njr 3.0

A few amusing things from MacFixIt this morning…

As on Friday, the top story is subscription-only. The teaser for this story continues to show a poor command of English vocabulary:

Our Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar) Special Report, which consists of extensive troubleshooting insight and commentary from Macintosh industry figureheads including Microsoft and Tenon Intersystems, is available for Pro subscribers here.

Figurehead \Fig"ure*head`\, n.
   2. A person who allows his name to be used to give standing
      to enterprises in which he has no responsible interest or
      duties; a nominal, but not real, head or chief.

Then there's the person who is upset that Apple deleted his time zone in Jaguar:

Our Time zone has been removed. This wouldn't be a problem because we can piggy back off another time zone. Unfortunately this time zone observes daylight savings and we dont. A checkbox for ignoring daylight savings would be great.

12:04 PM | Radio
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This week's MWJ includes a reference to Julio Ojeda-Zapata's Jaguar Journal. It's a mini-Weblog covering the Pioneer Press technology writer's exploits with Jaguar. Unlike most such journals I've read, which often do more to demonstrate the writer's ignorance and snap judgments than anything else, this one is filled with useful information, plentiful links, and reader responses.

The material on Bluetooth was most interesting—while Jaguar is Apple's second effort in Bluetooth support, the phones' software still appears stuck firmly at 1.0. Price aside, I won't be getting a Bluetooth-capable phone any time soon.

The only seeming inaccuracy I noted was a claim that Jaguar's built-in Internet connection sharing doesn't support sharing modem connections. I had no problem doing just that last week in New Hampshire, so I emailed the author, and was astonished to receive two replies within a few minutes. Ojeda-Zapata was able to get it working: you can read my email on the subject in the ninth installment of “Jaguar Journal”.

12:39 AM | Radio
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This page on Jaguar and gimp-print explains how to use the suite of gimp-print inkjet and PCL printer drivers with Jaguar and CUPS. I didn't know you could add a printer via URI directly from Print Center; I had been using the CUPS Web administration interface instead.

11:00 PM | Radio
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F-Script Anywhere 1.1.4 released, including Jaguar compatibility and a few cosmetic changes.

An ICeCoffEE release will be my next priority; it's been a long time and I've got a lot of unreleased code that is in good shape. I'm glad to see that my Terminal.app patching code degrades cleanly on Jaguar and doesn't hamper the rewritten Terminal's function. It should be easy to put back the Services menu in Terminal. From a few minutes with class-dump yesterday, the buffer storage format of the new Terminal doesn't look any better than the old, so I'm not sure how hard it will be to implement URL launching inside Terminal 1.3. I never publicly released the old one because it crashed so much, but I”m missing being able to Command-click URLs in IRC sessions.

Medical school classes start Tuesday; I'm really looking forward to them, although they'll be a challenge to balance with my research. This semester I'm taking medical genetics and histology. The latter is taught primarily on computers; my parents were of two minds when I mentioned this to them. “What do you mean, you don't use microscopes?” “Well, I guess they gave us some pretty lousy microscopes to use…”

In the aftermath of .mac, I've registered rileys.us at PairNIC for my parents to use for email. It'll be a few weeks before PairNIC is upgraded to a version which provides DNS service. For mail service, I have all the infrastructure in place already, aside from configuring Postfix for the new domain. We bought a UPS to use on the mailserver as they've been having a lot of power outages recently.

9:51 PM | Radio
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Got Notebook working on Jaguar tonight. There are a few minor issues with the GUI, but for day-to-day use, it looks good. If you're interested in trying it out, read on.

As the readme mentions, Notebook 0.9 is written to work with Tcl/Tk 8.3.4, TclLib 1.3, and BWidgets 1.4.1. If you're not using Windows, the readme doesn't offer much help on obtaining them. The Tcl'ers Wiki is helpful, but the pertinent information is scattered among several pages, none of which are helpfully titled “how to install Tcl/Tk on Mac OS X”.

There are at least two functional versions of Tcl/Tk on Mac OS X. The first is a straight Unix port, which uses Unix packaging conventions and X11 for Tk. Running Notebook with this configuration is pretty straightforward, if you have already installed an X server and Tcl/Tk. I installed XDarwin and Tcl/Tk 8.3.4 from Fink (fink install tcltk). Once TclLib and BWidgets are present (below), wish notebook.tcl starts Notebook. The instructions in README.txt describe how to edit notebook.tcl so it's directly executable if you'd prefer.

The more native version of Tcl/Tk on OS X, developed primarily by Jim Ingham and Ian Reid of Apple, is still experimental. It's built as a couple of Mac OS X frameworks, Tk.framework and Tcl.framework, and includes a packaged Carbon application named Wish Shell which works approximately like the wish tool. The native Aqua/Carbon Tk is very fast, but not entirely finished. This Wiki page contains a list of the bugs you can expect to find in the Aqua implementation of Tk.

It's possible to build Tcl/Tk 8.4a4 for Mac OS X/Carbon from CVS with the included Project Builder project, but I gave up after it broke on the spaces in my hard drive's name, and went looking for a binary version. Vince Darley's Alphatk distribution contains easily installable copies of Tcl.framework, Tk.framework, and Wish Shell.app. Download the Alphatk for OS X disk image here, then move the frameworks to /Library/Frameworks and put Wish Shell somewhere you can find it (perhaps /Applications).

TclLib and BWidget are pure Tcl library extensions; while they don't require compilation, they do need to be installed in the proper places. Tcl has the concept of a script library directory, in which it'll automatically search for installed packages. For the Unix port, this is /path/to/lib/tcl8.3; the OS X port uses /path/to/Frameworks/Tcl.framework/Resources/Scripts. When you're finished, you should have directories named tcllib1.3 and bwidget1.4.1 in this directory.

There are three different methods of installing TclLib that I could see, but only one of installing BWidget. Here's what I did, after unpacking both tarballs.

% cd tcllib-1.3
% ./install.sh /Library/Frameworks/Tcl.framework/Resources/Scripts
Installing tcllib 1.3 to /Library/Frameworks/Tcl.framework/Resources/Scripts
[This installs in the wrong place, .../Scripts/lib.  We will move it back later.]
% cd ../BWidget-1.4.1
% ln -s ../tcllib-1.3/config
% aclocal && autoconf
% ./configure --prefix=/Library/Frameworks/Tcl.framework/Resources/Scripts
checking for a BSD-compatible install... /usr/local/bin/install -c
configure: creating ./config.status
config.status: creating Makefile
% make install
[...]
% cd /Library/Frameworks/Tcl.framework/Resources/Scripts
% ls lib
bwidget1.4.1/  tcllib1.3/
% mv lib/* . 
% rmdir lib

This method also deposits documentation in .../Scripts/doc, and does a few other things which are probably wrong, but it works well enough for my purposes.

Finally, launch Wish Shell, choose Source from the File menu, and select notebook.tcl. It should display approximately as shown above.

12:15 AM | Radio
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