njr 3.0

So I was trying to install OpenSolaris on a CD-less SPARC system using an OS X machine as an install server (because said machine is barfing under FreeBSD, and I’m trying to figure out if it was a hardware problem).

After downloading the DVD image in four pieces, concatenating them together, and mounting it, I think I may have run into some weird disk imaging or filesystem bug on OS X. It’s really rather scary.

% uname -a
Darwin bookworm.local 8.6.0 Darwin Kernel Version 8.6.0: Tue Mar  7 16:58:48 PST
 2006; root:xnu-792.6.70.obj~1/RELEASE_PPC Power Macintosh powerpc
% hdid sol-nv-b40-sparc-dvd.iso
/dev/disk2                                              /Volumes/SOL_11_SPARC
% cp /Volumes/SOL_11_SPARC/Solaris_11/Tools/add_install_client ./one
% disktool -e disk2 0
[...]
***Disk Ejected('disk2')
% hdid sol-nv-b40-sparc-dvd.iso
/dev/disk2                                              /Volumes/SOL_11_SPARC
% cp /Volumes/SOL_11_SPARC/Solaris_11/Tools/add_install_client ./two
% diff one two
Binary files one and two differ
% file one two
one: data
two: data

add_install_client is supposed to be a shell script. A few times running strings on it, I found some OS X filesystem bits, for example:

% strings add_install_client
[...]
ntpd
snmpd
Starter
RetroRun
rter
crashreporterd
[...]
tarter
apcupsd
arter
serialnumberd
ARDHelper
zsh: 697 bus error  strings add_install_client

No time to debug further at the moment, but… yuck.

6:54 AM | Computing, macOS
1 Comment

Ever noticed that, when you drag a bunch of documents from the Finder onto an application, the order in which they open is often the exact opposite of what you want, if not outright random?

I’ve cursed this behavior several times, though never cared enough to do something about it—but Cameron Kaiser has. OpenAlpha is his solution: drop your files onto it instead, and they’ll be opened in alphabetical order. It uses my launch tool to do the opening; pretty cool to see my software not only being used, but embedded.

8:31 AM | Computing, macOS
3 Comments

Comment spam really is annoying, though it’s getting a run for its money from random Unicode glyph-abusing Brazilians I don’t know asking me to be their friend on Orkut. But four requests in one day!?

It seems WP-Cache was causing the weird blank-page-until-reload issues with WordPress 1.5, which translated into no-page-at-all issues in WordPress 2. Since TextDrive finally seems to have a handle on the server-crashing and performance issues (this server has been up for over 31 days), the caching plugin isn’t as imperative as it used to be, though I do like to be nice about using shared server resources where I can.

Quick WordPress 2 review: AJAXification is good. I don’t like the new admin color scheme; looks too much like a bad ripoff of Slashdot. From time to time gigantic fonts appear, for no apparent reason; being on a 1024×768 display, this sucks. The new WYSIWYG editor isn’t perfect (it turned a paragraph break into a line break the first time I posted this message), but it’s a lot better than most I’ve seen. The dynamic resizability of this editing window is especially slick—alternately, you could say we should have had this kind of stuff on the Web 10 years ago :-)

Still, I think I’ll be going back to MarsEdit as soon as I can; hopefully it’ll get some attention in the form of WebKit content-editable support soon. I’m already very addicted to NetNewsWire 2.1’s syncing, even with the known problems, it works well 99% of the time. When RSS feeds get messed up on iTunes, I end up with tens of old podcasting episodes, which is a lot of data to needlessly download. It’d be cool if I could tell it “don’t accept any posts with dates earlier than the newest (or even oldest) preexisting item in the feed”.

If you notice any site flakiness, please let me know. I realize some of the old posts from the PyCS and (especially) Radio sites still have formatting issues; fixing this is on my to-do list, just rather far down it.

7:27 AM | Administrivia, Computing, Web
No Comments

With gdb 6.3, I can’t run Simics more than twice, or it “loses track” of the program, at which point it will only die when I exit gdb, thereby losing all my configuration.

With gdb 6.4 I just compiled, I can run Simics as much as I want, but it won’t stop at any of the breakpoints I want to set.

Am I dreaming, or did debuggers used to work better than this?

7:27 PM | Computing
No Comments

Safari crashes in exactly one situation in my daily browsing habits: while rendering macworld.com. It’s totally reproducible and happens virtually every day.

Macworld is the most popular US Mac magazine. Safari is the most popular Mac Web browser. Does this seem completely bizarre to anyone else?

7:41 PM | Computing, macOS, Web
4 Comments