November 2007 Archives

In my previous article, I described how ssh-agent is integrated with Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard). While it is a huge improvement over previous versions of Mac OS X, SSHKeychain still has a couple of security features that are missing. These are especially nice for laptops when someone can just walk away with your machine, or in an office where you don’t trust everyone.

If you’re not that paranoid, the default Leopard behavior of storing your passphrase in your login keychain is probably fine. However, if you’re like me, we can harden things up a bit, while at the same time keeping security from becoming a burden. Here’s how I got Leopard to work very similarly to SSHKeychain, with some keychain management and small bit of coding.

I’ve previously written about SSH and ssh-agent on Mac OS X where I mentioned a utility named SSHKeychain that helps manage the agent daemon and your passphrases. Well, Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) has been released since that post, and things have changed. The long and the short of it is that ssh-agent is handled much better than before, by default. But its usage can also be a bit confusing (at least it was for me). I’ll try and explain how it all works in Leopard, so you can get the most out of it.

I’ve released version 1.0 of QLEnscript, my Quick Look generator that produces colorized source code previews. It now has thumbnail support, thanks to Peter Hosey, and it uses a smaller font. Grab it from my Google Code project.

I decided to write my first Quick Look generator called QLEnscript. It’s a replacement generator for source code files that produces colorized output for the following languages:

• Objective-C/C++
• C/C++
• Perl
• Python
• Java
• Shell scripts
• Assembly language

Version 1.0.b1 binary and source are up on my Google Code project. To install the binary, place QLEnscript.qlgenerator in one of the following directories:

• ~/Library/QuickLook
• /Library/QuickLook

When Apple first announced Spaces at last year's WWDC, officially bringing virtual desktops to Leopard, all I could think of was "Yes, finally!" Unfortunately, after seeing the final product, I happen to agree with Henry Story and John Gruber: Spaces is broken. Gruber nailed the crux of the problem:

In short, Spaces seems designed for app partitioning, not task partitioning.