Looking forward to seeing what Apple delivers at WWDC this year. Some quicky thoughts thingys:
Monday 07th June 2010
Wednesday 19th May 2010
Quick tip I picked up this afternoon. If you try to extract a series of archives with unrar or unzip and you get this error:
% unzip *zip
caution: filename not matched
… you can get around it by escaping the asterisk.
% unzip \*zip
I wonder why it works like this when virtually nothing else does?
Wednesday 05th May 2010
For those of you like me who use TrueCrypt on Mac OS X, a few more quick tips I’ve picked up.
Monday 03rd May 2010
Whenever I use software installation wizards I always choose the custom option to make sure it’s not installing anything I don’t want (package managers with custom flags are so much easier)! It was a good thing too, because when I installed Flip4Mac this afternoon it was going to install Microsoft Silverlight. Say what?
Wednesday 07th April 2010
In a worrying trend, it seems Apple will be furthering Facebook integration this time with iTunes. MacRumours is hardly an impartial source on such matters, but that ratio above doesn’t look too favourable.
Friday 12th March 2010
You can use a real, physical drive as a bootable hard disk in Sun Oracle VirtualBox using an undocumented feature, and it even works on Mac hosts!
Monday 08th March 2010
Sunday 14th February 2010
Hot off the heels (relatively speaking) of their ribbon interface-clad Office 2007 Microsoft’s Mac division has announced their next version of Office for Mac that will also include the ribbon interface. Problem is, both Microsoft and Apple already solved the problem of feature accessibility years ago with the tall toolbox and the ribbon is a giant step backwards, especially now with widescreens so prevalent.
Wednesday 10th February 2010
Having just spoken about photography, a few hours ago Apple released Aperture 3. One thing of note is the white box instead of black, shock of horrors! Of note for my own personal circumstances was the phrasing of the system requirements:
Aperture 3, which runs as a 64-bit application on Intel Core 2 Duo Macs running Mac OS X Snow Leopard [...]
Tuesday 09th February 2010
Running the ./configure script from the latest nano tarball on a virgin Snow Leopard machine (my dad’s) I keep running into a problem with UTF-8 support.
Using ncurses as the curses library
checking for use_default_colors in -lncurses… yes
configure: error:UTF-8 support was requested, but insufficient UTF-8 support was detected in your curses and/or C libraries. Please verify that your slang was built with UTF-8 support or your curses was built with wide character support, and that your C library was built with wide character support.
I’ve built the latest ncurses and slang libraries from MacPorts and have confirmed they were built with UTF-8 support. Only thing I can think of is it’s using the outdated ncurses from the system instead of MacPorts, but other ports such as Midnight Commander are using it. Will keep digging.
For what it’s worth, it builds just fine without UTF-8, but it’s a feature I’d rather have.
