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@shrewdlogarithm making snide comments about someone you don't know in reply to a joke about them makes you look awesome too… #

$10 bucks says @Klout will now think I am influential about LSD tomorrow…

any takers? #

@willhains It's why I hate people who do old style retweets and have a half dozen people's names listed + butchered spelling in their RT. #

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Can you tell I've been on a cooking kick lately? @ High Roller Penthouse http://t.co/NWg0gGtv #

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.@XSP_ I've never installed Windows (outside of a virtual machine environment that is) on any Mac I've ever owned (personal or work)… #

@XSP_ GTK, but I don't hook my personal laptop up to an external display and as long as work says ok, I don't care about price there. #

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@Uber_NYC agree! I used you guys heavily in SF. Wait times were far to long when I moved here 2 months ago, but seems much better now. #

@Uber_NYC seen improvements of 4-500% already, so keep up the great work! #

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I’ve got a box for just cell phones and tablets… yep, I do believe I have a problem!

Step 1, eleven more to go. Wish I knew the others… #

Movers got everything packed and ready to load. Unfortunately have to load most of it tomorrow morning as they are calling it a day. Ugh! #

To all of you pushing for USB3, I hate you. You cost me a useful port in exchange for an inferior POS one.

(FW800 dongle isn't out yet) #

Trying to decide if it's cuz I've been using my iPad a lot, or cuz I know a Retina laptop now exists, but either way, my MBA's so pixely! #

@Xuzz @chronic ROFLMAO! Guess if I am going to be associated with a language, could be far worse than JS… #

@Xuzz you have met me in person, you just didn't know it.

(now you are going to rack your brain for possibilities I bet, hehe!) #

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I started off following Apple’s guide to combining multiple audio interfaces to create an “Aggregate Device”. The process is actually really simple, first up you need to run “Audio MIDI Setup” from in /Applications/Utilities. Once it’s running, you will see the normal “+” in the lower left corner. Click it and pick “Create Aggregate Device” as seen here:

After you create the Aggregate Device, you then need to add devices to it, in this case both of your “Display Audio” devices, as seen here:

After adding the two devices, the Aggregate Device should now list 2 in and 4 out channels and have both display audio devices listed under it as follows:

Next up, you need to click on “Configure Speakers”. In that window, click both checkboxes in the streams list. In the bottom part of the window you will need to do a little experimentation. In my case, the right setup was to pick “3″ for the Left and “2″ for the right as seen here:

but the goal you are trying to achieve is to have the left monitor play sound when you click the left speaker and the right monitor play sound when you click the right monitor. Try the various combinations until you feel you have it right.

At this point, if you set the Aggregate Device as your output device, you should hear audio playing out both monitors, but with two caveats. First off, the sound is a bit “center heavy”. Second, if you try to use either the keyboard shortcut or the speaker icon to adjust volume, you will find that you can’t change the volume anymore. Neither of these are obviously desirable, but thankfully I found solutions to both.

The first issue with the off balanced sound is easily fixed directly inside the Audio MIDI Setup app. The solution is to reduce the volume on the “inner” speaker on both monitors. To accomplish this, I set the “outer” speaker to a value of 1.0 and the “inner” speaker on each monitor to 0.85. This seemed to accomplish the sound effect I prefer, but feel free to tweak the values to your liking. Here is what the screen looks like when you are configuring each:

I found it not particularly obvious which output was which, so have audio playing and click the mute checkbox to determine which is which as needed.

The final issue to resolve is having the ability to change the audio volume like normal. Unfortunately, I didn’t find a way to do this without the help of a 3rd party app, but thankfully, Soundflower seems to do the trick without any extra bloat and appears to be well maintained. It’s hosted on Github and you can find a download link both on Github and it’s Google Code home. Once you install it, you will find two new audio devices are listed in the Audio MIDI Setup app. For my purposes, the two channel device fit my needs, so I went in and set it as the default for both input, output, and system alert sounds (right click on the device and you will see options for each). You don’t have to do all three, but I found it works for my needs, so might for yours too. Once you have done that, launch the Soundflowerbed app from /Applications/Soundflower and then look for a menu bar icon shaped like a flower. Click on it, and then pick your Aggregate Device as shown here:

With that, you should now be all set. Try hitting the volume change keys on your keyboard and confirm everything is working.

If you run into any issues or have any comments / improvements to this, feel free to sound off with a comment below.

Enjoy!

-Jeremy

following up on my blog post yesterday about how to Install Final Cut Studio 2 on Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) without resorting to hackily installing Rosetta.

Digging high and low, I could find nothing in the FinalCutStudio.mpkg that would indicate any PPC requirements. Every binary is universal, nothing in any plist, not even a magic resource fork of some type getting in the way. Trying to pull it up in Pacifist crashes Pacifist, so no luck there either. Stumped, I decide to leverage the knowledge I learned yesterday of DTrace via this amazing blog post on the Top 10 DTrace scripts for Mac OS X.

First up I try `iosnoop`. It does help confirm that the system Installer.app is being executed, but nothing unexpected appears. One thing it does remind me about however is that Installer.app writes out a log file to /var/log/installer.log that I had overlooked previously. Checking it for any clues, I see the following:

Installer[14684]: @(#)PROGRAM:Install PROJECT:Install-686.3
Installer[14684]: @(#)PROGRAM:Installer PROJECT:Installer-530
Installer[14684]: Hardware: MacPro5,1 @ 2.40 GHz (x 16), 32768 MB RAM
Installer[14684]: Running OS Build: Mac OS X 10.7.3 (11D50b)
Installer[14684]: Final Cut Studio Installation Log
Installer[14684]: Opened from: /Volumes/Final Cut Studio/Installer/FinalCutStudio.mpkg
Installer[14684]: Rosetta required to install (QuickTime MPEG2 [6748520])

Ok, well that makes sense then. I’m obviously looking at the wrong package, I should actually be looking at QuickTimeMPEG2Pro.pkg instead it seems! Shifting my focus to it, I don’t find any obvious signs externally of it requiring PPC, but I do find it has an executable called `CheckMimeTypes` in it’s Resources folder that’s PPC only which is called by the postflight script. Aha! So there’s our issue, but that still doesn’t explain how Installer.app knows this fact before we even attempt to install. Not willing to just accept this new found knowledge on face value, I press on.

Since iosnoop was a bit light on info, I decide to give `hfssnoop` a shot since it’s significantly more verbose. Running QuickTimeMPEG2Pro.pkg directly now at this point, I check the hfssnoop output and find the following interesting tidbit:

1922348 501 17517 Installer hfs_vnop_read 0 BundleVersions.plist
1922348 501 17517 Installer hfs_vnop_read 2 PPCRequirements.plist
1922351 501 17517 Installer hfs_vnop_write 0 data.data
1922352 501 17517 Installer hfs_vnop_write 0 windows.plist
1922352 501 17517 Installer hfs_vnop_read 8 com.apple.LaunchServices.plist
1922352 501 17517 Installer hfs_vnop_read 8 com.apple.LaunchServices.plist
1922353 501 17517 Installer hfs_vnop_write 0 windows.plist

Ooohhh! Something referencing PPC! What might we have here? Doing a quick find for that file (`locate PPCRequirements.plist` for what its worth) lands me at this file: /System/Library/CoreServices/Installer.app/Contents/Resources/PPCRequirements.plist. Opening it up, I find the following contents:

Very very interesting if I do say so myself! It would seem that Apple is intentionally listing the identifiers explicitly of packages related to Final Cut Studio 2! Removing the FCS2 related entries from that file and re-running the installer, everything proceeds as normal and the install completes (albeit with a warning about the postflight failure) just fine.

So it would seem that just because a simple binary which does nothing other than to check mime types in the postflight script of a minor dependent package, Apple is going to say a big F U to FCS2/FCP6 users! W.T.F. !?!? What’s worse, they aren’t explicitly blocking just the package which is borked (albeit slightly), they are blocking multiple packages related to FCS2, even though they run just fine on Lion and furthermore all of Final Cut Studio 2 proper runs without issue!

This is extremely disappointing to say the least…

tl;dr

$ sudo installer -package /Volumes/Final\ Cut\ Studio/Installer/FinalCutStudio.mpkg -target /

tl;dr #2

For details on the exact cause and an easier workaround than below, click here to see my blog post with technical details on the how / why Final Cut Studio HD2 is being blocked from install without Rosetta.

Trying to reinstall Final Cut Pro Studio 2.0 on Mac OS X 10.7 Lion today, I ran into this seemingly impenetrable road block:

Of course my initial reaction was to scream, curse, and rant on Twitter. After calming down, I decided to do a Google search as obviously I couldn’t be the only one running into this problem before. Unfortunately, much to my dismay, I found a ton of links of people who thought they knew the answer (but ultimately were clueless), saying it just flat out wasn’t supported and there wasn’t any solution.

Thankfully I stumbled across this blog post describing how to install FCS2 using Rosetta from a 10.6 disc. I questioned it’s accuracy because I knew Lion removed PPC support, but figured it was worth a shot. Unfortunately opening my Snow Leopard box I found the disc was missing as apparently I didn’t put it back away properly last time. Scrounging all over the house, I couldn’t find it anywhere. Doing a deep dive across the web, I wasn’t able to find a single URL (outside sketchy file download services) anywhere that I could download it either.

Back at square one again, I started thinking to myself “there’s gotta be some flag or something that’s preventing it as all the binaries are universal”, yet trying everything I could think of for search terms was proving to be fruitless. Then it dawned on me, “what if I try installing via the command line?” Low and behold, that was the magic sauce that did the trick. Apparently running `installer` via a shell works perfectly!

To get going, fire up Terminal and enter this at the command prompt:

$ sudo installer -package /Volumes/Final\ Cut\ Studio/Installer/FinalCutStudio.mpkg -target /

When running the installer, you’ll see a bunch of messages like this:

But those are expected and not an issue. The install takes a while and you won’t see any graphical progress, but ultimately you’ll see this:

installer: The install was successful.

At that point, you are all set!

Enjoy!

-Jeremy

@Tristan's choice… I think mine was better! (Poached Eggs & Cheese On Toast @ Blue Bottle Coffee Co.) http://t.co/mrABn7oy #

@rckenned I think you are giving those developers too much credit by putting them in that group… #

@rckenned Fair enough! I could agree with you easily in that case. You're either a 1 or a 0, alive or dead. Much simpler! #

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Always a good day when they're all green… http://t.co/hFgDLCje #

Humbling!

RT @cheesycons If you ever need something really random, ping @jsjohnst. Seriously. He'll blow your mind. #

@sh1mmer I left just a bit ago… Boo! sorry I missed ya. #

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@bmf Ask me in 14 days and maybe then I'll go over the 1,093.6 yards long list of reasons to you why one shouldn't grossly stereotype! #

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@qqTC Because I travel… Also, because my "factory unlocked" iPhone went for a swim in a friend's pocket that I loaned it to. #

@synack boo! no invite!?!? /cc @SteveStreza #

@conradev I've been involved in the "world of jailbreak" for a long time. #

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Doing a little digging, I found that most of the functionality on the site is handled via a smidge of Javascript (not generally well written I might add), HTML cookies, Flash local storage, and of course an utterly pointless flash movie to request / type in a 6 digit code (why not just a simple XHR backed form!?!?). Upon investigation, it seems the Flash locale storage is used only as a fallback in case the cookie data is missing (and presumably, also to share cross browser). As long as you have a ‘PMData’ cookie, the Flash local storage appears to not be used.

Ok, so now we know we don’t need Flash for local storage, how about the Flash movie for entering the code. Rather than decompiling their SWF or sniffing traffic, I decided to skip that. For the instances where I need to type in the code (large money transfers), I can just fire up Chrome as that doesn’t happen but few times a month at most (unlike logging in and viewing my account). Instead, let’s see if we can get Bank of America to recognize my Safari browser as being one previously registered, despite it can’t register due to lack of Flash. I first started off by copying all of my B of A cookies from Chrome to Safari. This somewhat unsurprisingly did not work. On a whim, I decided to switch my user agent in Safari and see if having it identify as the same UA would fix it. Shockingly, that is all it took and now I can log in (and it shows my personalized SiteKey and all, expectedly). Going back to sign in again with a fresh browser window to repeat the test sequence, I found that the UA switch wasn’t even necessary anymore. Thus, I can’t obviously confirm it’s “required” to switch the UA, so if you are repeating my results, please let me know if your experience differs.

Now, anyone with any paranoid / security mental tendencies are likely going WTF!? Yeah, me too. Isn’t the whole point of having a formal process for “registering” a new computer permanently is it must be something which should not be able to easily be worked around in 30 seconds by anyone with even an intro level understanding of HTTP? If all it takes is my cookies combined with a specific user agent string (??), then aren’t we really adding trivial (if any) security to the process and are in actuality doing more like the TSA (aka security theater, “make you feel safer”)? I went ahead and reached out to Bank of America’s security team, but haven’t had a response (and don’t really expect one either).

Unfortunately, this isn’t an easy problem to truly solve correctly. Anyone have great ideas on how to get the Internet to standardize on a single login scheme across the globe which has a superb user experience while maintaining two-factor or better authentication when needed all in some workflow? If so, I’m all ears and ready to jump on helping make it a reality in my free time!

UPDATE: Here’s a great security paper on SiteKey… worth a read! http://www.redforcelabs.com/Documents/SiteKey.pdf

tl;dr –
Until this country has restored a “true” balanced budget, nothing else matters related to our national debt.

Yesterday I saw an intriguing retweet from a friend originally Tweeted by @paulfreid related to the current US Debt crisis and how it relates to various presidents over the past 3 decades. I did a quick fact check on it and the numbers seemed reasonably enough accurate to just retweet, so I did. Apparently a lot of people agreed with me on Twitter about its interestingness and to date my retweet has spread like wildfire (over 500 direct retweets so far not including cascade effect). A very unsurprising, but interesting thing, happened afterwards; the peanut gallery of the web reared their ugly head. From people blinding claiming the numbers are wrong, to those who immediately turned it into an “Obama vs the World” debate (with snide remarks about “Obamacare” and worse), to those who don’t understand math, to those who think the only important part is the raw amount of debt, nothing else. For those of you in the latter camp, let me clue you in on something:

Raw amounts aren’t everything!

To illustrate that point, here’s a somewhat contrived story. Hypothetically speaking, lets say there’s a homeless man named Bob who has $20 to his name. If he goes and spends $10 of that on some alcohol, he just spent 50% of his net worth. Next let’s say there is another man named John whose net worth is $50 million. He decides to go and spend a million dollars on a one night stand with a porn star. Just as ridiculous of a purchase in my eyes, but he only spent 2% of his net worth, even though he spent a million dollars, 1000x more than the homeless man! Which is more foolish? I have to say the one who spent 2% seems more logical (albeit very tiny) than the one who spent 50% of what he had on a frivolous purchase.

Now, to address those who think the numbers are flawed in the original tweet, yes, I have to concede, they are, a bit. I’m not sure if my sources are the exact same which could explain the variance, but that said, except for one president (where the percentage is actually higher) they are close enough that I personally wouldn’t blatantly call foul on something read in a tweet, rather than a real “report”. Based on an official source for the federal debt numbers, Page 141 of the 2012 Historical Tables from the Budget of the United States, we learn the following:

At the beginning of fiscal year 1981 (the first fiscal year Reagan was in office), the federal debt was sitting at $998,818,000. At the beginning of fiscal year 1989 (again, remember fiscal years don’t align with presidential terms precisely), the federal debt is now sitting at $2,829,770,000. Anyone who has paid attention in history class doesn’t need to be reminded that Reagan’s administration increased the debt more than any other since the institution of federal debt by Roosevelt, but just doing the math clearly shows a 183.31% increase. Yes, the tweet said 186%, but 183.31% is still within standard margin of reporting error, and again, I might be using a slightly different source. This is utterly obscene by any measure! Here’s a chart to show the remaining breakdowns by presidential terms:

I am hesitant to include the 2011 numbers above because personally I object to mixing “historical” numbers with “projected” numbers, but since we are already over half way through the year, I felt it might be considered disingenuous to not include. Furthermore, I firmly stand behind the fact President Obama should NOT be represented as an example of an administration “doing the right thing” fiscally, so, please do not take their lower percentage so far as a positive sign of anything on his part. In fact, if projections hold true (man let’s hope not for all of our’s sake!), his administration will easily be the second worst fiscally in modern US history, if not first!

In conclusion, for all of you who focus on the raw dollars and cents, or worse who focus on a man and everything he’s done or not done, YOU are the problem. We have way to many people in this country focused on the current news buzz topic who miss the big picture. Does it really freaking matter if the debt is $12 trillion or $14 trillion? Heck no! What matters is we are suffering as a country from thirty years of systemic gross overspending and it must stop! Cuts might be a solution, increased taxes might be a solution, but all of that is second to the fact we must STOP spending more than we have. Even elementary school kids can understand this concept, why not our own elected officials! What does that say about us as citizens because WE ELECTED THEM!?!?

While I am not a fan of President Clinton personally for other reasons, his administration helped secure a balanced budget (short lived as it was). A balanced budget is the critical step to ever getting ourselves out of this debt crisis. We must convince Congress and the current administration to stop with the endless loop holes and exceptions and own up to and actually stick with a sustainable balanced budget.

Let’s all do our part to be better informed and ensure the people we elect have our true best interests in mind.

Feeling like a steaming pile of manure this morning. This is really not the time to come down with something. #

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