Xor News

Yeah. I’m an apple fanboi. Some days I wish I could quit. Herewith
a status update on various aspects of fanboi-dom.

1. Macbook Pro – a late 2007 model. Hanging in there. Lost the HDD when
it was 2 weeks old, replaced at their expense. Been using TimeMachine
with an external after that. Lost the right arrow key over the summer.
Replaced at their expense. Nothing serious.

2. iPad – mid 2010. Not entirely useless. It is good for reading ebooks.
Not much else. Not good for family sharing, email, documents, music,
pictures as it can only sync with one iTunes. Not good for kids since
there is no Flash (i.e. no Webkinz). No Google Chrome. No logins and
passwords. No parental controls. Very disappointing.

3. MacPro – late 2010. 27″ Cinema display died after 3 days. 2 Hours with
support, rebooted about a hundred times. Sent it back, got a new one.
Out of commission for six days. The display has no power button and not
even a little light to indicate that it is getting power. Seems like something
that should be added in a future rev. Most folks thought of that back in the
’60′s.

4. MacOS X 10.6. Ok. The system wanted to give me a new JDK (1.6 update 2)
Wednesday night. Took it. Now none of my JNI code compiles. What? There is
a symlink to jni.h that points off to nowhere. Is that file optional? Did no one
else ever check that a jni.h file was included in that release? Word on the street
is to get the JDK 1.6 update 3 from the Apple Developer Connection. Right.
It does have the jni.h file but it’s still in the WRONG PLACE APPLE! And it
reports the exact same version number as update 2. Unbelievable. Update 2
is unfixable, but here is how I fixed update 3

1. cd /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.6.0/Home/
2. sudo mkdir include
3. cd include
4. for f in /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/A/Headers/*.h; do sudo ln -s $f .; done

5. The MacBookPro 2007 cannot connect to the 2010 27″ Cinema Display. Without buying
an adapter. No mini-DVI plug on the MBP 2007 model. For the price yous guys could
have included the stupid adapter.

6. A new version of iLife was just announced. Bummer as I just bought the update to the
previous version. I wonder if they will make that right?

The disappointments are sort of piling up. This is no where near the tipping point for
me personally, but it does start to affect how much I recommend Apple stuff.

Mac OS X Leopard (10.5) has some interesting new output from the ls(1) command. Some files include a “@” or a “+” at the end of the permission string. Like this:
-rw-rw-r–@ 1 12345 Jan 2 file.txt
This is different from the “@” used after the filename to note a symbolic link when using the -F flag. This new marker indicates:

• @ – the presence of extended metadata, see it with “ls -@”
• + – the presence of security ACL info, see it with “ls -e”

The new mdls(1) command might also be if interest for another view of the metadata. The metadata is stored in a file that begins with ._ (dot underscore) and then the normal filename. So the metadata for file.txt would be found in ._file.txt.

The new flags for ls are listed in the Leopard version of the ls man page, but if you’ve upgraded from Tiger you may not see any new man pages. The new man pages are delivered in gzip compressed format but the old man pages are not deleted — apparently a bug in the upgrade installer.

If you want to remove just those man pages that also have a (most likely newer) gzip version, then you can run this as root:

   cd /usr/share/man
   for f in `find . -name "*.gz" -print ; do
       o=`echo $f | sed 's/\.gz//'`
       if [ -f $o ] ; then
           echo rm $o
       fi
   done

Once you are happy with the output of that, remove the echo statement and the old man pages will be deleted. This isn’t perfect, it still leaves old man pages laying around for things that were part of Tiger but are not part of Leopard. There will still be a man page for niutil(1) , for example, which is obsoleted from Leopard. But I think I can live with that.