peteg's blog - hacking - mac

I've been very happy with VMware's Fusion product since their public beta a few years ago, using it mainly to run a Debian instance for Haskell hacking, and Windows for doing my tax. Recently the slow HGFS performance has been a drag while hacking ikiwiki, as git seems to take ages to perform a commit on my Mac home directory mounted under Debian. Fortunately, the unreasonably cheap upgrade to Fusion 3 yields a massive speedup.

Hmm, perhaps I spoke too soon. It seems a bit buggy: HGFS doesn't seem to cope with colons in filenames, of which there are many in the ikiwiki bugs directory.

I had my first encounter with an Apple "Genius Bar" today, having been referred to the one on George St in Sydney by the always-helpful staff at CompNOW at UNSW. In brief, the power adaptor for my MacBook was getting dangerous, with the insulation on the wire between the box and the computer wearing through, and sometimes getting quite warm. Apparently these things are known fire hazards.

The genii require booking, and I think I got the final one of the week: 4:45pm on this, a Sunday, afternoon. The machine is still under an AppleCare warranty, so the bloke replaced it on the spot. The CompNOW people said it would take them three to four days to do the same thing, as they had no stock, and moreover would need to hang onto my adaptor for that time.

Last Friday I decided to get the MacBook's case fixed again — due to a design flaw the top keyboard panel tends to crack in the bottom right corner. This is probably related to how I carry it around in a backpack. They also replaced (at least) the caps on the keyboard, which are perhaps a part of the same assembly (?).

I also took the opportunity to buy a copy of Snow Leopard from the pushers at CompNOW on the UNSW campus, thinking my poor little MacBook could benefit from the decreased memory pressure. In brief:

• Faster? Well, maybe. Certainly shinier.
• GHC is broken, but the fix is in: add -optc-m32 -opta-m32 -optl-m32 to the GHC driver script or wait for the imminent arrival of a new version.
• Isabelle survived just fine.
• MacPorts broke, as it always does.

I'm slow: a new Carbon Emacs has been out for a month.

That's a first, a Mac OS X update that screwed things up so badly the MacBook ceased to function. Oh well, I now know where an Apple store is in Hồ Chí Minh City; I went to:

Thuan My Co. Ltd - Apple Authorised Reseller
98 Nguyễn Công Trứ, District 1, Hồ Chí Minh City.
Tel: 84 8 8218936, 8218937
Fax: 84 8 8218937
Email: thuanmy-sales@hcm.fpt.vn

and tried to buy a copy, nay a licence, of Leopard. I'll spare you that story. The "update" function failed to work any magic (or didn't like the cafés I went to), but the "archive and install" thing did the trick. I get the impression that some database in my old 10.4 installation got trashed.

Here are some fix-ups for Leopard from around the net (sorry for the lack of attribution). Let's fix the Dock (make it look more like Tiger's):

defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES
killall Dock

and the transparent menubar (cut and paste this line, then — eek! — reboot):

sudo defaults write /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.WindowServer 'EnvironmentVariables' -dict 'CI_NO_BACKGROUND_IMAGE' 0.63

Time machine claims to have done something but I haven't tried to use it yet. Spaces is clunkier than I'd expect; using an app that sprays windows around like Finder and expecting some kind of mid-90s "raise" functionality is apparently asking too much. The wifi widget on the menubar finally works like what every user of open networks wants it to. Worth the money? Probably not, but heh, anything to get the MacBook back on its feet. That's the last time I travel without a Mac OS X DVD.

This whole Unicode fiasco has finally killed X11 as a viable option for me. I wouldn't have thought it was so very hard to provide a complete set of easily-usable Unicode fonts, but there it is.

So, on André's advice, I've switched to:

• Aquamacs, GNU Emacs with a shiny-happy Mac OS X face. Apart from a lot of minor irritations that come with losing about a decade's worth of XEmacs configuration, it seems quite slick. I tried Carbon XEmacs but it doesn't support Unicode out of the box, and I refuse to spend (more) hours fiddling with it.

• Terminator, an xterm-alike written in Java, is possibly the best thing ever to run on the JVM.

• A new bash from MacPorts that speaks Unicode better than the crusty old one that comes with Mac OS X 10.4.x.

Of course I'll still need X11 for sundry old-school things like Isabelle, but there the pain is much less.

So, why Aquamacs rather than a fancy closed-source editor? Well, TextMate crashed on me after about twenty minutes of use — I tried to open a file while saving-as another one, and was madly switching programs trying to navigate the directory tree — and so I recall the cardinal rule of editors: anything less than twenty years old hasn't been tested enough. Whether the (relatively shallow) differences that Aquamacs has to GNU Emacs matter is something I will soon discover.

This thing is magic: one can readily write a little script to (in my case) copy images from iPhoto into a Blosxom-friendly location, and output the requisite tags.

• Unplugging the headphones makes it pause. Perhaps all iPods do this, but my iRiver didn't.
• The control is much better designed than my old iRiver.

• Some audible warning that it's out of juice. The little all-purpose LED glows red, I think, and that's that.
• A way to delete songs on the player itself, so I can fill it up with random crap and on-the-spot nuke the annoying stuff, rather than having to tediously go through it afterwards in iTunes at home.

• The dinky dock. My old iRiver had a standard mini-USB port, which happened to be the same as my Canon PowerShot A75. One cable was all I needed. Moreover I have no way to recharge it without having the iBook plugged in and running — there's no juice on the USB bus when it's suspended.

I trudged all over Sydney CBD today looking for a new pair of Docs and something that would let me recharge the iBook from the car. It seems the old Docs shop on Pitt St Mall has folded, and the joint down George St that for years proudly advertised cut-price Docs has gone for the factory- (China-) direct brand instead. I'd forgotten what a hassle it is shopping on the street.

Anyway, to cut a long ramble short, I ended up buying a "Powertech Plus Cat. MP-3463 3.5 Amp Universal Step-up DC/DC Converter for Notebook Computer" from Jaycar on York St for $40. The sealed-in cardboard says it was made in China and is distributed by Electus Distribution, and I can guarantee you that the cardboard was printed there too. I can't find it in either of their catalogues. There is also a 6 Amp version for those who have something hefty.

It works, with one small wrinkle: the iBook-sized plug adaptor is wired backwards! Fortunately the iBook is up to that game, simply ignoring a reverse-polarity 24 volts. The solution is to wedge the plug adaptor onto the cable backwards. For the curious these Italians have the details, or you can try to figure out what Apple is on about.