Watchmen is the wikipedia featured article today! If you haven’t already read it, do yourself a favour and go and buy a copy.
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Day: August 23, 2006
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Character Info in Textmate
One rather useful feature of vim is that you can pull up information about a character by positioning your cursor over it and hitting ga (get ASCII?). I quite miss this in textmate, so I created a small command to add to the Text bundle. This is “Character Info”, which I’ve assigned to ^⇧I. It takes the selection as input and the information comes back in a tooltip.
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use charnames qw( :full );
binmode( STDIN, ':utf8' );
foreach my $c (split //, do { local $/; <> }) {
my $code = ord $c;
my $name = charnames::viacode( $code ) || "unknown character";
printf "U+%04X %sn", $code, $name;
}
exit 0;
This is what it looks like.
The only caveat is that it only works if you’re using UTF-8 for your files. But really, if not, why not?
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System Keychain
This morning I was trying to add a new machine to my wireless network. Unfortunately, I’d forgotten the password… To the Keychain Access batcave!
Unfortunately, the “Airport network password” is stored in the system keychain, instead of my login keychain. Whilst I can unlock the system keychain, when I ask it to show me the password for my wireless network, it prompts for a password. Not my password, as it happens. Oh no. System keychain is protected by a 48 random bytes stored in /var/db/SystemKey. It’s created by the systemkeychain utility the first time your mac is booted. More to the point, there’s absolutely no way I can type those bytes.
So, let’s be cunning I thought. I dropped down to the command line and ran:
% sudo cat /var/db/SystekMey | pbcopy
Then went back to keychain access only to discover that you can’t paste passwords in OS X.
A bit more googling turned up the security command. In particular, the dump-keychain command. Finally, running this spat out the password I was after:
% security dump-keychain -d ~/Library/Keychains/login.keychain
At this point, I found out that it was the password for my old wireless network, which I’d just stopped using. A closer inspection of my login keychain revealed another “AirPort network password” which just happened to be for the new network. Ah well, at least it surrendered itself willingly.
From googling, it appears that many other people have been unable to recover stuff in their system keychain. So this is good stuff to know.
Jabbering Giraffe 