Patching Bash “shellshock” on Apple Mac OS X 10.9.5

Given the recent bash vulnerability disclosure[1]most linux distributions havereleased patches. Unfortunately Apple still expected users to compiletheir patches into bash. If you were using Homebrew or Macport you werein better standing and simply had to create symlinks to the patchedexecutables. I’ve documented the steps I had to take on my Macdesktop. Compile mkdir bash cd bash/ wget http://opensource.apple.com/tarballs/bash/bash-92.tar.gz tar zxvf bash-92.tar.gz cd bash-92 cd bash-3.2/ curl https://ftp.

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! LaTeX Error: File `algorithm2e.sty’ not found.

During yet another LaTeX project on my MacBook, I added some algorithmsto my paper. After checking a couple of examples online, and discussingwith a colleage I decided to go with algorithm2e over others such asalgorithm, algorithmic, algorithmicx, program and pseudocode[1].However I got the following error “! LaTeX Error: File`algorithm2e.sty’ not found.” Since I am using macport, to resolvethis I needed to install the texlive-science package by executing sudoport install texlive-science, and all was good again.

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Connecting to OpenVPN from a Mac using Tunnelblink

To connect to an OpenVPN server you need an appropriate OpenVPN clientinstalled to establish the SSL link. For Apple Mac OS X systems,TunnelBlick (http://code.google.com/p/tunnelblick/) is a good graphicaluser interface. At the time of this blog the current latest stableversion of TunnelBlick available was 3.2.7. These instructions wereexecuted on an Apple iMac running Mac OS X 10.7.4. As with all otherposts on this blog, the purpose of this post is not to provide atutorial, but instead to documents the steps taken, for my ownbenefit.

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Change Apple Mac OS X Software Update Service (SUS) address

Apple IU Software Update service allows uses to keep their Mac OS Xmachines updated with the latest software updates and security patched.In some controlled environments, the update servers are specified in theuser profile. Sometimes there may be delays in the server updates, orproblems with the local update server and users may desire to connect toApple’s services directly. Here’s are some instructions that users mayfind useful.

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