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This is a minor bug-fix update for XKpasswd (my Perl random password generation module). It squashes two minor bugs which came to light while updating www.xkpasswd.net to use version 2 of the module.

1. When the custom_separator option was left blank, no separator was used, rather than the expected random separator.
2. When the custom_separator option was left blank or set to RANDOM, and the pad_char option to SEPARATOR, the results were un-expected, different random character was used for each, rather than the same random character.

For documentation and detailed release notes on version 2 of the module, see the release notes for version 2.0.

A few weeks ago on the Chit Chat Across the Pond segment of the Nosillacast, I mentioned that I had an OS X service set up to generate a random password using my XKpasswd Perl module and copy it to the clipboard. Listeners enquired as to how they would go about doing that, so as promised, here’s a quick tutorial.

Obviously this tutorial is for Mac OS X users only, because OS-wide Services and Automator are OS X features. The screenshots are taken on 10.8 Mountain Lion, but this same technique definitely also works on OSX 10.7 Lion, and probably even on 10.6 Snow Leopard. This tutorial also assumes that you have downloaded the XKpasswd module, and saved it somewhere on your computer, along with either the sample dictionary file included with the module or one of your own making, and that you know where on your computer those files have been saved. In other words, you need to have XKpasswd.pm and a text file with one word per line somewhere on your hard drive. In my sample code I’m going to assume you’ve installed the Perl module to the suggested location, /usr/local/xkpasswd/XKpasswd.pm, and that you have customised the sample dictionary a little (more secure that way), and saved it to /usr/local/xkpasswd/dict.txt.

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I spent the weekend majorly re-factoring XKpasswd.pm, my Perl random password generation library. V0.1 was the last thing I wrote before reading Perl Best Practices, and looking back on that code really illustrated the value of that book when used in combination with the perlcritic code analyser.

The new version of the module provides all the functionality the old one did, and more. The refactoring has made the module simpler to use from within scripts, as well as easier to modify and extend. Some new features have also been added, including the ability to use the www.random.org web service as the source of randomness for the library. A full list of bug fixes and new features is included below.

I had hoped to distribute this version as both a ZIP file and a .PKG file, but XCode 4.4 is not being cooperative on the new Mountain Lion, so that will probably have to wait until version 0.3.

Update – 6 August 2012: The link below has been updated to point to version 0.2.1 of the code. Details of the bugs fixed in the release notes.

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Yesterday I posted my thoughts on watermarking images for uploading to the web. This post formed the basis of myself and Allison Sheridan’s discussions in the Chit Chat Across the Pond segment on tonight’s Nosillacast Mac Podcast. During the discussion we talked a little about how I watermark my images, and I realised that I hadn’t released a version of my image processing scripts since 2008! I promised I’d remedy that, so today, after a little tidying up, I’m releasing the current snapshot of my scripts under the FreeBSD license.

I’m not releasing these scripts as a polished software package that’s ready to use, but rather, as a starting point for anyone who wants to create their own watermarking scripts. If you’re not prepared to get stuck into the command line and a little Perl (VERY little is needed mind), these scripts are of no use to you!

The scripts rely on the free and open source ImageMagick command line image editing tools, so you’ll need to install ImageMagick before you get stuck in. If you’re running OS X, I’d recommend installing ImageMagick via the free and open source MacPorts package manager.

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Update – 13 April 2012: Apple have released another update to Java (via software update) which automatically disables Java in Safari, and removes Flashback if it has infected your system. Please use Apple’s update rather than relying on this script!

Update – 10 April 2012: I have edited the script to run the additional commands recommended by TidBITS. The Download button will now return version 0.2 of the script.

It’s finally happened, there has been a serious malware outbreak on the Mac. Over half a million Macs have been infected with the latest variants of the Flashback malware. Earlier versions of this malware relied on tricking users into running an installer, or approving a request for permission to execute, but that has all changed now. The malware moved from being a simple trojan that relied on tricking people into running it, to a fully automated attack requiring no user interaction. The reason for this transformation is that the malware started to use flaws in Java, first, old vulnerabilities that were patched ages ago, so only affecting people who don’t keep their computers up to date, but this week, attacking flaws that Apple had, at the time, not yet patched. This means that for a few days, even the most diligent Mac users could have been hit.

This infection has no noticeable symptoms, and did not require you do do anything “stupid” to get infected. Any Mac user, not matter how careful, could have been infected. So, you need to check to be sure you are not one of the half million plus victims! Read more

Steve Gibson really set the cat among the pigeons with his Password Haystacks site a few months ago, and XKCD’s ‘Correct Horse Battery Staple’ web comic brought that message home to many many nerds and geeks. The basic idea is that you’re better off making your passwords long and memorable than short and complex. In the simplified XKCD example the password is simply made up of 4 common words, but Steve Gibson suggests you should add some padding around those words to make the passwords much harder to guess.

This is a lovely theory, but I’m not imaginative, and I need to invent a lot of passwords every week, so I wrote a Perl module to do it for me, and called it xkpasswd.pm. The first thing I’m announcing today is that I’ve made this library available for free for both personal and commercial use (under the FreeBSD license), you can download it from www.bartb.ie/xkpasswd.

It’s great to have a library for nerds to play with, but what about everyone else? Well, that’s where my second announcement comes in, I’ve also created www.xkpasswd.net, a simple web front-end to the xkpasswd.pm module.

www.xkpasswd.net

In case anyone is wondering where the name comes from? It’s a mashing together of XKCD, and passwd, the Linux/Unix command for changing passwords. Because I used to use Solaris, and hence the yppasswd command, I liked the idea of keeping the prefix to just two letters, hence xkpasswd, rather than xkcdpasswd.

For any programmers interested in using the Perl module, it has no prerequisites other than base Perl, and all you need to get started is the module and a dictionary file to point it at. The download package contains the module, a sample dictionary, and a sample Perl script which invokes the module.

In the future I also plan to release a JavaScript-only version if the library so that others can embed xkpasswd-based password generators in their own sites without needing Perl CGI support on their servers. I’m also experimenting with creating an OS X Service to allow people to easily generate xkpasswd passwords from anywhere within OS X, and perhaps even a native OS X Application. So stay tuned!

Following on from my post yesterday with three examples of using Automator to create Services, and some good suggestions in the comments, I spent some time this afternoon making the script in the third of those examples a little more efficient, and a lot more robust.

The Service I optimised was the one to strip keywords from image files. This Service assumes that both Growl and EXIFTool are installed, and that you’re running OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard or later.

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Some Apple haters just love to say that there is nothing to a Mac except for flashy marketing. There are a million different reasons that’s BS, but one in particular is ease of automation. The learning curve to start automating your Mac is very short and very gentle. Without ever seeing a single line of code you can add your own custom functionality to OS X to relieve you of your most boring repetitive tasks. If you can tolerate seeing a line or two of code, you can take things even further and tie Unix command line tools straight into your GUI. The best candidates for automation are simple repetitive tasks that you do often. You might only save 30 seconds each time, but if do that 10 times a day that soon adds up! In this post I just want to give three simple examples to whet your appetite and hopefully get you thinking about some simple tasks in your computing life that you could easily automate.

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Apple have added in a few lines of extra language to their Developer Agreement for the latest version of their iPhone SDK. You can read the exact wording changes on Daring Fireball, but the effect of the language is that you have to use Apple’s XCode development environment to compile all your code. This has had the effect of killing some unsupported means of making iPhone apps, most notably MonoTouch and Adobe’s about-to-be-released iPhone Flash bundler in CS5. My initial reaction was very negative (ask my Twitter followers), but that was purely an emotional response because Apple didn’t give us any reason for this change. Because Apple didn’t explain themselves, we were left to come up with our own explanations, and the first few that came to my mind were none too positive. Ultimately, I greatly dislike Objective C, so I was pissed off at the alternatives getting the chop. But, slowly, a different story is emerging. I still haven’t heard anything official from Apple, but I think I understand what’s going on, and it changes my opinions significantly.

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Since I first started using OS X at version 10.3 I’ve always felt that the services menu had great potential but badly needed some fit and polish to make it actually live up to that promise. It has been so bad that it is basically forgotten, and almost no one remebers that it even exists. In every application in OS X there is a menu item under the apps’s main menu (the one in bold with the same name as the app) called Services, that’s what I’m talking about. When it comes to the services menu both Tiger and Leopard were major disappointments because they didn’t bring any real improvement to the neglected services menu. SnowLeopard on the other hand is a totally different story. Similarly, when Automator first came out I thought it had great promise, but that it was a very 1.0 kind of offering, again, in need of some fit and polish to allow it live up to its obvious potential. SnowLeopard provides a lot of that fit and polish, and really brings Automator forward significantly. And what’s better, Apple have combined the fit and finish in these two apparently unrelated products together, to provide some exceptionally powerful functionality.

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