You can set up Time Machine to automatically back up all your important files, including your documents, music, photos, applications, and any other items you keep on your hard disk.

I consider my iTunes authorizations important, but apparently Apple does not. Seems that these are specifically excluded from backups… Removing the “SC Info” line from the /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd.bundle/Contents/Resources/StdExclusions.plist file solved this.

I know I should have de-authorized my machine before reinstalling, and I know you can “de-authorize all” to fix this as well; but it’s pretty disturbing to see iTunes remove all your applications from your iPhone…

While debugging a strange problem today, it was exactly that last scenario: A change in a header file did not cause a recompile, which left me debugging an old version of the binary. So I wanted to include the dependencies of .cpp files on the included headers in my Makefile. But since I’m too lazy to do it myself, I wrote a script.

Include these lines into your main Makefile.

Makefile.includes:
	-rm -f $@
	find . -name '*.cpp' | while read s; do echo "$${s%%cpp}o: $${s}" >> $@; done
	find . -name '*.c' | while read s; do echo "$${s%%c}o: $${s}" >> $@; done
	find . -name '*.cpp' -o -name '*.c' -o -name '*.hpp' -o -name '*.h' | while read f; do \
		/bin/echo -n "$$f: " >> $@; \
		D="`dirname "$$f"`/"; \
		grep '^#include "' $$f | sed 's@^#include "\(.*\)"@'$$D'\1@' | tr '\n' ' ' >> $@; \
		echo "" >> $@; \
		echo "	touch \$$@" >> $@; \
	done
.PHONY: Makefile.includes
include Makefile.includes

Obviously, someone figured out a way to do it anyway by prefixing a few extra chacacters to the text message. The exact text depends on your carrier, the link lists a bunch. I personally have tested it with Proximus (the Belgacom cellular carrier) and the “*R*” prefix (without quotes) works. This is the message I got back (I did obfuscate some numbers to protect my privacy):

id:0_______75 sub:001 dlvrd:001 submit date:1_______54 done date:1_______11 stat:DELIVRD err:000 text:BeginningOfTextMessa

Until I found out how to change that setting, that is. It’s hidden in the System Preferences under Keyboard – Keyboard Shortcuts. You can change Full Keyboard Access to “All Controls”, which is the behavior I’m used to from Linux and Windows.

Putting “New Year” on a calendar for the next 100 years is pretty easy; the fun begins when you want to add Easter and its variants. Luckily, there are algorithms to calculate the date of Easter, but they’re not pretty. In Belgium, school vacations also follow a set of rules. After a few hours in Perl, my script generated the events for 2000-2099. You can either download the file to import them, or use it as a subscribed calendar.

The text messages (SMS)

The text messages are in the file “msgs_<date>.csm”. This file is encoded in UTF-16 and is contains Comma Seperated Values (CSV), well actually its semicolon separated, as the header describes (the following is a single line, but has been split into multiple lines for readability):

Msg Id;Sender Name;Sender Address;Sender AddressType;Prefix;Subject;Body;BodyType;Folder;Account;
Msg Class;Content Length;Msg Size;Msg Flags;Msg Status;Modify Time;Delivery Time;Recipient Nbr;
Recipients;Attachment Nbr;Attachments

I didn’t figure out what exactly every field means, but here are my findings:

• Folder “\%MDF1″ is Inbox; “\%MDF3″ is Sent
• The Time fields are encoded “YYYY,MM,DD,hh,mm,ss”
• Recipients contains a series of fields; the second and third seem to be name and number, I didn’t identify the others.

I use this perl script to convert from the messages inside the PIB file to a Maildir-like structure, writing an email-like file for every message in the backup:

From: +32496______
To:  <>
Date: 01 Jan 2009 00:07:32
Subject: SMS
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF8

___ message ___

I usually just drop this folder into my IMAP-mailserver directory and browse my SMSes using Thunderbird.

The call log

The format is similar to the text messages: an UTF-16 CSV file but this time without an helpful header. I also wrote a perl script which converts this to a standard CSV-file with headers. There is some documentation inside the script on the fields I figured out.

$command | \
perl -pe '@now=localtime();printf "%04d-%02d-%02dT%02d:%02d:%02d ",$now[5]+1900,$now[4]+1,$now[3],$now[2],$now[1],$now[0];'

The perl command reads in every line, prints the current time in the default format (or in whatever format you specify), followed by the read line.

Obviously, I should use tee to send the output to both less and the file, but I regularly forget this. That where this hint comes in: you can save the current less-buffer to file!

In short, to save the buffer that is being displayed by a session of `less’, use its pipe-to-shell-command capability by scrolling to the top of the file and press `|’ followed by `$’ as well as entering `tee DESTINATION_FILE’ when prompted for the shell command.

Apparently, the solution is very straightforward: just highlight the “wrong” value in the drop-down and hit Shift+delete to get rid of it.

My concert just got another boost when Growl notified me that a new volume was mounted. I was surprised, since I was laying back, watching a movie… The volume mounted was “GoogleSoftwareUpdate-1.0.6.1054″.

I do have Google Earth installed on my machine, but don’t remember asking it to update itself, definitely not when it’s not even running!

After some digging around, I found the dmg hiding in ~/Library/Caches/com.google.UpdateEngine.Framework.501/Downloads/com.google.Keystone.dmg. Apparently, I’m not the only one who noticed this. This updating seemed to be launched from launchd and can be disabled by removing or disabling the plist-file:

Disabling the startup item can be done by deleting the file ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.google.keystone.agent.plist or adding a new “Disabled” property to it (in case you want to keep the file):

<key>Disabled</key>
<true/>