Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Filk of the day: Hope Eyrie by Leslie Fish (1975)

I just downloaded a free preference panel called Textpander. I had been using Quicksilver for some simple text insertion (especially a hrefs), but it annoyed me to no end because it used the clipboard to paste in the html code, nuking the URL I had saved in the clipboard to put into the hyperlink. Textpander (optionally) gives you your clipboard contents back again.

This was the other half of the ActiveWords functionality that I didn’t really need for my Mac, but it is handy in some cases.

Update: Either Textpander or the latest security/QuickTime update (2005-008/7.0.2, respectively) killed Emacs. I tried reinstalling–no luck. So I checked out the latest from cvs and rebuilt. (I’m still building the self-contained installer, just to be safe.) After a long, long build, Emacs is back, if a little funky on the font settings. Whew!

Update #2: Some days are good CVS days, some days are bad CVS days. My home-built emacs turned out to be funkier than I thought (lots of issues with tex-verbatim, so I downloaded a pre-built emacs from Japan. So far, so good.

Fun link of the day: The iTunes 5 Announcement From the Perspective of an Anthropomorphized Brushed Metal User Interface Theme (Daring Fireball)

Loyal readers (and I know I’m running out of them) know that I appreciate the occasional educational video. BitTorrent, however, is a den of thieves just waiting for the next big police raid. So I decided to move on with the technology to eDonkey. I checked out likely eDonkey clients for the Mac and decided on the cross-platform aMule, even though their mac client is just an experimental daily build.

To set up aMule I followed the directions in their wiki, with some bandwidth-setting advice from their ED2K faq. Other things I’ve heard about the network are that it’s not as fast as BitTorrent, but has more stuff available. I’ll find out either way.

I had a couple of kernel panics last week, so I tried out the X Lab’s advice on resolving kernel panics. There was nothing wrong with my disk or my memory, and repairing permissions didn’t help. In the end, I uninstalled the graphics program I’d been playing with and reinstalled. So far, so good…

Google has instructions for connecting to Google Talk with iChat. If you have a Gmail account, then you can Google Talk. The general FAQ is here.

I’m a trackpad devotee myself, but Apple’s new Mighty Mouse looks like a handy rodent. Slashdotters are already complaining about the tail. For a more optimistic review, see Here I Come To Save The Day from DetroitMac, Inc.

Invention of the day: Breathing with the fishes

Though my first reaction was “Noooooooooooo!” I’ve adjusted pretty quickly to the New Mac Order. I was hoping that John Gruber would explain why his anti-Intel predictions were so wrong, but the only comment so far from my favorite Mac guru is that classic apps won’t run on Intel.

So I’m going to have to provide the geek commentary myself. I’m not sure why they’re switching to Intel, but I am sure it’s not for the sake of the Apple faithful. We liked the PowerPC chip and no one wants their computers or their programs to go out of date so soon after the last big switch (to OSX).

Intel chips cost more than PPCs, so no savings are going to passed onto us. There’s no huge or guaranteed speed gain with Intel, if you believe the PowerPC benchmark numbers, but there is one concrete advantage to Intel chips: there are a lot of them. Apple has had pipeline problems with PowerPC chips no matter who was making them (Motorola, IBM, or Freescale). Intel will be a cake walk in comparison. Imagine ordering the latest and greatest PowerBook and getting it in a week instead of a month or two.

Of course the biggest advantage is the clone market for MacOS, but I thought Steve was against the clones. Only time will tell whether the clones attack.

(For deeper thoughts, try Slashdot.)

[Update:] John Gruber comes through with some analysis.

After much experimentation, I got Emacs to build and run on Tiger. I ran mac/make-package instead of the usual configure/make/install cycle, as advised by Stefan Tilkov. That built an installer instead of the usual Emacs.app, but the installer worked fine. (I started with a clean checkout, but make-package wouldn’t bootstrap so I just copied a bootstrapped lisp directory over from one of my failed attempts and that worked.)

So it seems that something is messed up in the main emacs configure script in CVS, since I saw someone else suggest commenting out the link to fink. I may have lost ispell, but at least I have Emacs back.

As I mentioned last night, I had to rebuild emacs for both MacOS 10.4.0 and 10.4.1. The second build failed, and then I screwed up my CVS (that is, my copy of the emacs source code) by trying to check out an older version. Let that be a lesson to you young’uns: Always Google first!

Google tells me I’m not alone in my emacs difficulties. I shouldn’t have been able to build Emacs for 10.4.0 and now my luck has run out. I could check out the source tree again and try a patch, but it will probably be easier to download one of the Tiger binaries that are floating around:

• Aquamacs claims to work with Tiger.
• John Wiseman’s build is hosted by a friend.
• This mystery build which you can also download from Apple is probably your best bet.

Of course, you could skip them all and use the built-in terminal emacs, but I prefer the GUI.

[Update] I should have downloaded Aquamacs, because the other two didn’t work. I’m trying some hacks now, but they’re not going well.

Maybe the opendarwin port would work. I also found a couple of links to 10.4.1 binaries:

• Carbon Emacs for 10.4.1
• Emacsen for many OSXen

Upgrading my MacOS version is a hassle for me because I have Too Much Stuff™ on my mac. I have three virtual hosts to configure in the new Apache config file. I have Emacs to rebuild. I have too many fonts so I have to do the font cache deletion ritual. I have system hacks like CandyBar that require upgrades.

On the bright side, I now have all my fellow bloggers loaded into Safari RSS, so I can keep up with the fen without opening NetNewsWire Lite. (Safari RSS looks kind of like a LJ friends list. I could just read my LJ friends list, but Safari is so much cooler.)

And now Tiger is up to 10.4.1, so I’m building emacs again…

The tablet mac has been rumored since about the time of the Lisa, but now there’s finally hard evidence in the form of a US Design Patent No. D504,899.