Hugo’s blog

For the past three weeks, our Mac mini, whose sole purpose in life is to run iTunes – to share music in the house – and Vine Server – because it’s headless –, had been crashing after less than 24 hours of being up. It would just stop responding to anything except to pings, and I would not be able to SSH nor VNC into it.

Nothing was showing up in the logs, and plugging in a monitor and a keyboard did not help getting more information. I didn’t remember doing any change to the system except applying the software upgrades from Apple.

As it’s a first generation one (as a matter of fact, bought on 22 January 2005, the day they were released), I wondered if it was time to invest into a new computer.

After running a full hardware test that turned up nothing abnormal, I decided to give it a last chance by reinstalling it. So I took my Panther CD (yes, remember, before Leopard, there was Tiger, and before Tiger, there was Leopard), and spent a couple of hours reinstalling the system from scratch.

The result is a much faster system, and it’s been up for almost 3 days now!

mini:~ hugo$ uptime
21:28 up 2 days, 22:42, 2 users, load averages: 0.07 0.02 0.01

So, just like Windows, OS X needs to be reinstalled, sometimes. But it’s not every few months, it’s about every 3 years.

While I was trying to have my Mac talk to the Internet over Bluetooth using my Treo 650, I experienced what I’ll call a Grayed Screen Of Death:

The reboot showed a nice kernel trace, that I sent to Apple.

It looks like Apple has copied Windows’s BSOD.

Ca y est, je suis finalement arrivé à configurer mon Mac pour utiliser mon Treo 650 via Bluetooth comme accès Internet avec Orange France. Ça a été beaucoup moins automatique qu’avec mon SonyEricsson T610, mais en suivant les excellentes instructions de captnswing.net et en utilisant orange comme APN, nom d’utilisateur et mot de passe, ça marche !

I have Java 5 installed on my Mac, but I couldn’t figure out how to use it.

Trying to figure out what /usr/bin/java is, I got:

hugo@Oompa-Loompa ~% ls -l /usr/bin/java
lrwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel  57B Nov 23 13:03 /usr/bin/java@ -> /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Commands/java

hugo@Oompa-Loompa /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Commands% ./java -version
java version "1.4.2_09"
Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.4.2_09-232)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.4.2-54, mixed mode)

hugo@Oompa-Loompa ~% ls -l /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework
total 56
lrwxr-xr-x    1 root  wheel  27B Nov 23 13:03 Classes@ -> Versions/CurrentJDK/Classes
lrwxr-xr-x    1 root  wheel  28B Nov 23 13:03 Commands@ -> Versions/CurrentJDK/Commands
lrwxr-xr-x    1 root  wheel  24B Nov 24 00:08 Headers@ -> Versions/Current/Headers
lrwxr-xr-x    1 root  wheel  24B Nov 23 13:03 Home@ -> Versions/CurrentJDK/Home
lrwxr-xr-x    1 root  wheel  23B Nov 23 15:49 JavaVM@ -> Versions/Current/JavaVM
lrwxr-xr-x    1 root  wheel  29B Nov 23 13:03 Libraries@ -> Versions/CurrentJDK/Libraries
lrwxr-xr-x    1 root  wheel  26B Nov 23 15:49 Resources@ -> Versions/Current/Resources
drwxr-xr-x   13 root  wheel  442B Feb 16 18:24 Versions/

hugo@Oompa-Loompa ~% ls -l /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions
lrwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel   5B Nov 23 15:49 1.3@ -> 1.3.1
drwxr-xr-x   8 root  wheel  272B Jun  9  2005 1.3.1/
lrwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel   5B Nov 23 13:03 1.4@ -> 1.4.2
drwxr-xr-x   8 root  wheel  272B Jun  9  2005 1.4.2/
lrwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel   5B Nov 23 15:49 1.5@ -> 1.5.0
drwxr-xr-x   8 root  wheel  272B Nov 23 15:49 1.5.0/
drwxr-xr-x   6 root  wheel  204B Feb 15 08:05 A/
lrwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel   1B Nov 23 15:49 Current@ -> A
lrwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel   5B Nov 23 13:03 CurrentJDK@ -> 1.4.2

A here is therefore version 1.4.2_09, and I wanted to use 1.5.
So I ended up doing something ugly:

hugo@Oompa-Loompa /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions% sudo mv Current Current.DIST
hugo@Oompa-Loompa /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions% sudo mv CurrentJDK CurrentJDK.DIST
hugo@Oompa-Loompa /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions% sudo ln -s 1.5 Current
hugo@Oompa-Loompa /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions% sudo ln -s 1.5 CurrentJDK

And behold:

hugo@Oompa-Loompa ~% java -version
java version "1.5.0_05"
Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.5.0_05-83)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.5.0_05-48, mixed mode, sharing)

I can already hear Mac people scream.

This is what happens when you let a Unix geek play with a Mac. I bet there was a better way to do that, but who knows how. I’ll have to watch out for things breaking in the Java world now.

About 6 months ago, I switched from Linux to OS X on my laptop. I had the feeling of betraying the Linux and open-source community when doing that, but I have to say that I’m pretty happy about the change.

With my PowerBook, things work, without me doing anything:

• If I close the lid, the machine suspends, and when I open it, it’s back.
• If I turn on my airport, it finds the networks very nicely, I click and I’m connected.
• If I plug a USB device in, it usually is immediately usable (e.g. a printer, or a pen tablet).
• If I need to print on the network, I’ll easily find the printer from the print window, click OK, and will be on my way to get your printed sheets.
• If I need some extra piece of open-source software, DarwinPorts usually has it for me.
• It never crashes and I never reboot other than for OS upgrades (and QuickTime upgrades, actually, for some reason).

When I compare this with how long it took me to have my built-in wireless working in my Compaq, ACPI sleep and software suspend which were randomly working at each new version of the kernel, I really can say that my Mac has made my life easier.

And because it’s a Unix machine, it took me only a couple of days to feel at ease with it, and I still read my mail with Mutt and OfflineIMAP, etc.

I’m sure people will say that if you choose the right laptop, things work out of the box, and that Gnome and KDE do all this. The truth is that, in my experience, it’s true to a certain point, but there’s always a point where you need to go and patch your kernel, look for some exotic driver for your modem. I never had a laptop with all its features working under Linux before at least a year of use, which is frustrating when you have a cool new laptop.
Of course, not everything is perfect:

• Palm’s Palm Desktop is actually not as good as JPilot, and I haven’t gotten through the pain to setting jpilot and pilot-link up.
• While it took me about 2 minutes at the back of a cab to be connected to the Internet over Bluetooth using my Sony-Ericsson T610 phone, I still haven’t managed to connect using my Treo 650, despite spending at least a couple of hours on it. I’m frustrated, as now, I’m really expecting things to just work.
• FVWM let me do whatever I wanted, and the OS X interface doesn’t: for example, focusing on a window brings it to the front, but I unhappily got used to that.
• The machine is slow compared to a PC laptop, but I think that the Intel-based Mac laptops will change that.
• DarwinPorts is cool, but is not as cool as Debian’s apt-get, and things have to be compiled from source. Fink uses Debian’s apt-get and binary packages, but is way out of date (e.g. their version of Mutt is 1.3.25).
• I had problems with the hardware after 1.5 months of use.

All in all, though, I’m happy about the switch. I saved a lot of time as things work out of the box. The PowerBook is not perfect, but it does its job pretty well for my use. And I’m of course still running Linux on my desktop which works like a charm.

Ever since I started using it, I thought that KDE was hella cool. And it looks like KDE 4 will support OS X Dashboard Widgets. It seems that KDE is always adding cool stuff.

I’m not a fan of the canvas tag, but there’s quite a few cool widgets, so I think that it’s a good news. And since KDE has SVG support, maybe that will bring SVG to the world of widgets!

I haven’t made any progress in making it customizable, but I have made some progress to make Chheckmail look better, or at least look less weird next to other nice looking widget. Well, it could be argued that it looks more weird now:

So I now use a Mac. But that doesn’t mean I’m not a Unix person anymore. Far from it. I don’t use Mail.app to read my mail for example. I still use Mutt which does exactly what I want to, and I still use OfflineIMAP for synchronizing my folders in a maildir format. And it works fine. Even better than fine.

But that led to the following problem: I couldn’t find a program to let me know if I had new mail in my maildir folders. On my Linux desktop, I use WMBiff, but I guess that there aren’t a lot of weirdos using maildir format under OSX.

So I decided to write my own, and I wanted to play around with widgets, so I wrote Chheckmail which currently only checks maildir (because that’s all I use anyway).

It’s ugly: I haven’t figured out how the geometry of a widget works, and I’m terrible at graphics.

Everything is hardcoded: I haven’t looked into how to handle preferences either, but I’m my only customer AFAIK, so editing a JavaScript file isn’t that constraining.

Depending on whether I get feedback and whether I spend more time on this, I’ll make it available publicly. It’s not that I’m ashamed of the code at this point, it’s just that it’s not userfriendly at all, nor is it documented.

Useful tip: when developing a dashboard widget, the console output shows errors. Useful to know.

The cool thing with a Mac is that everything is easy to do. Except when you don’t want to do it the way the OS wants you to.

This is the case with my iPod. I ripped my CDs on my Linux desktop, and I copy my music on my iPod from it using gtkpod. Now, I’d occasionnally like to copy audio files on my iPod while I’m on the road, e.g. podcasts.

The problem is that iTunes wants to associate my iPod to it, which roughly means take complete control of it. And step 1 is to erase its content and start from scratch. I’d really like to be able to have the equivalent of gtkpod on the Mac.

I thought gnupod would do the trick for me. However, when I installed the podcast, it claimed it was there, but I still haven’t figured out where on my iPod!

hugo@Oompa-Loompa ~/src/gnupod-0.98.3% gnupod_search.pl -a Europe
gnupod_search.pl Version 0.98.3 (C) Adrian Ulrich
ID  |ARTIST                          |ALBUM                           |TITLE
========================================================================================================
1   |Europe1.fr                      |Europe 1 - Actualité et divertissement|Actualité et divertissement 13/12/2005 18H45

iPodDisk doesn’t see it more than I do, and a gnupod check seems pretty confident that everything is OK:

hugo@Oompa-Loompa ~/src/gnupod-0.98.3% gnupod_check.pl
gnupod_check.pl Version 0.98.3 (C) Adrian Ulrich
Pass 1: Checking Files in the GNUtunesDB.xml...
Pass 2: Checking Files on the iPod...
..finished

  Total Playtime : 254 h
  Space used     : 18.41 GB
  iPod files     : 3449
  GNUpod files   : 3449
 -> Everything is fine  

Mr Podcast, where are you?

Update: It turns out that after all my investigation, I discovered that iTunes is happily showing all my songs and I can copy a PodCast happily. So what was that earlier message about associating my iPod with it then? I’m very confused. Or did gnupod or iPodDisk did something magical? Well, it seems to be working the way I wanted to, somehow.

Update 2:Yamipod seems like a good alternative to iTunes, and happily sees the content of my iPod. On top of it, it has a cool function to remove duplicated tracks (for some reason, I always end up with a fow duplicates, and I don’t quite know how.