Peter’s blog

I recently took some pictures of my Mac in the dark with the only source of illumination being the blue lights of the hard disks, the red lights of the optical mouse and the green lights of my adsl modem. I was really surprised by the results.

This picture takes in my whole desk. From left to right you can see a firewire hard disk, a USB hard disk, a 23″ Cinema display, an optical mouse, an ADSL modem, a Linksys NSLU2 and a network switch. The case of the Apple G5 is not visible as it is stashed to the left of the desk to save space.

Here is the EXIF info for the above photo

Camera make: SONY
Camera model: DSC-V1
Date/Time: 2005:07:02 20:27:24
Flash used: No
Focal length: 7.0mm
Exposure time: 30.000 s
Aperture: f/2.8
ISO equiv.: 100
Metering Mode: matrix
Exposure: shutter priority (semi-auto)

And here is a close up of the left side of the first picture. From left to right you can see the firewire hard disk, the USB 2.0 hard disk, an Apple keyboard and an Apple 23″ Cinema display.

Here is the EXIF info for the above photo

Camera make: SONY
Camera model: DSC-V1
Date/Time: 2005:07:02 20:29:27
Flash used: No
Focal length: 21.5mm
Exposure time: 30.000 s
Aperture: f/3.5
ISO equiv.: 100
Metering Mode: matrix
Exposure: shutter priority (semi-auto)

Next time I need to move my airport base station into the frame so I can have some white illumination.

Technorati Tags: nightshot, photo

Apple just keeps on trying to stop people copying files back from their iPod. This time iTunes 4.8 obfuscates the filenames of songs when copying them over to the iPod. Previous versions of iTunes kept the original filenames which made locating them on the iPod a breeze. Of course anyone with half a brain should be able to locate the required files using a combination of find and id3lib.

Come on Apple stop bowing to the demands of the RIAA. They are my songs and if I want to copy them back to my computer I should be able to. What happens if my computer crashes or I accidentally delete a track? Do I have to go get the CD and RIP it again?
What if my CD gets scratched or destroyed? Will the RIAA replace it free of charge? I do not think so.

Here is a list of some of the obfuscated filenames generated for clarity’s sake.

-rw-rw-rw- 1 peters swdevel 5022700 May 14 01:15 F31/YSPH.mp3
-rw-rw-rw- 1 peters swdevel 5477057 May 14 01:15 F16/ZPTJ.mp3
-rw-rw-rw- 1 peters swdevel 5444628 May 14 01:15 F16/VQEY.mp3
-rw-rw-rw- 1 peters swdevel 4385412 May 14 01:15 F13/UCKB.mp3
-rw-rw-rw- 1 peters swdevel 8638385 May 16 08:28 F28/WKSG.mp3
-rw-rw-rw- 1 peters swdevel 9565521 May 20 08:17 F12/SFLU.mp3
-rw-rw-rw- 1 peters swdevel 13368477 May 21 19:04 F20/QMVH.mp3
-rw-rw-rw- 1 peters swdevel 19586500 May 22 10:17 F07/EOVF.mp3
-rw-rw-rw- 1 peters swdevel 5256689 May 22 14:34 F07/OTTA.mp3
-rw-rw-rw- 1 peters swdevel 32654329 May 23 10:43 F28/MLEH.mp3
-rw-rw-rw- 1 peters swdevel 5834719 May 23 17:34 F04/BWAF.mp3
-rw-rw-rw- 1 peters swdevel 4530355 May 23 22:37 F49/GOUH.mp3
-rw-rw-rw- 1 peters swdevel 14590556 May 23 22:37 F48/YZLL.mp3
-rw-rw-rw- 1 peters swdevel 9582575 May 23 22:37 F45/GHVM.mp3

Technorati Tags: itunes

Crash and burn

That is just what xemacs 21.4.17 does when running on Mac OS X Tiger under X11. It simply crashes during initialisation. If you unset the DISPLAY environment variable so that the ncurses version comes up, it works fine. I tried the beta version of xemacs, version 21.5.20 and it also works fine.

After a quick run with gdb it seems the culprit is the call to NSCreateObjectFileImageFromFile(fname, &file); In previous versions of Mac OS X passing a NULL pointer for filename used to cause NSCreateObjectFileImageFromFile to return a dll handle to the current process image but in Tiger is just crashes with:

Thread 0 Crashed:
0 dyld 0x8fe1e900 strncmp + 224
1 dyld 0x8fe04f68 dyld::loadPhase3(char const*, dyld::LoadContext const&, std::vector<char const*, std::allocator<char const*> >*) + 56
2 dyld 0x8fe05638 dyld::loadPhase0(char const*, dyld::LoadContext const&, std::vector<char const*, std::allocator<char const*> >*) + 468

It seems that some Darwin developer somewhere broke the dyld::loadPhase3() routine during their latest programming efforts.

A quick and dirty workaround is to edit the file src/device-x.c, line 505 and change

dll_handle xaw_dll_handle = dll_open (NULL);

to

dll_handle xaw_dll_handle = dll_open (”/usr/local/bin/xemacs”);

If your xemacs is not installed in /usr/local/bin then just change the above string to point to the location its installed in.

Hopefully some xemacs development guys read this and fix it properly by propagating argv[0] to x_init_device()

Technorati Tags: macosx, tiger, xemacs