Rob Allen's DevNotes – Developing software in the Real World

Keyboard control of Big Sur notification alerts

With the release of Big Sur, my scripts for keyboard control of macOS notification alerts stopped working. With a bit of experimentation and help from Google, I have written new ones. Closing an alert To close a notification alert on Big Sur, conceptually we want to press the X button that appears when you hover over it. The AppleScript to do this is:

activate application "NotificationCenter"
tell application "System Events"
    tell process "NotificationCenter"
        set theWindow to group 1 of UI element 1 of scroll area 1 of window "Notification Center"
        # click theWindow
        set theActions to actions of theWindow
        repeat with theAction in theActions
            if description of theAction is "Close" then
                tell theWindow
                    perform theAction
                end tell
                exit repeat
            end if
        end repeat
    end tell
end tell

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activate application "NotificationCenter"

tell application "System Events"

tell process "NotificationCenter"

set theWindow to group 1 of UI element 1 of scroll area 1 of window "Notification Center"

# click theWindow

set theActions to actions of theWindow

repeat with theAction in theActions

if description of theAction is "Close" then

tell theWindow

perform theAction

end tell

exit repeat

end if

end repeat

end tell

This is much more complicated than just clicking button 1 of… continue reading.

Posted on 27 February 2021 in AppleScript, Computing Leave a comment

Free ticket to The Online PHP Conference!

I'm very happy to be speaking at The Online PHP Conference this year. As you can guess from the title, this is an online event so is easily accessible right from your desk. thePHP.cc have very kindly made available a couple of tickets to me, so you could attend for free.

Posted on 6 January 2021 in Conferences, PHP

2020 in Pictures

As we reach the end of 2020, I continue my tradition of looking back at my year through the photos that I took as I have done every year since 2009. I have been doing a Project 365 for a good few years which acts as a diary too, so I have the opportunity to appreciate what happened this year in my life. This has been quite a year with the pandemic hitting the UK… continue reading.

Posted on 31 December 2020 in Me, Year in Pictures One comment so far

Add Apple Watch authentication to sudo

Since 1Password added Apple Watch unlock I've wondered if there are other situations when I need to enter my password where it instead require a click of my Watch instead. I recently came across an article about how to make sudo work with Touch ID, which is nice, but my iMac Pro doesn't have Touch ID. I went searching though and found pam-watchid! This is a PAM module for using the Watch – exactly what… continue reading.

Posted on 9 December 2020 in Computing View all 5 comments

Using jenv to select Java version on macOS

When working on OpenWhisk, I discovered that it needed a different Java to the one I had installed. Looking around the Internet, I discovered jenv which shouldn't have surprised me as I use pyenv and I'm aware of rbenv too. As I use Homebrew, these are the commands I used. Firstly install jenv, the latest Java (15 at this time) and any other versions you need. Java 8 and 12 in this example: $ brew… continue reading.

Posted on 2 December 2020 in Java Leave a comment

Installing PHP extensions without pecl in PHP 8 Docker images

UPDATE: Since this was published, PR 1087 has been raised and merged with restores pecl to the Docker PHP 8 images. I discovered recently that pecl is no longer shipped in the PHP Docker images for PHP 8. This appears to be related to the deprecation of –with-pear in PHP core as noted in issue 1029. Consider this Dockerfile: FROM php:8.0.0RC5-cli-buster RUN pecl install mongodb && docker-php-ext-enable mongodb If you build, you'll discover the pecl… continue reading.

Posted on 24 November 2020 in PHP View all 3 comments

Syncing macOS Keychain certificates with Homebrew's OpenSSL

One of my clients runs their own Composer repository for some packages which is hosted on internal system where the SSL is signed by an internal root CA cert. I installed the relevant certificates into my Keychain, but Composer complained about not being able to trust the certificate. I use the Homebrew version of PHP which links to Homebrew's OpenSSL, so I realised that OpenSSL wasn't looking at the keychain, but instead at its own… continue reading.

Posted on 4 November 2020 in Software Leave a comment

Using MailHog via Docker for testing email

I recently needed to modify the emails that a client project sends out. It was set up to send via SMTP and so the easiest way to do this for me was to add a local MailHog instance and point the application at it. Manually running via Docker The quickest and easiest way to do this is via Docker. Manually, we can do:

$ docker run -p 8025:8025 -p 1025:1025 mailhog/mailhog

1	$ docker run -p 8025:8025 -p 1025:1025 mailhog/mailhog

This will run MailHog with the SMTP port exposed on localhost… continue reading.

Posted on 21 October 2020 in Development Leave a comment

Dorothy Hodgkin

Dorothy Hodgkin by J.S. Lewinski, 1697.© estate of J.S. Lewinski / National Portrait Gallery, London To celebrate Ada Lovelace Day today, I want to highlight Dorothy Hodgkin, a British chemist who made amazing discoveries with X-ray crystallography of molecules. In particular, she confirmed the structure of penicillin and discovered the structure of vitamin B12 and also of insulin. She won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her work on vitamin B12, which was described as… continue reading.

Posted on 13 October 2020 in Ada Lovelace Day Leave a comment

Step-debugging linked composer dependencies with PhpStorm

One project I'm working on has multiple separate parts in different git repositories that are brought into the main project using linked composer directories. I needed to get step debugging working in PhpStorm and this is the approach I took.

Posted on 7 October 2020 in PHP Leave a comment