Archives for December 2012

Inside Out

December 26, 2012 by

During winters warm colors and the warmth of fur is associated with the inside of a house, while cool colors and ice means the freezing, hostile world outside. This image was taken at the front door of the Ice Hotel in Kiruna, Sweden. I love the way it reverses the inside-outside association. Happy holidays!

Inside Out

Filed Under: My Photos Tagged With: ,

hdiutil Requires sudo for Read/Write

December 5, 2012 by

Another unwelcome surprise from Apple: in some recent OS X update (I don’t know exactly which one as I ran into the problem this morning) they changed how hdiutil behaves when mounting sparsebundles in read/write mode (it is used in my build scripts as a step toward generating the final setup DMG): it now requires sudo-ing when you use the -readwrite flag.

The problem is that sudo by default prompts for a password and silently fails when used from a script. The solution is to remove that password requirement. This is carried out by adding a line to the /etc/sudoers file:

%admin ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/hdiutil

This innocent one-line edit requires lots of command-line gymnastics, however. Permissions on the sudoers file is 440 by default, and the sudo command fails to work with anything other that that.

So you have to boot your Mac in single user mode to do the edit (by holding down Command+S at startup). Then you have to mount the root file system in read-write mode and change the permissions on the file:

mount -o update /
cd /etc
chmod 640 sudoers
vim sudoers

Add the line to the end of the file, save it and restore the file’s permissions:

chmod 440 sudoers

You can now reboot, and sudo hdiutil will not ask for a password any more! So it can be safely used from within build scripts.

  ☕ ☕ ☕

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Filed Under: Operating Systems Tagged With: , , ,

“Damn, I Would Need a Tilt/Shift for That”

December 2, 2012 by

I can’t remember how many times I had to say the above… Until my 24mm TS-E lens arrived, of course. This is a kind of scene that you can’t photograph without such a lens (OK, you can do that with a 2m ladder). The other option would be perspective correction after the fact – losing substantial amount of resolution. But for a stunning 40 x 60 cm print you need the resolution.

Because of the slight overexposure I employed here (to add to the glowing fog feel), there was some cyan CA at high contrast edges along the top 1/5 of the image (the lens was shifted a lot), but nothing that can’t be corrected quickly in post.

I must admit: the TS-E 24 is my favorite landscape lens.

The Dividing Line

Filed Under: My Photos Tagged With: , ,