Caius Theory

Here are some mac tips I know and consider "basic" mac knowledge, but no-one else seems to know.

• exposé key is on modern mac keyboards, looks like a load of squares on the F3 key.
• ⌘ + Exposé key => Show Desktop
• ⌃ + Exposé key => Show Application Windows
• ⌥ + Brightness keys => Open Displays prefpane in System Preferences.
• ⌥ + Exposé key => Open Exposé & Spaces prefpane in System Preferences.
• ⌥ + Dashboard key => Open Exposé & Spaces prefpane in System Preferences.
• ⌥ + Keyboard Backlight keys => Open Keyboard prefpane in System Preferences. (Only on laptops with keyboard backlighting.)
• ⌥ + Volume keys => Open Sound prefpane in System Preferences.
• ⇧ + Volume keys => Adjust the volume with the feedback noise setting toggled. If you normally have feedback "blips", it'll be silent. Or vice versa.
• ⌥ + ⇧ + Volume keys => Adjust the volume in 1/4 of a usual step.
• ⌃ + Eject key => Shows the Shut Down dialog.
• In the shut down dialog, hit R to restart, S to sleep, ⎋ to cancel.
• (Pretty much) Any dialog that pops up, hitting ⎋ will push the "cancel" button.
• In "Show all windows" or "Show application windows" exposé modes, hit the tab key to cycle through applications.
• Hit the space bar in exposé to activate "Quick Look" + windows pop up to 100% size as you mouse over them.
• Hold down ⌃ + ⇧ when mousing over the dock to toggle magnification whilst the keys are down.

(Alternative title Peter Cooper suggested, "A miscellany of input device co-ordinations to modulate the response of Apple's task preview and switching subsystem")

This is a re-run of an old post I took offline in an old server move and hadn't re-published.

Having been on two college systems and various university networks, I'm just amazed at the levels of freedom you have on some, and how locked down others are.

Take the first university network I ever used for example. It was pretty much totally open, to the point that I could game quite freely, and the administrator only picked me up because I was logged in as admin and not a normal user. (I didn't have an account for that machine.)

Going from that to my school network was a very big shock as it was moderately filtered through third party filtering software. This meant you couldn't go on the usual NSFW stuff, but still had access to other sites that could be seen as bad, such as proxy sites, or IRC java Clients for example.

Having moved from my old (slightly crass) college to my new one, its interesting how filtered this one is. You can't seem to go on a site with proxy or irc in the URL, except clean sites like the BBC or Wikipedia. The Proxy searching only came about through looking for web based IRC solutions.

Personally I think the universities have got it right. With all the students they have, they just limit the things they definitely have to, and allow everything else. (Blacklisting technique.) Both colleges seem to do the opposite - block everything until its verified and unblocked. (Whitelisting technique.)

The way I see it, the problem with the white listing technique is that people will always find a way around whatever restrictions are in place. For instance, I'm locked out of all of my web based email sites, so I can't email anyone. Its not the not being able to send that bothers me, its the not being able to save text that I've written in college to a website to then retrieve it from home that annoys me.

So how did I work around this restriction? Well I remembered that Google had bought Writely at some point recently, so one quick sign in later and I've got my own little area where I can save, organise and edit text based files. All I have to do when I get home is login, copy / paste into my email client and hit send.

One word that isn't blocked yet is blog, so I can still post this, and edit my posts. However, I'm still writing it in Writely and checking my markdown syntax is correct with Dingus. The writely interface is just that much nicer than notepad.

Backstory: Got myself a first generation iPhone second hand and unlocked it to work on my existing T-Mobile (Official iPhone network in the UK is O2.) Noticed after a week or so of owning it that when you change the volume on the phone, the bezel that comes up says "ringer" across the top. But when you have headphones plugged in, it says "Headphones". (Note the capitalisation difference.)

Now I'm not usually bothered by stuff like this (honest!) but as soon as I'd noticed the "bug", I couldn't help but think of it everytime I changed the volume, whether I was looking at the screen or not. Seeing as I'm running a jailbroken phone, and therefore have SSH access to it, I figured the string would be defined in a .strings file somewhere in the /System folder. And I'd be able to change it!

Fast-forward a few months and I install the iPhone OS 3.0 update (jailbroken of course), and finally decide to turn the phone's SSH server on and go looking for the setting. To do so I figured I'd just need grep installed on the phone - I could copy the file itself to my mac and edit it there.

So I connect to the phone, have a poke around the filesystem and then start a search to find the correct file:

# On the iPhone
$ cd /System/Library/
$ grep -r "ringer" *
Binary file CoreServices/SpringBoard.app/English.lproj/SpringBoard.strings matches
Binary file CoreServices/SpringBoard.app/M68AP.plist matches
Binary file CoreServices/SpringBoard.app/SpringBoard matches
Binary file Frameworks/CFNetwork.framework/CFNetwork matches
Binary file Frameworks/CFNetwork.framework/da.lproj/Localizable.strings matches
Binary file Frameworks/CFNetwork.framework/no.lproj/Localizable.strings matches
Binary file Frameworks/Foundation.framework/da.lproj/URL.strings matches

At which point I stopped the grep search (^C) because I know the home screen of the iPhone is the SpringBoard.app, so I figured it would be in the file SpringBoard.app/English.lproj/SpringBoard.strings. Making sure to have SSH enabled on your mac, a simple scp CoreServices/SpringBoard.app/English.lproj/SpringBoard.strings user@your_mac.local: later and the file is sat in my home folder on my mac.

Switching to the mac, now I try and open the file with TextMate, only to realise its in binary format. I need it in the nice XML format to edit it, so a quick google later and I've found a hint on MacOSXHints telling me how to convert from binary to xml plist format.

# On the mac
$ plutil -convert xml1 SpringBoard.strings

Then opening the file in TextMate was a bit more successful! I can actually understand what its defining now. Search through the file for "ringer" and I found the following lines:

<key>RINGER_VOLUME</key>
<string>ringer</string>

Change the "ringer" to "Ringer" between the <string> and my editing work is complete! Yes, it really is that easy to edit an interface string that is defined in a .string. Now I just need to convert the file back to binary, and copy it back to the phone. Converting back to binary file is one line, just change the xml1 in the previous command to binary1.

# On the mac
$ plutil -convert binary1 SpringBoard.strings

And then scp it back to the phone, make a backup of the existing file, and overwrite the existing file with the new one I've edited:

# On the iPhone
$ cd ~
$ scp user@mac_name.local:SpringBoard.strings .
$ cd /System/Library/CoreServices/SpringBoard.app/English.lproj/
$ mv SpringBoard.strings SpringBoard.strings.bak
$ cp ~/SpringBoard.strings SpringBoard.strings

And then restart the phone, either in the usual manner or just run reboot on the phone via SSH. Lo and behold once its rebooted and I changed the volume, it read "Ringer"!

At the 2009 Barcamp Leeds I attended a talk by Neil Crosby where he talked about automated testing, and about how he felt there was a gap in everything that people were testing. Everyone has unit tests, and people are doing full stack testing too, but no-one (so he feels) does XHTML/CSS/JS validation as part of their automated test suite. And certainly from what I've seen on the mainstream Ruby site's about testing, I agreed with him.

So after his talk I had a quick look at his frontend test suite, and started wondering where exactly I would fit frontend validation testing into my workflow. Would it be part of my unit tests (RSpec), or part of the full stack tests (Cucumber)? As you've probably guessed by the title of this post, its ended up going into my cucumber tests. Since the initial play its been something I've mused about occasionally, but not something I've actively looked into how to implement as part of my test workflow.

Fast-forward a few weeks from Barcamp Leeds and I see a news article in my feed reader entitled "Easy Markup Validation" which gets me hopeful someone's solved this frontend validation thing easily for Rubyists. A quick read through and I'm sold on it and installing the gem. Opened an existing project I'm working on which has a fairly extensive test suite (both unit tests & full stack tests) and tried to slot the validation into my controller unit tests.

Problem with doing this is by default RSpec-rails doesn't generate the views in your controller specs. At that point I realised I was already generating the full page when I was doing a full stack test using culerity and cucumber. So why not just add a cucumber step in my stories to validate the HTML on each page I visit? Mainly because its not enough of a failure for this app to have invalid XHTML markup. Having valid markup would be nice, but I'd rather have it as a separate test to my stories in some way.

Currently I just do that by only validating if ENV["VALIDATION"] is set to anything, so a normal run of my cucumber stories will just test the app does what its supposed to do. If I run them with VALIDATION=true then it will check my markup is valid as well.

features/support/env.rb

require "markup_validity" if ENV["VALIDATION"]

features/step_definitions/general_steps.rb

Then %r/the page is valid XHTML/ do
  $browser.html.should be_xhtml_strict if ENV["VALIDATION"]
end

features/logging_in.feature

Feature: Logging in
  In order to do stuff
  As a registered user
  I want to login

  Scenario: Successful Login
    Given there is a user called "Caius"

    When I goto the homepage
    Then the page is valid XHTML

    When I click on the "Login" link
    Then I am redirected to the login page
    And the page is valid XHTML

    When I enter my login details
    And I click "Login"
    Then I am redirected to my dashboard
    And the page is valid XHTML

Now when I run cucumber features/logging_in.feature, it doesn't validate the HTML, it just makes sure that I can login as my user and that I am redirected to the right places. But if I run VALIDATION=true cucumber features/logging_in.feature, then it does validate my XHTML on the homepage, the login page and on the user's dashboard. If it fails validation then it gives you a fairly helpful error message as to what it was expecting and what it found instead.

From a quick run against a couple of stories in my app I discovered that I've not been wrapping form elements in an enclosing element, so they've been quickly fixed and now they validate. Now I realise this gem is only testing XHTML output, and doesn't include CSS or JS validation, but from a quick peek at the gem's source it should be fairly easy to add both of those in I think, although again they aren't major errors for me yet in this app.

So I've got some js I've written to update a couple of <select> lists in a form, and it was all working fine for me (under Safari.) John happened to mention it wasn't working for him under Firefox, so I fired up Firefox and took a look. Could reproduce it perfectly, changing the first popup was populating the second one, but then wasn't selecting the right value from the list.

Having no idea what was happened I figured I'd enable firebug and watch it execute to figure out what was happening. Enabled firebug, reloaded the page, selected from the first popup… and voila! It updated the second one and selected the correct row! WTF!!!

Turned firebug off and it didn't work, turned it back on and it worked. Figured it might be something buggy in the Firefox 3.0.5 js runtime, so I grabbed a copy of the new beta 3.5 and tried it in there—still failed to update the page as it should.

Then started poking around the javascript code, the function that was seemingly failing to run was being triggered by a setTimeout() call set to 1 second. We figured it might be the timing causing it, so started playing around with the time, tried anything from ½ a second up to 4 seconds but still no joy in firefox with firebug turned off.

Then John went looking for the javascript errors in firefox (with firebug off) and discovered that it was throwing an error because window.console didn't exist. All of a sudden it made perfect sense! Safari has window.console.log() for writing to the console log, as does firebug. But of course firefox without firebug doesn't!

So the function was just exiting on that error. It was very weird initially to have it work perfectly as soon as the developer tools were enabled!