North Star Labs

After graduation and my last day at work, I’ve taken a road trip to visit the Bennett’s in D.C. and was promptly chagrined while trying to show off Leopard’s screen sharing over OpenVPN.

Fortunately, it’s pretty easy to turn on Screen Sharing from an SSH session.

echo -n enabled > /Library/Preferences/com.apple.ScreenSharing.launchd

Launchd should automatically start the Screen Sharing service when this file is modified.

More information is available at Apple Remote Desktop: Configuring remotely via command line (kickstart)

After upgrading all of my personal machines to Leopard, I’ve found myself using the Screen Sharing feature quite often. Many people have two Mac’s these days, particularly owners of the MacBook Air, and screen sharing makes it incredibly convenient to access a machine in another room.

As with most things I do frequently, Quicksilver has utterly spoiled me. The process of making the Finder active, pressing Command+K, and selecting or typing vnc://champ.local is just way too long.

Fortunately, it’s really easy to integrate Screen Sharing into our Quicksilver workflow.

Here’s how.

You’ll need to edit unix plaintext files, rather than rich text which TextEdit.app seems to insist on producing. TextWrangler is a great, free, text editor for editing Unix plain text files, although I’m partial to TextMate.

First, make sure Screen Sharing is turned on in the Sharing Preference Pane in Leopard.

Suppose you want to connect to a machine named “champ” in the Sharing Preference Pane.

The script will have the contents:

#!/bin/sh
# Nice and short
open vnc://champ.local &

Save the script into ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Scripts/champ.sh and make sure that folder is scanned by Quicksilver.

You’ll also need to make sure the script is executable, so open up Terminal.app and change the permissions:

chmod a+x ~/"Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Scripts/"*.sh

That’s it. Now you should just be able to invoke Quicksilver, start typing the name of the machine you want to share the screen with, and presto! Nice and fast.

I’ve been using the find command for over a decade now, and I’m ashamed to say I never really learned how to properly exclude directories. Dealing with with subversion working copies that litter “.svn” folders everywhere, I finally sorted it all out this afternoon.

To exclude “.svn” folders and all contents:

$ find . '!' '(' -name '.svn' -prune ')'

This, combined with find -print0 and xargs -0 to execute arbitrary commands on every filesystem object found is a wonderful tool to keep handy.