Rubénerd!

Self professed blogging experts (who's blogs aren't well known, go figure) say you should never write posts discussing why you haven't blogged. I've already used the word blog four times here. Anyway what have I been doing in this two day absence?

Don't read this post, the quality doesn't improve.

Melting Snow Leopard with a hair dryer

Or would that be a fur driver, wait fur dryer? The former sounds like an upholstered golf club.

First things first, given it was a public holiday in South Australia yesterday (something about a race, I think) I took most of the day to wipe my MacBook Pro and downgrade it back to Leopard. Is it redundant to say you've "gone back" and "downgraded" something? Stop interrupting me.

There are a few features I took for granted in Snow Leopard I took for granted (wait, I already said that) that I'm already missing, such as timestamped screenshot files (WOW that was a huge improvement!). I plugged all my external drives (seven... yes I know I know) and not one single Finder crash. Phews. Is Phews the plural of phew?

Corn chips

They've started selling CCs in Woolworths again! Unfortunately despite this awesomeness, I went to their Mawson Lakes branch late this afternoon and they were completely sold out of bread. Completely! Not a single loaf, not even that Home Brand bread that tastes like cardboard flour, or flour cardboard. I took that photo with my iTelephone and showed my sister, she said "WHOA". Her exact word.

Programming

The Perl script I wrote to sync a few computers back in Singapore in 2003 for a small company is still running, albeit with a few modifications since the last time I saw it! They called me up to take a look at it, and it consumed an entire afternoon.

I try my best to love object orientation, but clean, simple, modular code is still so much friggen fun. Heck I'm enjoying working in C again recently for similar reasons, it feels like I'm working with the computer on a problem that's easier for it to visualise instead of attempting to model objects from our world onto it. Does that make any sense? Damn I want to do assembler, but as if the university will do anything cool and interesting like that :(

Smileness

I was at a coffee shop this morning as I was typing on my new(ish) Libretto 70CT and a cute girl smiled and waved at me as she walked past. I'm such a pathetic simpleton, that one smile was enough to make me feel all warm and fuzzy all morning :).

I GOT A LIBRETTO 70CT!

HUGE news, but will be waiting to blog about it in more detail tomorrow.

This could be the first time I've ever downgraded an Apple OS.

As we speak I'm downgrading the Snow Leopard partition on my trusty old Core Duo 2006 MacBook Pro back to Leopard (and while I'm at it, I'm finally getting around to upgrading the FreeBSD partition to 8.0!). I kept waiting for updates to fix the severe stability problems in the Finder, my FireWire 800 ExpressCard and my iMovie HD plugins, but I've decided to give up for now.

As I always say, I love Apple hardware and software, but I'm not afraid to call them out when they do something wrong or if there's a better alternative. This hardware may be old and crappy, and it could very well be a problem with third party software not the OS itself, but the reality is it's still my primary production machine and I need it working reliably. Leopard on this machine was solid as a rock.

Goodbye Menlo, I'm going to miss you :'-(

And as a pre-emptive reply to what I assume will be a few comments, I think it's great that Snow Leopard works so flawlessly on your machine, but this has no bearing on my own circumstances. And to those who may simply accuse me of using weird software or that it's my configuration's fault for Snow Leopard not working well not Snow Leopard itself, you obviously skimmed this post without reading it. Skimmed sounds like pasteurisation. Can you pasteurise blog posts?

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 [...]

I've been saying on this blog for years that my 2006-vintage Core Duo MacBook Pro still works and does everything I need it to, but perhaps this is a sign that it's the end of the road for it as far as Apple is concerned. Perhaps this means Mac OS X 10.7 will only be 64-bit as well; could Snow Leopard be the latest OS X I'll be able to run on it?

I thought it was very odd that they timed the transition to Intel only months before the 64-bit Core 2 Duo processor, so they've had to support those precious few 32-bit machines like mine when they could have been entirely x64 from the start. If this is the start of 64-bit only applications at Apple, I applaud them for it; despite having a 32-bit MacBook Pro, the vast majority of the install base is 64-bit and machines like mine are weighing everybody else down.

Interim transition time?

Perhaps this may be the excuse I need to start rebooting into my FreeBSD partition on this MacBook Pro on a more regular basis to get used to it in anticipation of no more updates! I know it's not politically correct to admit it but I adore The Gimp, now I just need a photo management application that isn't some terrible Mono .NET thing.

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.

An interesting new development since upgrading my Snow Leopard install to 10.6.2, all my custom drive icons have started displaying heavily pixelated. If you think that Starfleet badge looks bad, the SOS-Dan logo I have for my Anime drive looks even worse!

A quickie Google search has shown this problem has been manifesting itself for lots of people, but oddly in many different places. The solution seems to be deleting the .DS_Store in the folder where you're having trouble, so in my case I deleted it from the desktop. All good.

It's good that after my exams are over and my assignments have been handed in that this is the kind of thing that now constitutes a "problem" :-).

ASIDE: To preempt any comments about my Starfleet badge comment, a) no it isn't ugly normally and b) Star Trek is still better than Star Wars. Regards, Ruben.

One of the most common uses for the Stacks feature on Leopard and Snow Leopard is to have an icon for the primary hard drive sitting in the Dock; it allows you to navigate most parts of the entire filesystem include user folders, applications and so on. Problem is, you need a separate icon for each drive.

This afternoon though I found a way to have one Stack icon for all your drives: drag the /Volumes folder onto the dock instead! /Volumes is the hidden folder on your Mac's primary hard drive that contains the mounts for each of your other drives.

To unhide /Volumes so you can drag it onto the Dock:

1. open the Finder
2. click Go to folder on the Go menu
3. enter /Volumes (including the forward slash) and hit Return
4. click the column view toolbar button

Unfortunately, the bad news is List view just displays a series of aliases that launch in the Finder. If you use the Grid view on Snow Leopard though you can now navigate to all the folders on all your mounted drives with one icon.

Finally found the first hardware device that Snow Leopard breaks: The HP LaserJet P1005 printer. Using Bonjour on an AirPort express on two separate machines the same cryptic "Error:-9672" error message. Apparently others are having a similar problem

So far this,not being able to play Matroska video files reliably and some weird font smoothing have been the only problems for me with the Snow Leopard system software. Still it means I'll have to walk to uni to print stuff. As an early adopter I deserve this of course.

When I turned on my first generation Core Duo MacBook Pro I got in early 2006 this evening the backlight refuses to turn on using the function keys on the keyboard. All other keyboard functions are fine.

If I shine a torch at the screen I can just barely make out the windows and can adjust the brightness slider in the Display prefpanel, but nothing happens. Using an external monitor I can use the machine, but the internal display is still black.

Not sure whether this is a problem with Snow Leopard, I sure as heck hope so but it's looking increasingly unlikely. I didn't have the backlight Snow Leopard installation problem, but could this be related?

Things I've tried so far and have failed:

1. Resetting the PRAM (three times)
2. Resetting the PMU

This is really serious. I need to take this machine to classes. If it's a hardware failure and I can only use an external display, I'm in big trouble.

I remember reading on one of the Mac forums I frequent that somebody thought it wasn't the major changes that Apple makes to it's software that set it apart from other vendors, it's the little, less publicised things that make their systems that much more of a pleasure to use in little but meaningful ways. Aside from a couple of of blunders I completely agree.

Case in point, Snow Leopard comes bundled with a new monospace font called Menlo which is shaping (ha, pun) out to be one of my favourite new features. If you haven't noticed it, launch Font Book.app and bask in its awesomeness!

If you're on Snow Leopard reading this, you should be able to tell the difference:

This is Monaco, my previous favourite
This is Andele Mono, from the Home Brew Terminal theme
This is Menlo, my new favourite monospaced font!

I'm not a graphics designer so I don't know the language I'm supposed to use when describing fonts, ligatures, serifs and the like but Menlo is brilliant. It's as if they took Monaco and Fixedsys from the early Windows and DOS days and made a slightly more "retro modern" typeface. Because each character is slightly shorter, lines of text also seem more evenly spaced. The font smoothing and anti-aliasing also look really good.

I've set Menlo as my default font in Terminal.app and TextMate and am thorougly loving it. I've also gone ahead and added it to my CSS for this site, so if you're running Snow Leopard you'll see it in code samples! Font porn?

code, pre, .mono, .grilled_cheese_sandwich {
    /* Mac, Mac, FLOSS, Windows, All */

    font-family: Menlo, Monaco, "DejaVu Sans Mono",
        "Lucida Console", monospace;
}

As much as I love Linux and FreeBSD desktop environments like Gnome and Xfce, the presentation of fonts and typefaces still keep me looking forward to programming and working on my Mac above all else, though they are improving in leaps and bounds. I don't consider Windows to be a viable contender with it's subpar onscreen font rendering.

It's become a little tradition of mine to break in new operating system installs by tuning into Whole Wheat Radio before I do anything else (Low-Fi, Med-Fi, Hi-Fi). It's useful because it tests both the sound card and more importantly the network.

Audion is a [relative] dead end

When I installed the newly released Snow Leopard on my MacBook Pro and got ready to install Audion to tune into the MP3Pro stream, it occurred to me that Audion is a PowerPC application. Snow Leopard is now an Intel only system, and while you can install Rosetta as an optional extra, the rabid system perfectionist inside of me cringes at the idea of installing an entire extra subsystem for only one application.

I've switched to QuickTime for now to play Whole Wheat on my Mac but because it doesn't have the MP3Pro decoder the quality suffers. Unfortunately, I cannot find anyone still supporting MP3Pro on the Mac.

QuickTime 10

While the quality might not be as good as MP3Pro for the same stream size, at my house here in Adelaide where we have a strict download quota I generally only listen to the Med-Fi stream anyway so quality is less of a concern.

With this in mind, QuickTime 10 that came with Snow Leopard is fantastic, its brand new minimalistic UI is very unobtrusive and fast, and part of me really gets a kick out of being told I'm listening to a Live Broadcast :)

User agent string

One of the great things about Whole Wheat Radio is you can also view who's listening and where at the same time you are, along with what software they're using to tune in with.

Because QuickTime is now an important architectural sublayer of Snow Leopard (a dedicated Mac developer may want to correct me on that) the user agent string for QuickTime and other software that utilises it's resources (such as iTunes) is now a cryptic reference to the OS rather than to QuickTime.

I added information on this along with a screenshot to the Whole Wheat Radio wiki, Jim Kloss might want to just create a redirect instead to QuickTime or to the Mac pages but I figured it was worth explaining so at least there aren't any red links on the who's listening page.

Grilled cheese sandwiches

It had to be said :).