Intel in a PPC world
Well, I am mostly converted over. There are a couple of apps I use that don’t have Intel/Universal binaries yet. One is X-Chat Aqua and the other is eSVN. Both are ports of *nix applications. X-Chat is a full port to Cocoa. eSVN uses the QT toolkit.
The other frustration was fink. My PPC coworker uses it daily. I am not so lucky yet. Gentoo’s packages are for PPC also.
MySQL has presented a challenge as well. We are still using 4.0 on our servers. There are some backwards compatibility issues that are keeping us at 4.0. MySQL has a nice Mac package. But, because 4.0 is not a current release, they only offer PPC binaries. So, I will have to build it myself to get 4.0. I have been working around the problems for now and using 4.1. Maybe this is a good time to bite the bullet and change our code to support 4.1+.
Technorati Tags: apple, intel, irc, mac, macbook, mysql, svn
Color Picker
When I was on Linux, I used a tool called KColorEdit. It was a standalone color picker that was part of KDE. It would allow me to input a hex color code, adjust via RGB or via HSV (Hue, Saturation and Value).
I was dismayed when I starting looking for a Mac equivalent. Most things I found fit one of two categories. They were either a plugin for something else or they were a “web safe” color picker. Now, sure many of the latter were old, but some were not. Web safe colors are so 1998.
I enlisted the help of some Mac friends. They pointed me here and there. I found a nice trial-ware application called Color Schemer. But, its $50. All I need is a color picker. They do have a cool web page though that lets you do some color matching.
Along the way, I also found a hex plugin for the Mac OS X color picker from Lucky Software. But, there seemed to be no way to invoke this from within jEdit.
Then, a buddy found this post on MacOSXHints. It describes how to make the OS X color picker into an application. W00T!!
Thanks Finney.
Technorati Tags: apple, html, mac, macbook, os-x, applescript
iSight and my hat
Networking works
Windows networking is a little mysterious. Sometimes, you just have to reboot the machine no matter what control panel or even command line stuff you try.
Linux is much more geeky. But, you have awesome control. You know exactly what is going on.
However, on my Mac, you just don’t worry about it. The wireless works, I changed the static IP on my router for the Mac today. I use one local IP here so I can route stuff in and out of the network for my development. I then with to the Network Preferences to refresh my DHCP lease. Well, crap, its already updated. And, I never lost connection to IRC, IM, email, anything. This is the kind of thing that made me swtich.
Power cord woes
When I saw the power cord connector in the keynote, I thought it was cool. After having one, I don’t like it. It comes unplugged all the time. My Mac regularly warns me that I am on reserve battery power. I look down and the cord has come unplugged.
On a related note, having all the connectors on the sides is inconvenient too. When I sit with my MacBook, I regularly sit with my legs crossed. The connectors on the side hit my legs. This of course knocks the power connector out. I am afraid I am going to damage the USB port.
Maybe I will get used to it.
Fink + Intel = huh?
Coming from Gentoo Linux, I was quite used to a good package manager for system tools. I had heard good things about fink. So, I grabbed the package from their site and installed it. That seemed to go just fine. The first thing I wanted was wget. wget is a great command line tool for downloading files. Its especially useful when you are already in the shell. The install of wget failed. (I did later discover that curl is on the system.) At first it was problems with compiling (see below). I got the compile issues worked out. It still failed. I got an error complaining that the package was for ppc and the target was i386 or something along those lines. I started digging around on the fink site and Google and discovered that fink is not quite ready for the Intel Macs. I had to compile it from scrap (as they call it, boostrap). No biggie, I was used to that. This process took a while. But, after that, it still will not install stuff. fink now reports that it can not find a package for wget. WTF?!?! I am kind of stuck on fink now. I could dig more, but one of my goals for moving to the Mac was to get away from fighting with command line stuff all the time.
If anyone is running fink on Intel Macs with success, please let me know.
Trouble in the terminal
So, today was the day I started working on getting my development environment up and running. I needed to install Apache, PHP, MySQL and memcached. MySQL was a breeze. I just used the prebuilt package from mysql.com. The others were a whole other story.
We run a pretty customized setup for Apache and PHP. My coworker that has been on the Mac for almost two years advised me to install them from scratch and to ignore the versions already on the system. Compiling on the Mac was not as easy as on Linux. I had installed XCode, but something was not right still. I was getting linker errors when I tried to configure Apache. Had trouble with fink too, but I will post that in the next story.
So, I spent a good part of the day hunting all over the internet. The answer that kept coming up was to install XCode. I had done that and starting the installer showed all the default checked packages would be “upgrades” meaning they were already installed. Finally, I just started the XCode installer and checked every box, 2.2GB of stuff. Something in there did the trick.
The other thing that slowed me dow was having to adjust to the BSD way of things. Things did not install where I was used to them being. apachectl was in sbin for example. On Linux, it goes into bin. Those are no big deals. I will have scripts to start and stop my whole dev environment.
At the end of the day, I got it all working. Luckily, this was a one time annoyance. My annoyance with Linux had become day to day.
Phorum 5.2 Template
As Thomas has said, we have started working on 5.2. I had wanted to redo the template for 5.1, but by the time that came up on the list, there was so much already done to the code, I did not want to hold it back. I know some of you went to a lot of trouble to change your 5.0 templates to work with 5.1. Keep in mind that 5.2 may very well be a year or more off in the future. We don’t release major changes as stable on a whim.
For those that want to keep up with the new template, you can see it at http://dev.phorum.org/phorum5-dev/. Keep in mind that some or all of it could be broken at any given time.
(Originally posted on the Phorum web site)
Mouse Tracking
I have had some trouble getting used to the mouse in Mac OS X. Both windows and Linux offer two settings for mouse movement, speed and acceleration. OS X only offers Tracking Speed. It seems to be a combination of the two. I am sure I will get used to it, but for now, its a bit difficult to get used to.
Blogging from my Dashboard
Cool, there is a Blogger Dashboard widget. That makes updating the blog from the Mac even easier.
