gdb_stl_utils for Mac OS X

Posted by rae in development
at 2:31 pm on Thursday, 15 May 2008

Oh ya, this will have a wide audience..

There’s a very useful little utility for debugging STL under gdb, and it’s called gdb_stl_utils.

However, the Makefile that comes with it doesn’t account for multiple architectures like Intel/PPC on the Mac. So I updated the Makefile and posted the whole thing on clith.com/gdb_stl_utils. I’ve mailed the new Makefile to the person who most recently updated it in hopes of helping others use this very useful tool.

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OpenProj

Posted by rae in development, software
at 2:04 pm on Friday, 24 August 2007

OpenProj

Today’s SourceForge newsletter mentioned a project I hadn’t heard of before, OpenProj.

A quick trip to the OpenProj SourceForge page later, and I realized another big Microsoft app had an open source replacement: MS Project.

it’s written in Java, and there is no Mac-specific distribution, so I grabbed the OS-independent zip and just double-clicked the .jar file, which worked fine. Apparently it can read and write MS Project files too.

I didn’t do much more than create a document and save it, but I’m hoping this will be a useful tool for free software projects all over.

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Conflict Notification is In

Posted by rae in development, work
at 1:46 am on Wednesday, 7 March 2007

So today I landed bug 5308, which was the task “Sharing conflict notification UI”.

conflict notification
click for larger version

It is lacking a good graphic for the icon, and it’s not displaying the number of conflicts, but it does okay, I think.

2 Comments

Interesting css scaled image

Posted by rae in development, the Net, web site
at 1:51 pm on Friday, 29 September 2006

I was reading about The Xbox 360’s HD-DVD drive when I noticed that the image was scaling up and down as I resized my browser window. Cool!

The magic seems to be in their /media/style.css CSS sheet, which includes this little gem:

.post img.biggie { width: 98%; max-width: 860px; margin: 0;}

I’ve never used max-width; I’ll have to check it out!

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Going Native - iTerm 0.7.8 Intel build

Posted by rae in development, software, work
at 10:05 pm on Tuesday, 26 September 2006

iTerm
click to download iTerm 0.7.8 intel
Now that I’m on my Mac Pro full time, I’m on the hunt for native Intel apps. Mostly I’m finding my main tools are already Universal (a side benefit for waiting for the Mac Pro before jumping on the Intel bandwagon).

However, one app I use almost 24/7 was problematic: iTerm, a terminal program.

Now, iTerm has been universal (meaning it has both native PPC and Intel code) since version 0.8. However, I have found all versions after 0.7.8 to be buggy and not well-behaved. I tried downloading the latest and greatest stable version, but i started getting rendering errors (blocks of black showing up) and the main text was over-bold for some reason (I was able to tone it down by setting the colour to a very drak grey instead of black).

Well, I’ve had enough. iTerm is open source, so I checked out the version of iTerm that was current as of 0.7.8 (which has a modification date of Mar 11 2004) and built it as an Intel binary (not universal - maybe later when I have copious amounts of spare time). This wasn’t rocket science - zero coding was required. Indeed, I didn’t even have to change **anything**.

You can grab it here: iTerm 0.78 intel

Here’s all I did:

cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@iterm.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/iterm co -D 2004-03-11 -P iTerm
open iTerm.xcode
Xcode proceeded to update the project and somehow magically set the target architecture to i386. Cool. I clicked on “Build” and away it went.

When it was done, lo and behold there was an Intel version of iTerm sitting in the “build/Development” folder. I double-clicked it and, booya, it ran fine.

Now the development version is not for distribution so, okay, I changed *one* setting: I changed the popup that said “Development” to “Deployment”. Another click on “Build” and there sat another iTerm in build/Deployment

I hope this is of use to someone other than me. I’m I the only one who finds iTerm 0.8 and later frustrating?

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Still no Mac Pro

Posted by rae in Reid, development, hardware
at 11:14 am on Tuesday, 5 September 2006

Despite recent stories about Mac Pros shipping if they had been ordered with the Radeon X1900 XT, my order — which I made Aug 8 — is still languishing. I guess Canadian orders are at the bottom of the heap.

Mac Pro order status
… still waiting …
(click for larger image)

2 Comments

Mac Pro price drop

Posted by rae in Reid, development, hardware
at 4:51 pm on Tuesday, 29 August 2006

I just got a letter from Apple r.e. the Mac Pro I ordered on Aug 8th:

To Our Valued Apple Customer:

Apple is pleased to announce a price drop for the Mac Pro you recently ordered. We have automatically adjusted your order to reflect the new price.

For up-to-date information on your order, please visit our Order Status website at http://www.apple.com/orderstatus. Once your order is shipped, you can also obtain tracking information on this site.

Thank you for your interest in Apple products.

Sincerely,
Apple Store Customer Support

I checked and my before-tax price went down by $96. Huh.

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Computer Languages

Posted by rae in development, entertainment, family, the Net
at 2:57 pm on Wednesday, 8 March 2006

Michael is studying computer langauges at school. Maybe I should point him at this little ditty.

Hah.

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A few items of note today..

Posted by rae in General, development, entertainment, hardware, software, the Net
at 11:26 am on Tuesday, 28 February 2006

tvRSS.net
RSS feeds for specific shows. Well, really feeds for search strings, which means “house” also gets “bleak house”. Oh well. Btw, Pirate Bay has RSS feeds too.

Apple’s Rails page
Wow, Apple digs Rails. Cool. I hope their tutorial is as useful as Curt Hibbs’ amazing two-part Rails tutorial [part 1] [part 2] or his followup Ajax on Rails. Slashdot comments point to a QuickTime movie that compares Rails, Zope (Plone), TurboGears, Django and J2EE. I should post a comment about this Rails demo, which is what got *me* hooked on Rails. There are others on this page of screencasts.

Dell Linux machines
Oooh, finally someone other than Walmart sells Linux desktops. Although apparently they are loathe to admit it!

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Democracy

Posted by rae in development, entertainment, software, the Net, work
at 5:30 pm on Saturday, 25 February 2006

Democracry TV Viewer
Democracy is an open-source app for subscribing to TV shows via RSS and downloading them via BitTorrent. It’s written in Python and uses PyObjC and Boost (a cool C++ library, which supplements STL).

A blurb from the current readme for the OS X build:

You’ll need Pyrex, PyObjC and Boost to compile DTV. We use these for linking to C, Objective C, and C++ code. And you’ll need Python 2.4 or later.

At least as of 1.3.7, the prebuilt PyObjC binaries do not have proper Quicktime support, so you’ll have to build from source. Download and untar: http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/pyobjc/pyobjc-1.3.7.tar.gz

I find it quite funny that I find out this way that Mitch Kapor is involved. Mitch is also behind the project I’m working on, Chandler.

One thing the Democracy guys are doing that I wish we were doing is using Trac for everything. I mean, Bugzilla is nice and all, but it’s very 1990’s in a lot of ways, and will probably never make up for that.

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