njr 3.0

My Subversion server for personal projects, svn.sabi.net (aka cmi.sabi.net) runs on my desktop G4 at home off our cable modem connection, and our IP address changed this morning for the first time in almost two years. I’ve updated DNS but it might take a while to propagate. (The new address is 12.208.7.59.)

Robert Chin points out that I was wrong—Spotlight does indeed ship with a HTML importer, but for some reason I still can’t get it to index the release notes. No time to troubleshoot further right now.

12:31 PM | PyCS
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Back in Mac OS X 10.0 and 10.1, the bane of my existence was lookupd dying and hanging the machine impossibly. In Tiger, a similar culprit appears to be securityd.

root        43   0.0  0.2    29332   3632  ??  Ss    8:42PM   0:00.43 /usr/sbin/securityd

Innocent-looking, isn’t it? But when it dies, don’t expect to be able to launch graphical processes, or restart cleanly, or sudo… and it’s died four times in the past week, necessitating the repeated use of the triangle-logoed button on the front of my G4.

8:48 PM | PyCS
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My compiled version of GNU Emacs broke in Tiger with some inexplicable error message. After several hours of struggling with Emacs’s build process, I got CVS HEAD to compile, and all is well except for the font spacing.

In Tiger (after changing the font height to 120 from 110):

In Panther (the way I want it):

On the other hand, I can now M-x customize without Emacs crashing. Hopefully the font spacing issues will be resolved at some point.

The first screenshot above is brought to you courtesy of 1001Screenshot 1.0.1, my Flickr screenshot poster. (If you missed the first announcement, you can read about it here.)

Apple broke their command-line screencapture utility in Tiger by making its default output be PNG instead of PDF. It still exits successfully even on error conditions. However, they did fix some bugs such as actually complaining via stderr when the file couldn’t be saved.

Aside from Tiger compatibility—which uses the PNG output directly, instead of converting from PDF, so it’s much faster—1001Screenshot 1.0.1 also brings better error reporting. Instead of just dumping errors to Console, it uses py2app’s error script support to gracefully report errors in a dialog box and even offer you a direct bug report email button.

Source for 1001Screenshot is now in Subversion; I had to slightly patch py2app to get error dialogs out of it, as you’ll see if you try to build from source, but a fix should be in the official distribution at some point.

And yes, the above wrangling means I didn’t even get a chance to start on ICeCoffEE 1.4.2 today. I’ll try to knock it out tomorrow night, but it might be another week. Sorry for the fans of discontiguous selection.

12:15 AM | PyCS
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ICeCoffEE work would have been started by now, except my access point, now almost three years old, seems to have become unusable today. The access point part of it is giving abysmal performance (1 KB/sec) and the Ethernet switch part just stopped working; when I plug things into two ports, one of them goes through a continual cycle of being connected for a second, then disconnected for another second.

I’ll borrow an access point and get working tomorrow, I guess. An AirPort Express will likely replace it, since I’d love to dump my current three-step “getting music to the stereo” solution. Though that means I’ll need to get a router box and Ethernet switch when Steve leaves in about a month.

3:33 PM | PyCS
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Spotlight doesn’t come with a HTML importer.

No, really.

I was wondering why I couldn’t search through the release notes.

Someone want to write one?

(Yes, I can imagine about 800 reasons why it would be a bad idea performance- and UI-wise to enable by default, but I want one.)

3:33 PM | PyCS
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