Within Reason: Category Apple

hagui on Mac OS X

Ceri Davies — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 22:16:00 +0000

VCS’ hagui is basically pointless, but I do like a live diagram of what’s going on when I’m creating new service groups. I also like my Mac, so here’s the quick how-to on getting it working on the Mac.

Extract the VRTScscm package from the install media, and copy it somewhere permanent. I’m using my home directory.

   $ gzip -dc VRTScscm.tar.gz | (cd /tmp; tar xf -)
   $ mv /tmp/VRTScscm/reloc/opt ${HOME}

Fix the VCS_HOME and JAVA_HOME variables in the hagui script.

   VCS_HOME="${HOME}/opt/VRTSvcs"
   JAVA_HOME=/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/CurrentJDK/Home

I create a symlink for convenience.

   $ ln -s ../opt/VRTSvcs/bin/hagui ${HOME}/bin

Job’s done. While you’re here, this is the best video on YouTube, JFYI.

Mirror, mirror...

Ceri Davies — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 19:49:00 +0000

Now that’s funny.

Gone to the bad

Ceri Davies — Fri, 17 Feb 2006 20:54:00 +0000

There has been a lot of complaining done about problems with Apple’s Mail.app.

The major annoyances with it for me have been its utter refusal to mark messages as read or to retrieve addresses from our LDAP servers reliably. Since we have a site-wide license for Office, I decided to try Entourage.

Yes, it’s from Microsoft. The secret is this though: on Mac OS X, Office isn’t really, really shit and annoying.

Entourage basically does everything that I want; it has sensible defaults with respect to top-posting (and not doing it) and text formats (plain by default), and can actually mark a message as read once I have read it. LDAP stuff works too.

It did manage to mangle my signature, but that was imported from Mail.app so I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt there.

What happened to December?

Ceri Davies — Wed, 28 Dec 2005 13:16:00 +0000

First things first, we have a privacy policy now. Google Analytics insists that you have one in order to use the service, and since it is the lowest maintenance tool for creating inane and useless statistics, I am using it.

I managed to park in front of my house, whereupon someone drove a skip truck into my car (and yes, my number plate says GNU on it — call it coincidence). My insurer, Sainsbury’s, have been pretty good.

After discussion on hackers@, the crunchgen patch got committed. On a related note, had some discussion with Adrian and Philip Paeps about pivot_root(), which is a system call which switches the root mountpoint with another mountpoint. Seems that what we want is rather different to the Linux syscall of the same name. Adrian’s idea was to reuse the devfs_fixup() code, but I’m under the impression that this gets away with murder by virtue of there being no userland processes running while it is doing the business. More thought required…

I received a nice PowerBook from work, thanks. I still need a new i386 laptop, but my budget isn’t going to stretch to one this year unless Yonah does crazy things to prices.

In that vein, I finally caught up with this century and got a USB stick. Can maybe get to work on that GELI/kenv stuff now.

Christmas was good, although I haven’t been nearly drunk enough due to a cold that I just cannot get rid of. Six days left before we have to go back to work though ;-)

Quick roundup

Ceri Davies — Sun, 04 Dec 2005 12:19:00 +0000

Adrian Steinmann and I knocked the crunchgen(1) patch into submission; it’s now available for testing. All pre-existing configuration files should produce the same code — only use of the new libs_so keyword should make a difference. We’re looking at a 6 week MFC period or so.

I can’t mail Marius Nünnerich for some reason, so if you know him, let him know that his patch doesn’t work on the FreeBSD cluster; use bytes doesn’t exist in Perl 5.00503. I suspect that we can just get away without it.

I finally managed to buildworld after about 6 weeks; took a make installincludes and a make install in lib/libmemstat for some reason; I must have screwed something up somewhere. I can start work on some of that kernel side stuff I mentioned, though I don’t really have a test machine :-/

On which note, I’ve decided on a laptop that I want but I don’t think that December is the best time of year to be buying. I’m expecting the usual raft of price drops in the new year, and if the rumour about Apple based Intel laptops coming in January turns out to be true, I may be better off with one of them (assuming that it will run Windows too — that’s the real clincher here).

Sun released practically their entire Enterprise suite as free (as in beer, for now). This means that the Java Availability Suite which, despite the crappy name, is Sun Cluster and some other tools is now free, and so is the Grid Engine. The Grid Engine supports a whole bunch of operating systems and is a much better candidate for a compile farm than I thought Condor was. I strongly suspect that the Linux bits will work fine on FreeBSD too. I’ll be firing up the old Netra for a fiddle when these downloads finish; Stef will be pleased — I suppose it will save on heating.

Just Another Victim Of The Ambient Morality

Ceri Davies — Thu, 28 Apr 2005 19:40:00 +0000

Quick braindump:

Heard about these crazy “pro-life” pharmacists on Radio 4 last night. Arrogant pro-life-the-way-I-say-so idiots.
Tiger is released tomorrow, and since this is a blog I have to list the new features I think might actually be useful:
- Xgrid: apparently it’s absurdly easy to cluster Macs now. Xcode’s distributed compilation was neat, but this looks great (proviso the lack of documentation today; we’ll see tomorrow)
- Inkwell: I shyed away from tablets because they looked like a pain in ass to use. No longer
- Xcode 2.0: Remote debugging looks nice
That’s pretty much all. I’m sure that the other enhancements are great, but I won’t be rushing out to buy it on the strength of this.
Buying a house == PITA (yes, still)
Where is FreeBSD 5.4-RELEASE? Well, there is a networking regression that needs working out. We have a pretty lengthy list of new features too. There’s an upgrade I can recommend.

Update: The aforementioned bug has been fixed, and FreeBSD 5.4-RELEASE should be unleashed on May 9th.

Not Invented Here

Ceri Davies — Mon, 07 Feb 2005 21:22:00 +0000

Mostly for my own benefit, here is a list of the (non-base) applications I’ve found most useful on the Mac this week, along with where to get them.

Virtue: Virtual Desktop manager for MacOS X (which I’m a little disappointed isn’t standard, but then it may be confusing for Gran). I’ve made a little .mov format film of it working (QuickTime is not the POS that it is on Windows either)
GPGMail: A dirty hack to get GPG integrated into Apple’s Mail.app
Believe it or not, iTunes. I don’t even have an iPod, and this still outshines everything similar
Firefox. Whatever.

Not a long list, but it hasn’t been a week yet.

I’ve been through a huge amount of shit too; it’s good to know that the spirit of Open Source is not dead. The nice thing about MacOS X seems to be that you can put a GUI round anything (let’s say chown(8), for example) and release it as ShareWare. This time next year, we’ll all be millionaires!

Recent Convert

Ceri Davies — Mon, 31 Jan 2005 21:02:00 +0000

Have been listening to the new Lemon Jelly album pretty much non-stop for the last two days. It’s doing wonders for my general mood and I’m enjoying it, but I can’t help thinking that it does sound a bit like just another Ministry of Sound compilation. My final word will probably come when I see them on tour next month.

My Mac mini arrived today as well, and it’s enough to say that I’m pretty much sold. I’ve finally found a mailer that isn’t Mutt that looks vaguely useful, and it’s got a GUI too (so no more questions from brian and paul about whether I’ve ever heard of X Window). Xcode looks decent enough, and the other applications are eminently usable. There should be an X server on here somewhere, so I can continue to do everything from this one machine. Oh, and DVD playback works.

Bring on the accusations of homosexuality.

Big Sexy Beast

Ceri Davies — Mon, 31 Jan 2005 21:01:00 +0000

Having finally agreed with Bill Palmer on something - not buying a G4 powerbook - Apple have pulled out the big guns.

I’m still not getting one, but I’m sorely tempted; with the 7% discount I get from work, the prices are almost too tempting. Luckily for me, I still can’t afford them - sorry Apple.

FreeBSD from Berkeley

Ceri Davies — Sat, 15 Jan 2005 22:40:00 +0000

I downloaded the ”Mac OS X for UNIX users Technology Brief” from the UNIX developer section of Apple’s site, as I’ve ordered a Mac mini and wanted to work out how it will fit into the ”infrastructure” here.

I was a bit annoyed to discover that it states on Page 3 that FreeBSD is “developed at the University of California, Berkeley”. Note passed to Apple via the contact link; let’s see what happens.

Update: January 18th, 2005

Apple responded and have “forwarded this information to the appropriate team for their review”.