the command line!

To use it you first need to open Terminal via Applications->Utilities->Terminal. Then you need to get a list of the serial ports available. These devices are listed in the /dev folder and all start with the prefix tty. To see a list of all the serial ports on your computer, type:

ls /dev/tty.*

The ls is the Unix list command and the * after tty. is a wild card so that you are returned a list of everything in the /dev folder that starts with tty., namely all your serial ports. To connect to one of those serial ports you need to use screen. The format for calling screen is:

screen portname datarate

For example, to connect to a serial port called /dev/tty.usbserial-A3000Xg3 at 9600 bits per second, type:

screen /dev/tty.usbserial-A3000Xg3 9600

Now anything you type will be sent out the serial port (though there is no local echo of your typing) and anything the serial port receives will be displayed on the screen. The command to close the serial port is Control-A followed by Control-\.

For more info on screen check the man pages by typing:

man screen