durin42's random tangents

Get command-as-meta in Cocoa Emacs 23

2009-06-22T21:00:00.000-04:00

I've been running the Cocoa Nightlies of emacs lately. It's been mostly nice, although I switched back to 22 for a while because meta became super by default, and I couldn't figure out how to change it. The solution is to either go into

M-x Customize -> Environment -> Ns

or put


;; Command is meta in OS X.
(setq ns-command-modifier (quote meta))

in your emacs startup files. You'll also need to install an updated emacsclient since the one for emacs 22 won't work with 23.

ZFS on OS X and Hanging Updaters

2009-04-11T13:58:00.002-04:00

I was finishing off my taxes today, and while trying to apply the updater for TaxCut the updater would just hang. It'd completely max out one core of my MBP, and not ever do anything. Finally, in a moment of desperation, I fired up Instruments and started sampling it, and it was getting stuck in a Carbon routine about getting filesystem info. Unmounting my ZFS partition and trying the updater again caused it to go through instantly, with no issues.

Instruments is Made. Of. Awesome.

shepherd: Re-run tests automatically on save

2009-02-02T22:00:00.000-05:00

For the past few months I've been using a tool I wrote called Shepherd to help run my tests for me when I'm doing a fast edit/re-test cycle. Shepherd is an OS X only shell tool (although I'd like to see equivalents for other platforms) that uses FSEvents to watch a directory for edits and re-run the tests only when the right kind of file has been edited. This is nice for a couple of reasons: Your editor doesn't need to know tests are being run, and it'll automatically re-run the tests if the code changes for some other reason, like an hg revert.

There are some bugs (^C in the middle of a test run doesn't actually stop the in-progress test run, for example), but it's been a valuable tool for me, and I'm quite late in blogging about it so others can try it out. The code is hosted on BitBucket, so if you have improvements to make, please publish them there in a fork or queue so I can pick them up!

Best iTunes Message Ever

2008-07-25T23:40:00.002-04:00

"Purchasing updateAllSoftwareButton" just made me chuckle. Couldn't they have at least named the button something like "All Software Updates" so that a purchase would result in seeing "Purchasing All Software Updates" or something else sane?

Nokia 6085 with iSync

2008-06-30T22:20:00.002-04:00

Well, I have an iPhone, but A doesn't, so we just got her a Nokia 6085, which is a huge step up from the Samsung she had. To get it working with iSync, I took this plugin for the 6300 and replaced 6300 with 6085 in all the plists, and it just worked neat as you please.

Syncing over bluetooth is kinda cool. Maybe Apple could work out some minimal ability to sync (say) calendars, contacts, and iTunes play counts over bluetooth, leaving the "big" files for when you've got a wire?

2008-05-17T12:34:00.001-04:00

This just makes me sad. I was booking a hotel room at a major hotel chain, and I got to this form and just started laughing. Am I weird in that I was tempted to try and screw up their system by using those characters?

Also, what kind of place is it that makes a form this not-robust in 2008? That's just asking for trouble.

Using ConfigParser on StringIO

2008-04-23T10:18:00.003-04:00

ConfigParser is one of those bits of Python that is sadly under-documented. Recently I had need of using ConfigParser on a non-file, which meant using StringIO. Sadly, I couldn't find any examples of how to do this. After a little experimenting, I found that this works:


dummy_config = """[pinky]
narf: True
troz: True
"""
config = ConfigParser.ConfigParser()
s = StringIO.StringIO(dummy_config)
config.readfp(s)
print config.sections()

So there you have it: the secret is the readfp() method, which is mentioned in the output of PyDoc, but Google barely knew about.

setuptools and Subversion 1.5

2008-03-31T23:53:00.002-04:00

Heads up: if you do not patch setuptools, installs from svn working copies *will* error out when you upgrade to Subversion 1.5. This isn't a big deal, really. If you're not using the new features, you can easily downgrade your working copy (left as an exercise for the reader, since I don't want to empower that kind of bad behavior). That said, if you are like me, you want to just fix setuptools. I figured out the patch. It's actually trivial, since they are already parsing the entries file in a sane way, all that needed to happen was to bump the accepted version of the entries file in the setuptools sources and move on with my day. Unfortunately, they have been totally silent on the patch. As such, I'm posting it here so that Google at least has a chance of finding this and making the world able to fix this problem. Here's the patch:


Index: setuptools/command/egg_info.py
===================================================================
--- setuptools/command/egg_info.py (revision 61076)
+++ setuptools/command/egg_info.py (working copy)
@@ -217,9 +217,9 @@
             data = f.read()
             f.close()
 
-            if data.startswith('8'):
+            if data.startswith('8') or data.startswith('9'):
                 data = map(str.splitlines,data.split('\n\x0c\n'))
-                del data[0][0]  # get rid of the '8'
+                del data[0][0]  # get rid of the '8' or '9'
                 dirurl = data[0][3]
                 localrev = max([int(d[9]) for d in data if len(d)>9 and d[9]]+[0])
             elif data.startswith('<?xml'):
Index: setuptools/command/sdist.py
===================================================================
--- setuptools/command/sdist.py (revision 61076)
+++ setuptools/command/sdist.py (working copy)
@@ -86,7 +86,7 @@
     f = open(filename,'rU')
     data = f.read()
     f.close()
-    if data.startswith('8'):    # subversion 1.4
+    if data.startswith('8') or data.startswith('9'):  # subversion 1.4 or 1.5
         for record in map(str.splitlines, data.split('\n\x0c\n')[1:]):
             if not record or len(record)>=6 and record[5]=="delete":
                 continue    # skip deleted

If this works for you (and you are sure you are using svn 1.5 client binaries ("head -n 1 .svn/entries" prints "9"), please head over to the distutils SIG list and mention that it works for you. Of course, if you're reading this and you can be more of an authority than I can (I read the the libsvn_wc docs (search "The entries file")), please comment over there if the patch is right, or give me feedback so I can submit a more resilient patch.

"Getting" the iPhone

2008-02-20T21:51:00.004-05:00

Daniel Jalkut wrote a really insightful post about the "getting it" gap.

I've found this to be true in my own life very recently, with the iPhone I just got. I've had the device about 3 weeks, and it's already surprised me in a major way: I hate RSS on the desktop now. Even having to use a web-based RSS reader on the phone, leafing through articles is so much more natural on the touchscreen than it is on the desktop. In fact, most of my email needs are more streamlined on the phone as well, although that's mostly due to my fairly extensive server-side filtering with procmail. Web browsing in general just "feels" better to me - you want to move, you slide the page in the direction you want to go. I actually have had brain farts moving to the MacBook Pro's two-finger scrolling, often moving the wrong way (for those that don't know, on the iPhone you "push" the page up, whereas with two-finger scroll you "pull" the page down).

If I could have a full-size display with a UI that worked like this (actually touching the display), I'd be a really happy camper. It's just so much better than a "normal" mouse-driven UI.

Those are my first usability impressions of the phone. It has some warts, to be sure: text entry is a disaster for more than a quick email's worth of input, notes don't sync, to-dos don't sync, etc. But on the whole, it's amazing how well the system works without needing a manual (I still haven't watched the intro video, but plan to in case there are handy gestures that weren't immediately obvious, like the Mail swipe-to-delete gesture I found a few days ago).

New Podcast

2008-02-17T21:23:00.004-05:00

I've been following a few podcasts intermittently (mostly CarTalk), but the latest one I really like is PC LOAD LETTER. They're covering open-source issues and things like the history of Subversion. Using the issue tracker in Google's project hosting, they are taking questions from the audience. I'd recommend listening to the first episode as an intro, and then any others available (at this point, just one other episode).

Go add it to your iTunes feeds now - you'll probably learn something interesting, or at least be entertained.

AT&T's Billing is Evil

2008-02-17T19:54:00.003-05:00

I recently got an iPhone. My impressions of that are another post entirely, but right now the thing that's vexing me is that they don't give me unlimited nights and weekends, but insist on using up the pool of those minutes before falling back on M2M (mobile to mobile) minutes. Why do I care? Because - they set me up on a plan with "unlimited" "free" mobile to mobile, but instead, it uses the minutes I would rather use to talk to people that aren't on AT&T's network. This is just deceptive advertising. I've attached an image of the FAQ entry because I can't link to it effectively and it's a huge pain to get to.

If you feel so driven, call AT&T's support line at 1-800-331-0500. Let them know you think they should change this policy, because prior to 2004 they did do their billing using M2M first. This is just a stupid policy, and makes their advertising (in my opinion) less than completely honest.

Time Machine and Xcode Love Disk Space

2008-01-20T13:48:00.001-05:00

I was idly looking at my Time Machine backups today and noticed that Time Machine backs up Xcode's build directories. It struck me as wrong because, after all Backup Core provides a function to exclude files and folders from being backed up. Xcode should (maybe optionally?) call this against all built product directories and intermediate product directories.

This is bug 5696811 and was filed on 1-20-2008.

System Spelunking

2007-11-29T14:57:00.000-05:00

I got bored, so I started poking around inside OS X this week. Here's some of the interesting (to me) tidbits:

Time Machine

Used to be called Peabody? Hitting Time Machine with strings(1) shows three keys of the form com.apple.peabody.* - This is (probably) a reference to Mr. Peabody's Wayback Machine which allowed one to see what the past looked like. Another curiosity here, in the prefpane's Localizable.strings, we see FILEVAULT_WARNING_TIGER. Does this mean that Time Machine used to work on Tiger?

Screen Sharing

Perhaps this used to be called Liason? The icon name inside the app bundle is liason.icns. This is a little odd because the app controller is SSAppController. Maybe they just used their refactoring support there but didn't change the icon name. Also, there's an -isLeopard; selector in here - maybe this was designed to work on 10.4 as well? I might try grabbing the app and shifting it over to a 10.4 machine to see what happens. Liason is definitely a cooler name than Screen Sharing.

Probably not new, but interesting anyway:

Network Utility has "stroke" in its resources, it's a simple command-line portscanner. It's even nice enough to give you usage if you fail to give it sane arguments.

Apple is really inconsistent about their standards for shipping nibs. Boot Camp has classes.nib, info.nib, keyedobjects.nib, and objects.nib, but over in Address Book I saw keyedobjects.nib and designable.nib.

I've never noticed designable.nib before. It's XML text, and it looks like the new "xib" format introduced with IB 3. In fact, you can open designable.nib using IB 3 if you change the extension to xib and it'll work. locate(1) indicates a bunch of these scattered throughout the system. Does anybody know what these are for? There's one in my dev build of Adium, so I don't think it has something to do with using xib files, because we don't do those yet.

Some days, you just get that lucky.

2007-10-18T12:42:00.001-04:00

I was browsing Google Code Hosting randomly last night, looking at various OS X related tags, and I found a real gem of a tool that looks like the best thing since sliced bread.

The tool is relocation-tool or rtool. It's this nifty little shell script that lets you take foo.dylib and make it into foo.framework! I've not played with swapping out dylib dependencies with frameworks yet, but it looks like it can do that too.

I just tested the tool on a copy of Serf and it worked great. It also worked on libsvn_wc.

Hopefully there will be a future post about how to get gstreamer and all dependencies rebuilt into frameworks.

Apple and Airport

2007-07-04T23:26:00.000-04:00

I've gotten fed up with the 10.4.10 problems on AirPort for my MacBook Pro. It's been unbelievably flaky.

So I did what any self-respecting geek would do: I ran a backup, then started screwing around with system internals.

I'm pleased to report that if you replace IO80211Family.kext in 10.4.10 with the version from 10.4.9 the problems go away. I'm now back up to my old speed.

Lest you become dismayed, the driver *does* load. I'm absolutely sure. The key is some permissions have to be set right or the system will refuse to load the kext (try with kextload manually for a helpful error message).

Note that I'm not willing to offer much (if any) help to people to allow them to do this. If you want to go mucking around in system internals, it's at your own risk and I'll have no part in helping you shoot your own foot. I have no idea how well Software Update will handle swapping kexts like this, so be wary on the whole.

But my wireless works fast and without flakiness again. No speed stalls or random dropouts yet!

Menubar

2007-06-23T19:40:00.000-04:00

Via Peter, What's in your menubar?:

Left to right:
1) Spotlight
2) Fast User Switching
3) Time
4) Battery Status
5) Volume
6) Wireless
7) Bluetooth
8) Network Throughput (MenuMeters)
9) CPU Usage Bars (MenuMeters)
10) RAM Use (MenuMeters)
11) Growl
12) MacFusion (MacFUSE GUI)
13) Adium

Presentation on Perian

2007-01-10T15:33:00.000-05:00

Last night I gave a presentation to CAWUG about Perian. It's intended for developers, and it was received fairly well. I've posted the contents of the presentation so other people can take a look at it.

The other presentation was Rentzsch on NSXReturnThrowError (to be renamed soon), which is a horrifying set of macros that make error handling in mixed Cocoa/Carbon/C++/posix code easier.

Audio or Hair Care?

2006-12-12T01:23:00.000-05:00

Ridiculous Fish has a fun little quiz that demonstrates the absurd similarity of digital audio products and various hair-care products. Quite funny in an odd way...

Report an Apple bug .... Thursday?

2006-08-10T13:28:00.000-04:00

I don't usually uncover enough Apple bugs to actually remember to do RAABF, so you get RAABT.

Filed as 4675523

Summary:
Extremely long file names can cause copy operations to FAT32 filesystems to fail silently without any warning if multibyte characters are present in the file name.

Steps:
1) Produce a long (250+ character) file name with multibyte characters, such as:
"05 V. 1 Im Tempo Des Scherzo. Wild herausfahrend - 2 Langsam - 3 Langsam - 4 (Trombone) - 5 Im Anfang sehr zurückgehalten - 6 Wiedersehr breit - 7 Ritenuto - 8 Wieder zurückhaltend - 9 Sehr langsam und gedehnt (_der grosse Appell_) - 10 Langsam. Mis.m4a"
2) Place the file in a folder
3) copy the folder to a FAT32 volume
4) try and open the file from the FAT32 volume

Expected results:
The file opens and is usable.

Actual results:
The file probably vanishes upon the first click, preventing a double click. If you manage to double-click, the file will "not be found."

Regression:
None known.

Workarounds:
Don't use long file names with multibyte characters. Note that this has a potential data loss impact for users, particularly when copying music libraries, as multibyte characters and the classical genre seem to be joined at the hip on my machine.

Perian

2006-07-12T23:13:00.000-04:00

For the past couple of weeks or so my "other" spare time project has been Perian which eventually will be a sort of swiss-army knife for QuickTime to read various formats, and maybe even eventually export to a few of them. My target is to support as many things as possible from ffmpeg and its associated libraries.

Today, I'm pleased to say we're releasing version 0.1, numbered so low because it barely does anything special yet. For the moment, it handles AVI files fairly reliably. I've found only one file it can't handle correctly, and I'm still trying to figure out what's special about it. It handles both DivX and XviD encoded AVIs without trouble. I'm now using only Flip4Mac and Perian for my playback needs in QuickTime, and I've not needed to touch VLC for any AVI (save the one oddly-encoded one).

In the future, it should also handle ogm and mkv files cleanly, as well as additional associated codecs.

Get the release from here and be sure to let me know about any bugs you encounter.

Esoteric Rez Errors

2006-07-12T02:53:00.000-04:00

I seem to be managing to break things on a more regular basis. Tonight, it was Rez.

I got the error

/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreFoundation.framework/Headers/CoreFoundation.h:11: ### /Developer/Tools/Rez - SysError 2 during open of "sys/types.h".

Sure sounds ominous to me. SysError 2? That looks up to be an address error, if it's an old-style error number. Horrors!

A good deal of testing later (wherein I should have tried Rezzing something else, but for whatever idiotic reason didn't) I have determined this error is (mostly) harmless. It means that somewhere, someplace, you included a header file Rez deemed unworthy. Note that it won't necessarily even include anything else in that header. Isn't it magic?

Moral: check your headers and keep them simple when you're using Rez.

bfobserver Sucking RAM

2006-07-09T00:45:00.000-04:00

By now most of the people involved with Mac development know about the bfobserver "python zombie bug." One thing most of those posts don't seem to mention is that bfobserver can eat prodigious amounts of RAM without actually going zombie. "Whaa?" I hear you say? Yes. I just was using my iBook and noticed it had a rather extensive 2 GiB set of swapfiles, which is well over the norm for me (varies depending on what I do, usually 512 MiB GiB if Xcode isn't open and Safari is sucking RAM down at its usual rate). Closing Xcode and Safari usually cures almost all RAM-hog issues for me, but here it dropped things down to 1.5 GiB, which still seemed gihuge for running, well, Finder and Dock.

I looked around a bit with a few tools, then thought to go to Activity Monitor and see what had large VM sizes. Ran the launchd command to kill bfobserver (sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.dnbobserver.plist) and then immediately my VM dropped back down to 512 MiB just like that.

Why Apple is putting this tool on by default is beyond me, it just seems to be causing more harm than good.

Airport-induced rant.

2006-07-05T14:13:00.000-04:00

Big Macs are somewhat tricky to eat. They have a lot of semi-shredded lettuce, plus sauce that is slippery and makes the lettuce tend to slide out. Plus, the meat is ground beef (it is, after all, a hamburger) and so that tends to fragment a little bit. Thing is, I used to be able to eat one with minimal mess by using the wrapper as a handle. It worked well, and kept your hands nicely clean as you at something that loves to explode into your lap and make a mess everywhere.
No longer. The Big Mac I got yesterday came in a cardboard box. What the tard? It's a slightly messy sandwich - I want a wrapper on it that I can use as a handle. No, in the name of environmental conservation I now need to use an extra napkin or two because of the additional mess I create while eating and hemorrhaging lettuce all over what would otherwise be my lap. Wait, two napkins. Isn't that a similar amount of paper products as the wrapper was? So now we're using cardboard AND napkins instead of just a bit of wax paper? Brilliance.
Serving the customer by making their meal just a bit messier. If McD was in the cleaning supplies market, I'd almost see this move making some kind of twisted marketing sense, but as it is?

2006-06-18T22:46:00.000-04:00

Debugging Java used in Cocoa apps with the Objective-C Bridge:

In relation to some work I was doing with Adium, I became frustrated at the lack of any way to deal with debugging java classes that are used via the Cocoa-Java bridge. In a moment of desperation, I sought out various means of debugging or profiling, and I accidentally found a valid solution:
add

-Xrunjdwp:transport=dt_socket,address=8000,server=y,suspend=n

to the JVM arguments as specified in your application's Info.plist.
The way to do this is as follows:

<key>VMOptions</key>
<string>-Xrunjdwp:transport=dt_socket,address=8000,server=y,suspend=n</string>

You can then connect to the application using the java debugger of your choice, the line to do this with jdb is

jdb -attach 8000

I've heard that I should try using something like Eclipse, so if you aren't up on debugging in the Java world I guess it's worth giving that a look. I've also heard good things about IntelliJ, but that costs a reasonable chunk of money.

2006-06-16T11:54:00.000-04:00

My review of HoudahSpot as seen on MacZOT.com

It's really quite nice - I was skeptical of a search app being that useful, but it actually gives you SQL-like power for searching for files. In many ways, it's what I felt spotlight should have been. That's not to say it replaces spotlight altogether, but the combination of the two will be very powerful.

This looks like a really great header-searching tool, which been a beef of mine with spotlight, that it doesn't make a decent header-search tool.

NOTE: If you're seeing this on June 16, 2006 head over to MacZOT, you might be able to get a Free copy of HoudahSpot

Search easily in Tiger, Mac OS X, with HoudahSpot

2006-06-11T22:10:00.000-04:00

I've not seen these listed related to Mac stuff elsewhere, so I'm posting here in hopes that next time I have this problem and I have forgotten how to fix it I'll be able to Google it and find this...

I was building ffmpeg from source into static libs, then working on building those into something else. Somewhere along the line I got the error

/usr/bin/ld: staticLibs/libavcodec.a(mem.o) has local relocation entries in non-writable section (__TEXT,__symbol_stub1)

the fix is to add "-read_only_relocs suppress" to OTHER_LDFLAGS, and then you should be sitting pretty. I'm betting this isn't a good setting to need on, but at least it makes the build happen.

2006-04-25T18:16:00.000-04:00

SubEthaEdit from CodingMonkeys is officially
BLOGZOT 2.0 on MacZOT.com. If there are enough posts around the internet about it,
MacZOT and TheCodingMonkeys will award $105,000 in Mac software. SubEthaEdit is a very good app, and I use it every day for every kind of editing I've done.

2006-04-21T15:06:00.000-04:00

Report an Apple Bug Friday #1:

Preview's Scale to Page feature doesn't

Summary: When asking preview to scale a full-page image (right to the page border) down to actual printable area, Preview naively shrinks to the chosen paper size, not the printable image size. The result of this is that the image gets cut off when printed.

Steps to reproduce:
1. Pick an image that goes right to the border of your display (such as Peter's vi tutorial sheet )
2. Print, ensuring that the "Scale to Fit" box is checked.

Expected results:
You get a sheet of paper out of the printer which includes the whole image

Actual results:
The printer margin is blank, since the printer can't print there, but there are parts of the image which should have been printed there.

Regression:
None known.

Notes:
GraphicConverter gets the scaling correct every time.

2006-01-23T21:54:00.000-05:00

Lord of War was on in the lobby so I sat my braindead self down and watched. Reactions:

If you skip all the love/sex scenes, which we did, it's a good film. That said, I have some gripes. One I'm going to bother with here is the attempt at the end of the film to claim that he was somehow serving the US Govt in his dealings, with US made weapons, because he was dealing in AK-47s, which are (brace yourself) a Soviet design. Perhaps they left out details or something, but in any case, that was odd. Bigger gripe: casting the USA and the other permanent members of the UN Security Council as the biggest suppliers of weapons and munitions worldwide. The film goes whacked on crack at the end. I can think of a couple of ways it could have better served its (IMO, misguided) mission.

On the whole, if you like a good Cage film and you want to look past the incoherencies and skip the sketch, it's worth it. I think that's a bit much to ask though. I wouldn't bother unless you're really bored and can't figure out anything to watch (or even rewatch, there are many movies that would be better on an umpteenth showing than this was on its first).

2006-01-12T12:11:00.000-05:00

At some point, I'm going to start throwing movie reviews, half finished essayRants, and random code things up here. For now, you get to look at an empty page until I get to that.