Paranormal in Origin

Time Machine Restore

2008-01-15T22:41:00.001Z

To my immense relief, restoring from a Time Machine backup seems to (mostly) have Just Worked. Phew!

The minor things I've spotted so far are:

Apache stopped working after the restore. As discussed here and here, a simple sudo mkdir /private/var/log/apache2 sorted things out.
My local Bugzilla installation seems to have lost some bugs I entered before the crash. However, it's entirely possible that I entered them just before the crash, and so they didn't make it across to the backup.

Crash!

2008-01-02T22:40:00.000Z

Bit of a disaster this evening—the hard drive on the Powerbook has died. No booting, no sign of it in Disk Utility (when booting from CD), and a strange clicking noise at startup. (I was in the middle of updating an iPod Classic to 1.0.3 firmware at the time, and the sync process had already failed a couple of times for no apparent reason.)

The really distressing part is that it died while it was in the process of updating the offsite backup (which is my iPod), and it managed to trash that too.

So let's hope that Time Machine lives up to its billing.

From Firefox to Safari

2007-12-12T21:14:00.001Z

So I've finally had it with Firefox for Mac: one crash too many and it's time to go back to Safari and see what the Leopard version is like.

The easy part of the shift is transferring the bookmarks. First export them in Firefox:

Bookmarks, Organize Bookmarks… opens the Bookmarks Manager
File, Export… dumps the bookmarks to file

and then File, Import Bookmarks… in Safari allows the bookmarks to be dragged into place.

More problematic are the Firefox add-ons. I can live without Leet Key, and I can always reload Firefox if I need to debug things with DOM Inspector or Firebug, but I really can't do without Flashblock.

Fortunately, Pith Helmet seems to do the similar sorts of things for Safari.

ML-2250 Printer Problems

2007-11-11T20:20:00.001Z

I had some difficulties with support for my Samsung ML-2250 printer before, and with the Leopard install they seem to be back. Leopard appears to detect the printer automatically, but on startup and whenever I try to print, the printer just spits out sheets with random bits of PostScript on them.

This looks to be the core of the problem: the printer driver describes itself as "Samsung ML-2250 Series PS", but according to the printer manual PostScript is an optional extra that I don't have.

So maybe I need to revisit the helpful comment I got about Foomatic…

Finder hang

2007-11-07T18:47:00.001Z

After rebooting with the latest software update, the Finder hang that I had before is back.

I'm trying out a hint from this thread, which is to rename the /Library/Application Support/DivXNetworks. Given that it's an intermittent fault, if I don't mention the hang again that will probably mean that it worked…

c++filt, aka cxxfilt

2007-11-05T22:15:00.001Z

Aha. Via the list of Leopard open source stuff I found a download for the relevant patched version of binutils to produce cxxfilt (a.k.a. c++filt), so that particular project directory is back in business.

GraphicConverter 6.0.1

2007-11-05T20:59:00.000Z

Easy solution to the GraphicConverter problem: upgrade to the latest version and buy an upgrade license. It's only $20 for an upgrade (from the bundled Mac OS X version), which is cheap given the current USD/GBP rate.

Filesharing fixed

2007-11-04T18:46:00.000Z

Looking at the logs in the Console application, there seem to be a lot of errors of the form:

tdb(unnamed): tdb_open_ex: spinlocks no longer supported

If I get rid of /private/var/db/samba/secrets.tdb, then there are more errors complaining about different .tdb files in the /private/var/samba/ directory. So I tried getting rid of the whole /private/var/samba/ directory (after having saved off a copy, of course), and I can suddenly see the Mac from the Windows machine again.

Of course, this BFMI approach isn't really a solution to be recommended: I've got no idea what the files were there for and whether this has just made my Samba connections dreadfully insecure.

Filesharing problems

2007-11-04T13:52:00.000Z

I discovered that the Mac box is no longer visible from the PC, so it looks like I've got some Samba problems under Leopard. Looking at the logs in the Console app, it looks like smbd keeps exiting immediately after startup. Running from the command line also fails:

/etc:smbd -i -S
smbd version 3.0.25b-apple started.
Copyright Andrew Tridgell and the Samba Team 1992-2007
WARNING: The "printer admin" option is deprecated
Failed to open /private/var/db/samba/secrets.tdb
ERROR: we did not create the shmem (owned by another user, uid 0, gid 0)
ERROR: failed to setup profiling

No clue on this one—the only hint out there looks to be unrelated (shutting down Apache makes no difference).

Apache setup

2007-11-04T13:18:00.001Z

My pre-Leopard setup for Apache had a number of tweaks, but they have all stopped working with the upgrade.

The configuration file seems to have moved to /etc/apache2/httpd.conf, and now Includes various *.conf files from the extra/ and other/ directories.

So I just created a other/dmd.conf file with the configuration that I'd previously added to httpd.conf, forced a refresh with sudo killall -HUP httpd and things were working again.

I also found that my user web directory (the stuff under ~/Sites) was no longer visible—browsers would get a 403 Access Denied. Following a couple of useful hints, I added a users/dmd.conf file and all was well:

<Directory "/Users/dmd/Sites/">
  Options Indexes MultiViews
  AllowOverride None
  Order allow,deny
  Allow from all
</Directory>

Fortran and c++filt

2007-10-29T21:08:00.000Z

Discovered an added wrinkle to the missing c++filt problem, which is that the GNU Fortran compiler g77 seems (bizarrely) to need c++filt—and so generates errors on execution (it still seems to produce executable binary files, though).

I tried installing the old 10.3.9 tools/SDK off the Leopard DVD in the hope that there might be a c++filt lurking somewhere, but no joy (with either find or Spotlight).

In other news, it looks like the version of GraphicConverter that came bundled with the machine isn't coping well with Leopard. It doesn't always refresh/redraw its windows—leaving them grey and blank (until they're scrolled to force a redraw).

X11 in the Dock

2007-10-29T21:00:00.001Z

OK, it looks like my X11 problems aren't unique to me.

Getting rid of .dSYM/ directories

2007-10-28T21:09:00.000Z

So the new --work-properly option for this is to use -gstabs rather than plain old -g.

For Xcode projects, it looks like there's a choice of setting DEBUG_INFORMATION_FORMAT to one of stabs, dwarf or dwarf-with-dsym (where the last of these is apparently the default), but as far as I can tell the Xcode settings don't affect the proper way of doing things (the command line).

dvips and relative paths

2007-10-28T18:48:00.001Z

Next oddity: dvips stopped finding figure files in a different relative directory:

dvips: Could not find figure file ../figures/lyapunov.ps; continuing

With a hint from this discussion, it looks like the appropriate --work-properly option is dvips -R0 … (although I've no idea why a relative path is considered a security hole, nor why this is now a problem given that I've not updated dvips).

gv and libXaw3d

2007-10-28T17:34:00.000Z

Found another small application that's not working, namely gv. The error message is:

dyld: Library not loaded: /usr/X11R6/lib/libXaw3d.7.dylib
  Referenced from: /usr/local/bin/gv
  Reason: image not found
Trace/BPT trap

so as before I looked in /usr/X11R6 1/lib, and lo and behold, there's the relevant library.

A quick

/usr/X11R6 1/lib:ls /usr/X11R6/lib/*Xaw3d*
ls: /usr/X11R6/lib/*Xaw3d*: No such file or directory
/usr/X11R6 1/lib:sudo mv *Xaw3d* /usr/X11R6/lib/

and gv is good to go again.

Turning off the Spotlight

2007-10-28T14:34:00.000Z

Almost certainly old news to 10.4 users, but when I plugged in an external hard drive, I noticed that Spotlight kicked off the process of trying to index it. Perusing a couple of useful web pages, it looks like the easiest way to stop this is just to add the external hard disk to the Spotlight Privacy list.

Upgrading from 10.3.9 to 10.5 (Leopard)

2007-10-27T21:10:00.000+01:00

I passed on installing Tiger, but it looked like Leopard might be worth the upgrade (and might have a side bonus that my new iPod might now work), so off I went.

After backing things up, I whacked in the install DVD and left it to run an upgrade. I had to deselect a few things to get it to fit on my nearly-full hard disk, but sadly I couldn't deselect all of the additional languages which appeared to need a bunch of space (presumably they were there from the 10.3 install, and the Leopard installer only allows upgrade/install not removal).

The install took about an hour and a half, and was mostly fairly smooth. However, there were a couple of serious oddities afterwards: the Finder would only hang, and everything seemed to run very slowly. Relaunching the Finder didn't help, but just as I was starting to get worried the problem went away after a couple of reboots. (Bizarrely, the Finder problem seemed to affect my Emacs startup too—it didn't read my .emacs and showed an error message: "Finder got an error: Apple Event timed out.")

For the slowdown, I finally noticed the new magnifying glass in the top right corner of the screen, and discovered that it was due to Spotlight indexing the disk. Once it had finished (which I would guess took around 3 hours, but I left it overnight), the speed seems to be roughly back to normal.

The upgraded X11 seems to be the biggest step backwards so far. The upgrade lost my customized shortcut applications, and in trying to recreate them I discovered that it's no longer possible to include command line options for an application (so I've had to create shell scripts and execute them instead). More seriously, the interaction of X11 with the Dock gets confused, so I end up with a bunch of big "X" icons in the dock, and Command-Tabbing to a X11 doesn't bring any window to the foreground.

Trying to rebuild all of my source code projects failed miserably at first, but that was just because I hadn't upgraded Xcode yet. Once that was installed, things started to work much better—but a few chunks of my source code needed updating for the newer, stricter compiler (GCC 4.0.1).

Some things were a little more taxing, however. The new version of M4 (1.4.6) has a bug dealing with input files that don't end in a newline; the easiest way of dealing with this was just to add newlines.

My installation of xfig disappeared during the upgrade, which is a bit of a problem as a lot of my older projects rely on it. Consulting my notes it looks like I originally got xfig using the i-Installer, but that now fails to re-install the package (and has dire warnings about the unsupported level of both the particular package and the installer itself).

Spotlight may be spangly, but it didn't find where xfig had gotten to. Good old UNIX find, on the other hand, quickly determined that xfig and friends had been shuffled off to a separate /usr/X11R6 1/bin/ directory. A quick mv * /usr/X11R6/bin/ and all was sorted.

Another problem was what initially looked like a problem with the C++ compiler's internal header files:

~/text/recipes: c++ -I. -c temp.cpp
/usr/include/c++/4.0.0/bits/locale_facets.tcc: In member function 'virtual long int std::collate<_CharT>::do_hash(const _CharT*, const _CharT*) const':
/usr/include/c++/4.0.0/bits/locale_facets.tcc:2417: error: 'digits' is not a member of 'std::numeric_limits<long unsigned int>'
/usr/include/c++/4.0.0/bits/istream.tcc: In member function 'std::basic_istream<_CharT, _Traits>& std::basic_istream<_CharT, _Traits>::operator>>(short int&)':
/usr/include/c++/4.0.0/bits/istream.tcc:151: error: 'min' is not a member of 'std::numeric_limits<short int>'
/usr/include/c++/4.0.0/bits/istream.tcc:152: error: 'max' is not a member of 'std::numeric_limits<short int>'

However, skipping the "-I." on the command line made the problem disappear, so it looked like a name clash between one of my local header files and one of the system header files. Again, the magic of the UNIX command line (specifically for ii in *; do find /usr/include/c++ -name $ii; done) found the culprit so I could rename it. (It was actually a local version of the limits header file that I'd created ages ago to cope with the deficiencies of the previous version of the C++ compiler.)

Having made all of the required changes to my project files, I noticed a bunch of deprecation warnings when I checked them in to CVS. The net result of the instructions for getting rid of this was to:

add UseNewInfoFmtStrings=yes to $CVSROOT/CVSROOT/config
adjust the commitinfo script so that it took (and ignored) parameters " %r/%p %s"

Still to investigate further:

With the updates to a variety of projects, I also noticed the appearance of a bunch of exefile.dSYM directories all over the place. According to the docs, since Xcode 2.4 these directories look to hold debugging information for generated executables, held separately from the executables themselves. Given that I never distribute binaries, I'd prefer the normal behavior of binding the debugging information into the executable file itself. So I guess I need to look for the appropriate --work-properly option.
Also, c++filt has gone missing. Not normally a big deal, but it's specifically needed for one particular old project of mine. It's normally in the GNU binutils package, so I'll start the hunt there.
See if there's any solution to the X11 issues.

System Failure

2007-06-03T12:37:00.000+01:00

Here's a first (which is pretty impressive for two+ years in):

System Failure: cpu=0; code=0000001 (Corrupt stack)
Latest crash info for cpi 0:
   Exception stat (sv=0x2ABBCC80)
      PC=0x000940A0; MSR=0x00001030; DAR=0x175AFFF4; DSISR=0x42000000; LR=0x00093F8C; R1=0x175AFEE0; XCP=0x00000098 (System Failure)
      Backtrace:

         backtrace terminated - frame not mapped or invalid: 0x175AFEE0

Proceeding back via exception chain:
   Exception state (sv=0x2ABBCC80)
     PC=0x001D9FCC; MSR=0x00009030; DAR=0x175AFFF4; DSISR=0x42000000; LR=0x001D9FFC; R1=0x175B00000; XCP=0x0000000C (0x300 - Data access)
     Backtrace:
        0x52415449 0x001D9FFC 0x001D9FFC 0x001D9FFC 0x001D9FFC 0x001D9FFC 0x001D9FFC 0x001D9FFC 
        0x001D9FFC 0x001D9FFC 0x001D9FFC 0x001D9FFC 0x001D9FFC 0x001D9FFC 0x001D9FFC 0x001D9FFC 
        0x001D9FFC 0x001D9FFC 0x001D9FFC 0x001D9FFC 0x001D9FFC 0x001D9FFC 0x001D9FFC 0x001D9FFC 
        0x001D9FFC 0x001D9FFC 0x001D9FFC 0x001D9FFC 0x001D9FFC 0x001D9FFC 0x001D9FFC 0x001D9FFC 
     backtrace continues...
   Exception state (sv=0x2AD90280)
     PC=0x9002E76C; MSR=0x0000D030; DAR=0x017B9000; DSISR=0x42000000; LR=0x90025290; R1=0xBFFFF7B00; XCP=0x00000030 (0xC00 - System call)

Kernel version:
Darwin Kernel Version 7.9.0:
Wed Mar 30 20:11:17 PST 2005; root:xnu/xnu-517.12.7.obj~1/RELEASE_PPC


Memory access exception (1,0,0)
ethernet MAC Address: 00:00:00:00:00:00
ip address: 0.0.0.0

Waiting for remote debugger connection

For now, I shall just assume it's down to cosmic rays.

Tidying up "Open With"

2007-04-22T12:35:00.002+01:00

Adobe Photoshop and ImageReady really clutter up the "Open With" context menu (in Finder) with lots of extra actions for images—things like "Constrain to 200x200 pixels.exe", "Slide Thumbnail.exe", etc. There's around 25 of them, which makes it much harder to select the proper image processing application.

These extra entries correspond to "Droplets", which are small image processing scripts. Thanks to this page, getting rid of them is simple:

cd /Applications/Adobe Photoshop CS2/Samples
mv Droplets Droplets.hidden

[Edit 2008-07-19: Following these instructions may also be needed]

Keyboard Shortcuts

2007-03-05T12:04:00.001Z

For future reference, some keyboard shortcuts I keep forgetting:

Ctrl-F2 jumps focus to the menu bar
Ctrl-F3 jumps focus to the Dock
Tab and Shift-Tab jump around buttons in modal dialogs, Space selects (not Enter, which triggers the default button (i.e. the one in blue)

(The last of these need the System Preferences/Keyboard & Mouse/Keyboard Shortcuts/Turn on full keyboard access option to be turned on).

Django

2006-11-17T14:53:00.001Z

Today, my installation notes on the steps I took to get Django set up and running (Mac OS X version still at 10.3.9).

The general picture of the chunks of software involved is:

At first glance, my machine has Python and MySQL already installed:

   ~:which python
   /usr/bin/python
   ~:which mysql
   /usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql

so it looks like it should just be a case of adding in MySQLdb and Django itself.

MySQLdb

First, I downloaded and unpacked MySQL-python-1.2.1_p2.tar.gz from this page. However, reading the README file, it looks like there are some version dependencies:

MySQL >= 3.23.32: A quick run of status from inside mysql shows my version as 4.1.15, so that's OK.
Python >= 2.3.3: running /usr/bin/python -V just shows "Python 2.3". Thanks to this page, I could run import platform;print platform.python_version() in the Python interpreter and discovered that the built-in version of Python is 2.3.0. Drat.

PUSH: Python 2.5

Quick digression to visit the Mac Python page and download a copy of Python 2.5. A normal Mac install procedure means that I've now got a /usr/local/bin/python that reports 2.5.0, and it appears to be installed under /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5

POP: Back to MySQLdb

In the MySQL-python-1.2.1_p2 directory, I did a quick chmod +x setup.py and then ran setup.py build. This built very quickly, producing some stuff in the build/ subdirectory. Running sudo setup.py install put things into the /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/lib/python2.5/site-packages directory.

Time for a quick test to check that everything is OK, using a Bugzilla database I've got running locally:

~:python
Python 2.5 (r25:51918, Sep 19 2006, 08:49:13) 
[GCC 4.0.1 (Apple Computer, Inc. build 5341)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import _mysql
>>> db=_mysql.connect(host="localhost", user="bugs", passwd="password", db="bugs")
>>> db.query("""select short_desc from bugs where bug_id < 10""")
>>> r=db.store_result()
>>> r.fetch_row()
(('tracker.exe fails to run',),)
>>> r.fetch_row(10)
(('Using Word as email editor confuses tracker',), 
 ('Mysteriously, many items have people = "none" should just be blank',), 
 ('keyword combo should have whole description in it, not "same description"',), 
 ('Dodgy start/end times just get mysteriously dropped',), 
 ('Detect and drop the addition of duplicate keywords',), 
 ("Get rid of menus that we don't use",), 
 ('Add wildcards to project keywords',), 
 ('Add help to activity forms',))
>>>

Looks good.

[Edit 2008-07-20: When I repeated this process later (on 10.5), I also needed to follow these instructions.]

Django

I decided to take the Django folks at their word when they claim that the development version is pretty stable, so I checked out the code with svn co http://code.djangoproject.com/svn/django/trunk/ as suggested. (I downloaded in November 2006, at which point the highest stable release was 0.95).

To make Django visible within Python just needed a sudo ln -s `pwd`/trunk/django/ /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/lib/python2.5/site-packages/django. (To check it was visible, a quick import django in Python didn't generate any errors.)

From here on, the normal Django documentation can take over.

Round Three: Return to Plan A

2006-11-09T15:10:00.000Z

Plan A has been successfully resurrected and completed, with a mere 6 day pause for step 3. I found a much more helpful set of folk, so it was just a case of killing time in town while steps 1 and 4 took place.

Round Two: The Unhappy in Pursuit of the Unavailable

2006-10-26T10:43:00.000+01:00

Next attempt to get my Powerbook fixed: I talked to Apple Support, and they gave me the number for the Apple Store on Regent Street, to see if they might be able to resurrect Plan A.

Next problem: you can only get to deal with the "Genius" Bar if you have an appointment. And you can only book an appointment on-line. But you can't book an appointment for a particular day—you can only book appointments for today (unless you pay an extra £80 a year for ProCare). And when I checked the site at 9:03am and 10:30am today, it told me: "Unfortunately, there are no more reservations available today. Please check back tomorrow."

It makes booking an appointment with a GP seem positively straightforward.

Round One: Lying scum

2006-10-25T18:33:00.000+01:00

After talking to Apple Support, it sounded like fixing my memory problem would be fairly straightforward, if a bit of a hassle. Plan A:

I'd take the machine into a service centre to confirm the fault.
They would order a new logic board.
In the meanwhile, I could limp along with half memory.
When the board came in, they would call me and I'd go back to the service centre to have the board replaced.

I spoke to my nearest service centre, who confirmed that this was how it would work and said that I could just pop in and they would do step 1 there and then.

So today I left work early and drove down to Islington in the rain to visit the service centre, only to discover that the lying scum now claimed that the only way they would fix the problem would be Plan B:

Leave the machine with them.
At some point thereafter, they would confirm the fault and order a new logic board.
Some days thereafter (up to 10, presumably working, days) the new logic board would arrive.
Sometime thereafter they would exchange the board and call me.
I would then pick up the fixed machine.

Spot the difference between Plan A and Plan B?

Not having at all prepared to do without my main machine (with our bug system, code repository and all my personal email on it) for three weeks, I left and drove home in the rain.

Thanks for (half of) the memory

2006-10-24T12:32:00.000+01:00

I'd been wondering for the last few days why my Powerbook seems to be running much more slowly than usual, and I think I've determined the answer: it's only recognizing half of the 1024 MB of memory.

Looks like I'm not alone in having this problem.

MathML: the Revenge

2006-10-02T20:34:00.000+01:00

Hey, it looks like they fixed the MathML font pro ble ms with Firefox under Mac OS X when I wasn't looking.

Hmm, I wonder if blogger allows MathML:

\frac{(Y + A) (2 Y + X) (\frac{{(X - 2 Y)}^{4}}{{(X^{2} - 4 Y^{2})}^{2}} + 1)}{4 Y^{2} + X^{2}}

I guess not (at least, not without some template fiddling)

Kernel panic

2006-09-04T11:00:00.000+01:00

Hmm, another security update, another new problem. This time, I'm getting a bunch of kernel panics, often on startup. (As an aside, I should point out that I had to look up what the multi-lingual message about restarting the computer was about—in other words, these are the first kernel panics I've had in a year and a half of using Mac OS X day in, day out).

No indication (in /Library/Logs/panic.log) of what the problem might be, but things seems to have stabilized now.

[Edit 4-Nov-06: I now suspect the problem might have been half of the memory failing]

Web CVS viewing

2006-06-02T16:45:00.001+01:00

Today's task was to get ViewVC set up, for a nice web view of the CVS repository.

The basics were pretty straightforward; ran the viewvc-install script to install it into /usr/local/viewvc-1.0.0, and then went to /Library/WebServer/Documents and added a symlink with ln -s /usr/local/viewvc-1.0.0/bin/cgi cvs.

Next was to get Apache to run the ViewVC scripts. In a very similar way to one of the steps in the Bugzilla installation, this involved editing /etc/httpd/httpd.conf to add a new section (followed by a killall -HUP httpd):

<Directory /Library/WebServer/Documents/cvs>
  AddHandler cgi-script .cgi
  Options +Indexes +ExecCGI
  DirectoryIndex viewvc.cgi
  AllowOverride Limit
</Directory>

Now time for some added chrome: syntax colouring. I tried both Enscript and Highlight (the former from the enscript Fink package, the latter from source), and decided to go for Highlight as it included line numbers in the output.

One final tweak, though: Highlight wasn't recognising some of our Visual Basic files, because they have slightly different extensions (.cls and .dsr). A quick modification to /etc/highlight/filetypes.conf to change the line

  $ext(vb)=bas basic bi

to read

  $ext(vb)=bas basic bi dsr cls

and we're done.

Airport keychain problems

2006-05-14T10:24:00.000+01:00

Grr. Installed another software update, and yet again the wireless networking has stopped working. This has happened every time I've installed an OS update; the problem seems to be related to Keychain Access—eventually, after a few reboots I get the dialog about AirPort needing to access the system keychain, and after that everything recovers. Another data point supporting this theory: the Keychain Access program (in Applications/Utilities) sometimes hangs as well.

...

Four reboots later, the problem has mysteriously fixed itself (and without the airport system keychain dialog this time). I was just about to try some more experimental solutions, but I guess I'll save them for the next time around.

Groups

2006-05-04T18:51:00.000+01:00

I've got a CVS repository on the Mac which is accessed by another user, and we keep having permission problems when new files are added. According to the CVS Manual, UNIX groups are the normal way to deal with this. However, Mac OS X doesn't quite deal with groups in the same way as normal UNIX boxen.

Not to worry: there are some nice scripts here, here and here to make things look more normal.

Who's That File

2006-05-04T18:32:00.000+01:00

Because I keep forgetting: the magic incantation to figure out which Fink package owns a particular file is:
dpkg -S file

Broken wireless

2006-01-17T07:27:00.000Z

Hmm. I clicked OK on a bunch of Software Update features last night, and now things are screwy. In particular, the wireless stuff isn't working—I just get the swirly rainbow beachball cursor for anything on the right hand side of the top menu bar (including the clock, which has stuck). I think that one of the things I clicked on was a new Powerbook update, which is presumably the prime suspect.

[Edit: I've now rebooted for a third time, and this time things work. This time I got the dialog on booting that asks about migrating AirPort keychains; that hadn't appeared on the previous two attempts at rebooting. I'm not sure what was different this time round—possibly that I completely powered off the machine rather than restarting.

Also, I figured out how to find out what Software Update installed: just go to Preferences, Installed Updates while Software Update is running (or System Preferences, Software Update, Installed Updates). For a more direct approach, just look in /Library/Logs/Software Update.log]

Wiki

2006-01-13T14:29:00.000Z

Here's an easy one: getting a wiki set up just involves installing pre-built version of MoinMoin and jumping straight to http://localhost:8080.Looks like the underlying data is stored in files under ~/Library/Application Support/MoinX/instance/data, so it even gets picked up by my normal backup process.

And back to intel

2006-01-11T21:05:00.000Z

As mentioned previously, I have some sympathy with this. Still, at least I've had mine for nine months, not three weeks.

Bugzilla mail

2006-01-08T16:35:00.000Z

To finish off my Bugzilla installation, I need to get email working. Thunderbird is working fine, but I need to configure things so that command line email works.

Postfix 2.0.10 looks to already be installed and running under Mac OS X 10.3.9, so the first step is to edit /etc/hostconfig so that Postfix starts at boot time (by setting MAILSERVER=-YES-).

At this point, a command line mail somebody@email.address works, but triggering Bugzilla to send a mail (by reassigning a bug, say) gives an error "undef error - Can't open sendmail at /System/Library/Perl/5.8.1/CGI/Carp.pm line 314"). Looking at the perl code in Bugzilla/BugMail.pm, it looks like the path to sendmail is hardcoded as /usr/lib/sendmail—so I just put in a symlink: ln -s /usr/sbin/sendmail /usr/lib/sendmail.

With that, mails from Bugzilla do start to get through, but the From: address isn't quite right. Time to edit /etc/postfix/main.cf to set myorigin = lurklurk.org, and then mails are coming from a more sensible place.

[Edit 13-Jun-06: The straightforward setup sends mail directly from my box, and this was getting bounced by some mail server recipients. To sent via my normal SMTP outgoing server, I also needed to change the value of relayhost.]

Bugzilla 2.18.4

2006-01-06T18:20:00.000Z

OK, here's the sequence of steps I used to get Bugzilla up and running under Mac OS X. The official instructions are here, and the download is here. It's a reasonably convoluted process, so I'd recommend having some soothing music on: I went for Musica Antiqua Köln playing Bach's "Musical Offering".

Zerothly, I already had an install of MySQL that I'd gotten from here. It wasn't set up to auto-start on boot, so I re-opened the .dmg file and ran the MySQLStartupItem.pkg package.

Firstly, I used FinkCommander to install a collection of lower-level utilities that are needed:

libpng3 and libpng3-shlibs
gd2, gd2-bin, gd2-shlibs
expat

Nextly was to get all of the relevant Perl modules installed. This are the things that the ./checksetup.pl --check-modules command spits out; roughly:

perl -MCPAN -e 'install "Bundle::Bugzilla"': this is a shortcut to get all of the really-required modules in one go; there were a few problems, but running it repeatedly seemed to work eventually.
perl -MCPAN -e 'install "Chart::Base"'
perl -MCPAN -e 'install "PatchReader"'
perl -MCPAN -e 'install "GD::Graph"' (pointing it at the /sw/lib location for libgd
For the XML::Parser module, I had to tweak things by hand a bit

cpan
cpan> look "XML::Parser"
# perl Makefile.PL EXPATLIBPATH=/sw/lib EXPATINCPATH=/sw/include
# make; make test; make install
# exit

At the end of all of this, ./checksetup.pl --check-modules was happy, so I moved on to the full ./checksetup.pl and edited the generated localconfig file:

changed the value of $db_pass to a password
changed the value of $webservergroup to www to match the running Apache server

Some tweaking of the MySQL setup next:

created a /usr/local/mysql/data/my.cnf file, and added ft_min_word_len=2 and max_allowed_packet=1M in a [mysqld] section
set up a bugs user from the mysql -u root command line:

mysql> GRANT SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, INDEX, ALTER, CREATE, LOCK TABLES, CREATE TEMPORARY TABLES, DROP, REFERENCES ON bugs.* TO bugs@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'password';
mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

At this point, running ./checksetup.pl did a bunch of work: setting up Apache configuration scripts, generating tables in the database, setting up an administrator account. Nearly there!

Next is webserver setup. To make the Bugzilla directory (/usr/local/bugzilla-2.18.4 for me) visible to the webserver, I just put in a symlink: cd /Library/WebServer/Documents; ln -s /usr/local/bugzilla-2.18.4 bugzilla. Then I added the following chunk of configuration to /etc/httpd/httpd.conf (just before Section 3 in the existing file):

<Directory /Library/WebServer/Documents/bugzilla>
  AddHandler cgi-script .cgi
  Options +Indexes +ExecCGI +FollowSymLinks
  DirectoryIndex index.cgi
  AllowOverride Limit
</Directory>

A swift killall -HUP httpd (to get the config file reloaded) and woot, http://localhost/bugzilla looks to be up and running.

The only thing left to do is to set things up so that Bugzilla can send out emails (in a manner that's effectively equivalent to running mail on the command line). My CD has finished playing now, so I'll defer that to another day.

Booklet printing

2005-09-27T17:59:00.000+01:00

Now that I've got a laser printer, I wanted to print things as compactly as possible—in booklet form, double sided. The CocoaBooklet utility seems to do a splendid job of this. I've set the preferences to A4 paper, destination "Same as Original" with a "-booklet" suffix, options "Do not flip odd pages" and "Split the document into odd and even pages" armed.

Dragging a PDF file onto the application, this gives me an Even-booklet.pdf and an Odd-booklet.pdf file. If I then

Print the Even-booklet.pdf file in reverse order
Flip the printout for printing on the other side by just putting it into the manual feeder, preserving its orientation (face down, with the two tops of the printed pages on the right hand side)
Print the Odd-booklet.pdf file in forwards order

I get the booklet I'm after

Samsung ML-2250

2005-09-01T17:34:00.000+01:00

Rather foolishly, I bought a new printer without noticing that it doesn't have support for Mac OS X. I was hopeful for a minute when I managed to install a PostScript driver for the printer, but reading the user manual in more detail it turns out it needs an extra thingy installed to do that.

However, it turns out that the driver for the ML-2150 seems to work OK for the ML-2250 too.

fatfind

2005-09-01T10:24:00.000+01:00

Given that my home directory is now too big to fit on a single DVD, I bought an external hard drive for backing things up to.

However, it seems to be annoyingly difficult to actually get all of the data I want onto it. My first method was just to copy all of the relevant files across in Finder. This doesn't work, because whenever Finder comes across a file whose filename isn't allowed under the FAT32 filesystem of the destination drive, it just quits (which is incredibly annoying: why can't it carry on to copy all the other files?).

So next, I tried resorting to low-level UNIX stuff: cd /Users; tar czvf /Volumes/BACKUPDRIVE/dmd_20050831.tgz dmd. That didn't work either (some gzip error message), so I tried the uncompressed verson (cd /Users; tar cvf /Volumes/BACKUPDRIVE/dmd_20050831.tar dmd), and even a straightforward copy (cp -pR /Users/dmd/* .), but they both failed too.

After looking in the Help, my next attempt was to try using Disk Utility to create a disk image of my home directory in a file on the external HD. Nope, failure there too. Following a tip, I also tried to get Disk Utility to create a read/write 50Gb HFS disk image on the external HD, but that failed too.

So what I'm converging on now is figuring out (by experimentation and the filthy internet) that the characters that cause problems on FAT32 are: \ : ? * < > | ", and so find . -name '*[<:|>/\\\*"?]*' finds all of the problematic files so I can rename them.

[Edit: Actually, it looks like there are occasionally files that have non-printable characters in their filenames; in particular application packages often have a file called Icon^M. So flipping the find command around to find . -name "*[^a-z A-Z0-9!#$%&\'()+,.\-;=@\[\]^_\`{}~]*" seems to work better.]

Another victim^H^H^H^Hconvert

2005-07-20T07:16:00.000+01:00

jwz joins the party, and has a number of tweaks of his own. I shall watch with interest to see if he finds anything definitive on the whole clipboard débâcle; I really couldn't summon up the energy to fight all that stuff again.

Windows, windows everywhere, and all the boards did shrink

2005-06-30T17:59:00.000+01:00

Hidden away on this page, I found a neat hint for a keyboard shortcut to go with Cmd-Tab—it turns out that Cmd-~ will cycle windows within the currently running application. Also, buried in the comments is the point that Ctrl-F4 will cycle through the Z-order of windows regardless of which application they belong to.

X marks the spot

2005-06-17T16:34:00.000+01:00

Added in CLX support to my Fink installation of CLISP by modifying the /sw/fink/dists/stable/main/finkinfo/languages/clisp.info file. In the end, all I needed to do was to add --with-module=clx/new-clx to the makemake command, and then a

fink
rebuild clisp

sorted everything out—clisp -K full has the XLIB package available.

Shafted again

2005-06-08T21:41:00.000+01:00

"Put simply, who in their right minds would buy a Power-based Mac now, or in the next eighteen months?"

Thunderbirds Are Go

2005-05-20T14:13:00.000+01:00

So it's all been pretty quiet on the Mac front, because most everything that needs installing or setting up has been done. All that's left are occasional annoyances.

Of which, the one that's been puzzling me recently is how to get mailto: tags to bring up Thunderbird rather than the default Mac mail client.

To my surprise, this wasn't actually something that immediately popped out from a quick google, at least not for any combination of appropriate words I could think of. Eventually, I found a link that gave me the hint I needed—for Mac OS X 10.3, the way to set the default mail application is in Mail. So I loaded up Mail, went to Preferences pane and set Firefox as the default email application, and my mailto: links now seem to work fine.

Toothing problems

2005-05-02T12:46:00.000+01:00

I eventually realized that I now own two Bluetooth devices, the Powerbook and a Tungsten T5, so it only seemed natural to try to get the two to talk to each other.

My initial attempts failed miserably—every time I turned on Bluetooth on the Powerbook, it hanged. However, installing the firmware update improved things enormously, and together with some additional instructions, things were soon syncing OK.

Palm DBs

2005-05-01T12:46:00.000+01:00

Once upon a time, I used to use some tools for putting things into and out of the Palm DB database format, so I thought I'd take another look.

The most recent version looks to be 0.3.3, but that hasn't been modified since 2002, so it looks like I'm on my own. Thanks to the magic of autoconf, a large fraction of the build works straight out of the box, but there's a couple of tweaks needed:

modifying */Makefile to add the -Wno-long-double option
modifying flatfile/Makefile to set STATIC=yes so that it builds a static library rather than a shared library (looks like another chunk of code that needs the --work-properly option).

Of course, now that I've built it, it doesn't work—it claims my PDB files are corrupt. After a bit of debugging, the problem seems to be that it thinks there's a zero length record at the end of the file. One quick and dirty hack to libflatfile/DB.cpp coming up:

*** old/DB.cpp  Sun May  1 12:41:29 2005
--- new/DB.cpp  Sun May  1 12:43:45 2005
***************
*** 450,455 ****
--- 450,456 ----
          PalmLib::Record record = pdb.getRecord(i);
          Record rec;
  
+         if (record.size() == 0) continue;
              std::vector ptrs;
              std::vector sizes;
              parse_record(record, ptrs, sizes);

(in the main loop in PalmLib::FlatFile::DB::DB) ...and all seems to work.

PalmOS

2005-04-30T17:57:00.000+01:00

Next up, getting a PalmOS development environment up and running so I can get another old project up and running again.

The most convenient approach looks to be the version here, which packages up PRC-Tools 2.3, PilRC 2.9p10 and the PalmOS SDK V.5. This seems to put the SDK into /opt/palmdev/sdk-5, and the command line tools (m68k-palmos-gcc, m68k-palmos-ld etc) into /usr/local/bin.

The pdbc tools are also useful, so I pulled a copy of v0.9.5 from the PalmGear site. Out of the box, this gave syntax errors on every file I fed it; to get it to work I had to:

convert the lex and yacc source files to Unix file format
regenerate from the lex/yacc generated code (which needed chmod +w *)
rebuild (make)

To test things out, I also needed the Palm OS Emulator and the skins to go with it, from PalmSource (registration needed)

MathML

2005-04-29T20:50:00.000+01:00

Hmm. I had a previous project to do some things with MathML, but getting anything visible on Mac OS X seems to be tricky. It doesn't look like Mozilla/Firefox currently has decent support, and Safari shows no signs of support. Even turning to Internet Explorer in desperation, it turns out that the MathPlayer plug-in is Windows-only.

Sigh.

Servlets and Applets

2005-04-23T13:31:00.000+01:00

Another project that's lurking on my hard disk involves some Java servlets, so I thought I'd try to get that up and running again. The first stop for information was the page on the subject at developer.apple.com, and the first thing to download is a copy of Tomcat 5.5.9. After installing under /usr/local/jakarta-tomcat-5.5.9 and reading the RUNNING.txt file, the first piece of vital extra information is that JAVA_HOME needs to be /Library/Java/Home.

The more serious problem elucidated in the RUNNING.txt file is that tomcat-5.5.9 needs JRE 5.0 or later to run out of the box.

Pause. Actually, the even more serious problem is that the OS 10.3.9 upgrade has killed Java.
~:java -version
Segmentation fault
<click>.
~:java -version
java version "1.4.2_05"
Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.4.2_05-141.4)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.4.2-38, mixed mode)
Digression over.

So, returning to the fray the jakarta-tomcat-5.5.9-compat.tar.gz gets untarred into /usr/local, and lo a page appears at port 8080.

Some hints from this page also led me to edit conf/tomcat-users.xml to add the roles admin,manager to allow administrative access, which is helpful for seeing how things are getting on.

Now I just need to get my own code compiled and installed. Adding /usr/local/jakarta-tomcat-5.5.9/common/lib/servlet-api.jar to the CLASSPATH takes care of the first, and the second involves following the instructions at the developer.apple.com page.

10.3.9

2005-04-19T22:30:00.000+01:00

Ooh look, an OS upgrade. <click>

Stat none, perl one

2005-04-17T18:36:00.000+01:00

Got back from a friend's wedding today, so I've got a bunch of new pictures from the digital camera, which gives me the opportunity to get my scripts for JPG files up and working again. First stop is to use FinkCommander to pull in libjpeg-bin and libjpeg-shlibs (version 6b-16) so that I've got wrjpgcom installed.

The perl part of the scripts Just Works, but there doesn't seem to be a command-line stat command available. Easy enough to convert to a one-line Perl script to hit stat and scalar localtime, though.

Breadcrumb Trail

2005-04-10T18:34:00.000+01:00

So this page looks like an excellent place to start (and one which would have been very useful back during my perennial quest for the --work-properly option, and this page also has some useful hints—which seem to point me towards the

-dynamic
  -r

options.

Finding the --work-properly option

2005-04-09T18:51:00.000+01:00

I once worked on a sequence of projects that involved porting a fair chunk of code between a variety of different Unix variants—Solaris (both x86 and SPARC), IRIX, HP-UX, AIX and Linux. To begin with, we would tend to use the GNU toolchain because it was easily accessible and cheap, but in the end we had to use the native compilers on each system (not least because we were selling the product to the equipment manufacturers themselves, and they seem oddly biased towards their own toolchains).

Now, in general I remain impressed at how easily half a million lines of code did port between these systems. The codebase included some fairly low level code, some hacking in the internals of the X server, and some vexing C++ (this was pre-ANSI C++ by some margin)—and the record for getting it running on a new system was around two weeks.

However, every platform had some kind of gotcha in the toolchain. It would always be a different issue—on one platform it would be template instantiation, on another it would be position-dependent code, on a third it would be allowing dereferencing of a null pointer. In each case, though, it would boil down to a peculiar default behaviour of some tool in the build process—the compiler, the linker, the dynamic loader. In each case, it would also always turn out that there was an option buried in the depths of the man page that would make the tool behave sensibly (where "sensibly" here means to behave like the equivalent tool on the other four platforms).

Thus the legend of the --work-properly option was born.

The legend that whenever cc or ar or ld or ld.so or libdl.so isn't doing what it's supposed to, somewhere there's an option to make it so.

And now, as I try to get another project up and running again, the hunt is on for the --work-properly option for shared library generation.

[Edit: Nic helpfully points out that this page has some good stuff on OS X dylibs]

Escape Meta Alt Control Shift (Command Option)

2005-04-09T17:24:00.000+01:00

I'm now playing with copy and paste in the Carbon version of Emacs. Sean Luke's page has some useful functions to get normal Mac copy and paste working—and which are making me lean towards having Alt map to Emacs Meta.

(Of course, this stops alt-3 working as the hash key, but a quick

  (defun mac-insert-hash () 
    "Insert a hash / octothorp character"
    (interactive)
    (insert-char ?# 1))
  (define-key global-map "\M-3" 'mac-insert-hash)

sorts that out.)

Of course, this doesn't work with the arcane (insane?) complexities of X11 selections/clipboards/cut buffers/whatever. Once upon a time I even had to understand all the nonsense in the ICCCM and get it to work with the rest of the known universe, but thankfully all of that has since faded from my brain.

I also figured out the problem with emacsclient—my default path was picking up the version that matched the pre-installed terminal-only Emacs, not the full Mac OS X build. Changing my edit script to use

  /Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/bin/emacsclient --no-wait $*

sorts that out. I got a bit confused in the process of sorting this out, because it looks like the emacsserver stuff doesn't run as a separate process (at least, nothing other than the main Emacs program shows up in ps).

More lost keys

2005-04-09T11:56:00.000+01:00

First up today, some minor tweaks to my .emacs file. Moving to the beginning and end of the buffer isn't working with my normal Ctrl-Home and Ctrl-End (or rather Ctrl-Fn-Left and Ctrl-Fn-Right) bindings, and a quick Ctrl-H, K (also known as describe-key) reveals that keys are coming in as <kp-home> and <kp-end>

  (define-key global-map [C-kp-home] 'beginning-of-buffer)
  (define-key global-map [C-kp-end]  'end-of-buffer)

Next is to set up some sort of delete-right key, because I'm used to having both a backspace and a delete key on my other keyboards. Again, Ctrl-H, K reveals that the raw backspace key is giving <backspace>, and Fn-backspace is giving <kp-delete>, so in goes:

  (define-key global-map [kp-delete] 'delete-char)

At the moment, I'm still not sure whether I'm going to want the Apple/command key or the Alt key as the Emacs meta key, so I'm still bouncing between (setq mac-command-key-is-meta 't) and (setq mac-command-key-is-meta nil).

Finally for today's keyboard tweaking, I need a way of switching between insert and overwrite mode—you know, the thing which that handy key labelled "Insert" does. For the moment, I'm going to hijack the key just to the right of the right-hand command key, which Emacs tells me is <kp-enter>:

  (define-key global-map [kp-enter] 'overwrite-mode)

Now I need a way of putting all of this stuff inside a conditional, so that I can use the same .emacs across all my different machines. Looks like system-configuration is the right thing to look at—on the Powerbook it's coming out as "powerpc-apple-darwin7.4.0" (whereas my Linux box gives "i386-redhat-linux-gnu"). So

  (setq on-mac (string-match "powerpc-apple" system-configuration))

seems to do the trick.

Should Just Work

2005-04-03T17:50:00.000+01:00

Worked on getting a few more of my old projects up and running. The xytools 2.4.5 plotting utilities from James Theiler (that I've been using for 10 years now) just compiled and worked, as did the Saxon XSLT processor (since it's in the form of a Java jar file and the Powerbook comes with Java support) that I've used for the odd XML experiment.

These aren't the permissions you're looking for

2005-04-02T17:50:00.000+01:00

A little more tweaking of the setup; I'm used to using the F-keys to do various things in Emacs, so I changed the default configuration (where they adjust volume, brightness etc) to need the Fn key to be pressed too (System Preferences, Keyboard, check "Use the F1-F12 keys for custom actions"). I also tweaked the Exposé settings to just do things with F11 and F12 (not F9-F11), and to add the top-right and bottom-right mouse corners as triggers too. (System Preferences, Exposé )

I've also been going through the files I transferred across from my Linux box and correcting the permissions. Because I did the transfer via a USB drive, basically everything ended up with mode -rwxrwxrwx, so I needed to get rid of the execute bit on regular files that weren't scripts, and to get rid of write permission on any RCS/*,v files and their corresponding workfiles.

This isn't that exciting, except that it revealed a feature of the filesystem that I hadn't realized—there's an extra layer of permissioning on top of the normal Unix modes. Even as root (which I enabled via Applications, Utilities, NetInfo Manager, Security, Enable Root User) I'd get:

  % chmod -x file
  chmod: file: operation not permitted

This is because the file has been locked, which is visible (and alterable) in the Finder file Info window. The chflags uchg file and

chflags
nouchg file

commands lock and unlock files from the command line respectively. I've still no idea why some (and there seemed no pattern as to which) of the transferred files ended up locked but most didn't.

Standards are great; there's so many of them to choose from

2005-04-01T17:49:00.000+01:00

Ah, the joys of media formats. The QuickTime client included with MacOSX doesn't cover all of the panoply of different video formats I seem to have lying around on my disk (some of which are admittedly of, er, dubious provenance) so I've had a frenzy of installing different video clients:

Miss Direction

2005-03-27T17:47:00.000+01:00

Shuffled things around on the disk a bit more; specifically, moved the MP3 files out of my home directory (to /MP3 to be precise). This illustrated a neat feature of the Mac filesystem—iTunes could still find all of the files, without having to re-import them. Presumably the Finder keeps track with some kind of redirection feature, although I can't see evidence of this at the Unix command prompt level.

I've also got my Palm handheld syncing to the Powerbook; just installing the software that came with the handheld worked OK, but to get it to sync with the MacOS iCal and AddressBook programs, I also needed to download iSync and the iSync Palm conduit

Next up for getting things installed is another installer package, this time the Fink 0.7.1 package management utilities plus a Mac GUI wrapper called FinkCommander 0.5.3 for them. Fink seems to install stuff under /sw. Once that was on board, the key packages I was after were the guile and clisp-maxima packages, so that I could get some old projects up and running again (hence the installation of clisp-maxima rather than clisp, although I did need to ln -s /sw/bin/clisp-maxima /sw/bin/clisp). With the package dependencies, I ended up with 31 packages installed via Fink, and I needed to add -I/sw/include to my makefiles.

I also got fed up of only having a terminal version of Emacs available, so I downloaded a Mac GUI version 21.3.50.1. The main problem that I've had with this so far is that the emacsserver/emacsclient stuff isn't working.

Where did I put that key?

2005-03-26T17:00:00.000Z

The MP3 files finished transferring overnight, so I've imported them into iTunes. The default setup would make copies of the file (in ~/Music/iTunes), but that can be turned off (iTunes, Preferences, Advanced, clear "Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library").

The other brief puzzle that needed a quick google to sort out was how to get a hash mark from the keyboard ("hash"/UK = "pound"/US = "octothorp"/pedantic). The "UK" keyboard on the machine isn't really a proper UK keyboard—it's basically a US keyboard with an English pound sign where the hash would be (shift-3). For example, shift-2 gives @ and the double quote key is on shift-single quote (at the right hand side of the keyboard). Anyway, the secret is Alt-3.

Overall, I think it's going to take me a while to get used to a completely different keyboard. Not having the Control key in the bottom left is odd, and I've still not found an equivalent of the Delete and Insert keys.

The other slightly worrying aspect of the keyboard is that the Control and Fn keys seem to catch occasionally; I'll have to keep an eye on that and see if it persists.

Also started in on installing a bunch of extra things.

the X11 package that didn't seem to be on the DVD
an X11 (v1.1.2) and a native MacOSX (1.1 release candidate) version of OpenOffice, so I can look at the files from the Windows box that are in MS Office formats
Firefox 1.0.2
Thunderbird 1.0.2
the X11 version of the Gimp v2.2.3

Getting TeX set up was the next task. The first step was to install an installer, namely i-Installer 2.69.0; with this installed, I could pull down a bunch of things from "Gerben's i-Directory @ TUG" (which seems to be http://tug.org/i-packages/iid/gwrelative.iid):

tex (with the full, 2004 stable variant)
xfig and its dependency Xaw3d
ghostscript-8
gv
ImageMagick and its dependencies libwmf and freetype2

This set up the teTeX distribution under /usr/local/teTeX, and basically worked immediately. The only wrinkle I had to tweak by hand was the installation of a font of my own, which involved:

  cd /usr/local/teTeX/share/texmf.tetex/fonts/source/public
  ln -s /Users/dmd/text/dmdbb
  cd /usr/local/teTeX/share/texmf.tetex
  vi ls-R

and adding the dmdbb directory into that file.

New toy

2005-03-25T00:00:00.000Z

Well, I could resist no longer. I trundled along to the Apple store on Regent Street and bought myself a 15" Powerbook with all the trimmings. I didn't actually want the enhanced graphics card, but the retail operation didn't carry all the possible permutations and I definitely wanted the version with the bigger (100Gb) hard disk and extra (1Gb) memory. The extended warranty is insanely expensive, but there's not really any choice—knowing my luck with such things, if I risked it and didn't get the warranty, the machine would pack up at precisely 13 months old.

Anyway, I've decided to keep some sort of track of what I'm installing and configuring on the machine to make it comfortable for me as a long-time Linux user. The main point of this is that if I have to start again from scratch for some reason, the whole process will be easier to repeat; however, there's a chance that some nugget of information here might be useful for somebody else in a similar situation.

The initial setup seemed pretty smooth, and I transferred across all of the files from my Windows box and my Linux box. Transferring the MP3 collection took a little longer, though—35Gb takes a while to move over a 10Mb LAN—so I left that running overnight.

The first thing I installed was the Xcode package package from the OS DVD-ROM that came with the machine, in preparation for some development activity.

Paranormal in Origin

Time Machine Restore

Crash!

From Firefox to Safari

ML-2250 Printer Problems

Finder hang

c++filt, aka cxxfilt

GraphicConverter 6.0.1

Filesharing fixed

Filesharing problems

Apache setup

Fortran and c++filt

X11 in the Dock

Getting rid of .dSYM/ directories

dvips and relative paths

gv and libXaw3d

Turning off the Spotlight

Upgrading from 10.3.9 to 10.5 (Leopard)

System Failure

Tidying up "Open With"

Keyboard Shortcuts

Django

MySQLdb

PUSH: Python 2.5

POP: Back to MySQLdb

Django

Round Three: Return to Plan A

Round Two: The Unhappy in Pursuit of the Unavailable

Round One: Lying scum

Thanks for (half of) the memory

MathML: the Revenge

Kernel panic

Web CVS viewing

Airport keychain problems

Groups

Who's That File

Broken wireless

Wiki

And back to intel

Bugzilla mail

Bugzilla 2.18.4

Booklet printing

Samsung ML-2250

fatfind

Another victim^H^H^H^Hconvert

Windows, windows everywhere, and all the boards did shrink

X marks the spot

Shafted again

Thunderbirds Are Go

Toothing problems

Palm DBs

PalmOS

MathML

Servlets and Applets

10.3.9

Stat none, perl one

Breadcrumb Trail

Finding the --work-properly option

Escape Meta Alt Control Shift (Command Option)

More lost keys

Should Just Work

These aren't the permissions you're looking for

Standards are great; there's so many of them to choose from

Miss Direction

Where did I put that key?

New toy

Should Just Work