Dock-maintainer: Defined

Recently I created a tool called dock-maintainer. This post goes over a couple things but mainly serves to explain why I created it and why I needed it instead of using other solutions. Traditionally this job (maintaining Dock configurations) has been handled in a multitude of ways. There have been many ways to do this. One can use configuration profiles, puppet/salt/chef/etc, outset with a script (a method I used until recently).

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I made a thing..well sorta

It seems that I have learned A LOT in recent months concerning Python. Again huge shout out to Nick McSpadden and froger for helping me get to where I am knowledge wise today. In between now and my last post, Nick helped me understand the dict datatype. Turns out python can use translate dict into the plist equivalents! The more you know eh? The reason he was helping me on this was because I had an idea to take his PrinterGenerator tool and make it work in a different way. Continue reading

TIL 03 -- Get Model Info via Python via Serial

A while back I learned about this website, Apple Config Code Lookup, when I was building my first info grab script for an inventory. I have since evolved that script into a full Info Viewer (inventory is done via MunkiReport-PHP). One thing I was always missing was the output from the Apple Config Code Lookup; since I am migrating most of my shell scripts to Python, I figured I might as well add it. Continue reading

TIL 02 - Multiple Inputs For One Argument

I use a tool called Outset Dock Profiler made by Nick McSpadden. It's great and for user accounts where I only need to target one profile, it works great! {% icon fa-thumbs-o-up fg-lg >}} There has always been one thing about it that bothered me. If I had multiple profiles for a user, I couldn't use this tool. Sure I could use it to build an initial package and modify the script. Continue reading

TIL 01 - Get a OS X Preference via python

As I am trying to learn more of the Python programming language (version 2.7.* as that is what is currently built-in to OS X), I find little challenges to help process what I have learned of it. Recently I was introduced to the Foundation frameworks that come with OS X. For a while I was writing scripts that required plistlib which could only read the XML version of a plist. OS X stores preferences in binary plist form. Continue reading