June 13th, 2007
So there’s this big Leopard thing that’s the talk of Mac town (well, that and Safari) with all the new features being revealed (officially, at least, to the general public) at WWDC 2007.
Some of the features are pretty cool, most of them are mundane. For me, I am really looking forward to:
- the new Finder - Finder sucks so bad as a file system interface. I use Path Finder, which incidentally had an upgrade recently to 4.7. The new Finder looks pretty (Cover Flow for files, sexy!) but what I’m really hoping for is a Finder with which you can actually be productive.
- Ruby and Rails baked right into Mac OS X - while installing Rails and upgrading Ruby is a breeze on Mac OS X as it is right now, having these installed by default is pretty sweet. Even Capistrano will be included. Now, how one upgrades Ruby is another thing though…
- Time Machine - Even though I already own a licensed copy of SuperDuper!, I’m still eager to use Time Machine. I mean, who isn’t hooked on the time travel metaphor yet? It’s like System Restore done right (with the advantage of hindsight, of course).
What are you looking forward in Leopard?
So what exactly is new in Safari 3 (other than the big OMGWTFBBQ over Safari for Windows)? TUAW has the best writeup (with screenshots of course) of the new features in Safari 3 I’ve seen so far. Check it out if you’re lazy to try it out - I did install the beta and took it for a test drive, but was never much of a Safari user to recognize what exactly did change in Safari 3 beta, so this helped. I must say the new Find interface is really slick and the draggable tabs has been a long time coming (one of my biggest annoyances with Safari and Camino). (0)
June 5th, 2007
Pardon the self-promoting cross-linking: Toilets and Linux evangelism (or what we use to build Bezurk) is an entry I just posted on the brand new Bezurk Blog about how the toilet is a good place to spread the word.
If you’ve found other neat ways to use the free Ubuntu stickers (or even the Apple stickers that comes with iPods), do post it!
May 29th, 2007
Just in case anyone runs into this problem (which, I might add, would probably go away when either the portfile is updated or the source mirror fixes the problem) while installing ImageMagick via MacPorts…
While trying to install Rmagick on my spanking, new, glossy, kakkoii MacBook, MacPorts reported a checksum error with the ImageMagick source tarball:
Target com.apple.checksum returned: Unable to verify file checksums
At first, I thought it was an outdated portfile but even after a sudo port selfupdate and sudo port -d sync, the checksum error was still occurring (checksum of the file: 4bcb4264c2170fe562b10a732f43e7af, expected checksum in the portfile: 9469ce1b1b645f8c728158cc434b0ff8).
Turns out, the first listed master site (where MacPorts gets its source files from), http://imagemagick.linux-mirror.org/download/ is hosting a source tarball with a bad checksum. Digging around the man page for port a bit, and switching the order of the master source sites solved it, so it was just a case of a bad file on one of the mirror sites.
sudo port edit imagemagick to edit the portfile and change the source mirror to a legit one. You should see something like this:
master_sites \
http://imagemagick.linux-mirror.org/download/ \
http://ftp.surfnet.nl/pub/ImageMagick/ \
sourceforge:imagemagick \
ftp://ftp.imagemagick.net/pub/${name}/ \
ftp://ftp.fifi.org/pub/ImageMagick/ \
ftp://ftp.nluug.nl/pub/${name}/
Just move an alternative master_site to the top of the list (I used the SourceForge one). There probably is a way to specify the master_site on the command line with port install but I’ve had just about enough of reading man pages and the now nearly unfindable MacPorts documentation (whatever happened to the old Darwin Ports site that had great documentation?)
Anyway, I’ve written to the webmaster of the mirror site linux-mirror.org, so this would probably be fixed for all two of you who are gonna be installing ImageMagick via MacPorts within these few days or so. Still, it was a good exercise in debugging bad port installations.
May 5th, 2007
Some of the latest Firefox 3 aka Minefield trunk builds include Growl integration! This is probably a non-event for anyone other than Mac users, but hey Growl notifications without needing to install an extension? Pretty nice.
Get a nightly here: https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk/
To test Firefox 3 nightlies without possibly messing up your existing profile (preferences, extensions, what have you), use the Profile Manager to create a new profile just for testing. Way less stupid then trying to load up 48 tabs from your current profile in Firefox 3 and then seeing most of the extensions fail to work (which was what I tried to do, once).
Source: Bug 362685 – Growl Integration for Mac OS X (nsIAlertsService)
Comments and TrackBacks (2) | Category: Applications, Mac, Operating Systems 
