Wisdom and Wonder » Mac

Reinstalling Snow Leopard

Grant — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 02:37:11 +0000

To satisfy my own curiosity, I reinstalled OS X Snow Leopard today.

It took about 48m to install the OS. I excluded all printer drivers, foreign language fonts, and translations.

You can’t trust the estimated time to completion. It started by reporting only 17m. After 17m, it changed to 18m, at which point I quit watching. Returning later, it reported 5m remaining, and after 1m reported completion.

One reason for a faster installation, too, is that the installation media is not verified as it was in Leopard.

This was on a 2.0GHz Core2Duo Mini.

BlackBerry Desktop Manager coming to Mac in September

Grant — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 15:30:27 +0000

Good to hear.

(via engadget)

Reinstalling Leopard

Grant — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 23:57:11 +0000

To satisfy my own curiousity, I reinstalled OS X Leopard today.

It took about 1.5h to install the OS and 30m to install the base apps like iDVD and so on.

This was on a 2.0GHz Core2Duo Mini.

Separators in the Dock in Leopard

Grant — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 12:33:39 +0000

Here is one way to separate items in the OS X Dock in Leopard.

defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-apps -array-add '{ "tile-type" = "spacer-tile"; }'
killall Dock

Setting up QBZR on OS X

Grant — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 01:33:35 +0000

Bzr is nice to use. It is tailored for the masses (of which I am a member). It has the usual UNIX support, but it has first-class Windows support, too. It has a nice UI if you want it. The community is great, too.

A few days ago I installed it on OS X and found that there was no UI support via Qt. Fortunately there are directions for setting it up here. Here are the steps that I followed:

Installed bzr 1.14.1
Installed Qt for Mac OS X Cocoa, qt-mac-cocoa-opensource-4.5.1.dmg, to the default location
Verified its installation by running ‘qtdemo’
Installed sip, sip-4.7.9.tar.gz
Installed PyQt, PyQt-mac-gpl-4.4.4.tar.gz (build took a relatively long time)
Tried out qlog and qdiff and they worked fine

Now I am wondering if I should have just installed this using MacPorts.

Addendum: 06/21/09

Here are the directions that I followed from that link:

In order to install PyQt, you need to have SIP installed.
1) download and install QT4.x

2) get SIP from http://www.riverbankcomputing.co.uk/sip/download.php
$> python configure.py -d /Library/Python/2.5/site-packages
$> make
$> sudo make install

3) get PyQT from http://www.riverbankcomputing.co.uk/pyqt/download.php
$> python configure.py -q /bin/qmake -d /Library/Python/2.5/site-packages
$> make
$> sudo make install

Hope this helps to get qbzr working

BZR as of today works with Python 2.4 or greater. Leopard comes with both 2.3 and 2.5 installed; but defaults to 2.5.

I didn’t know where qmake was installed; and typing ‘type -a qmake’ seemed to be the quickest way to find it.

Mini-malistic Mac development environment

Grant — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 01:19:51 +0000

It looks like the “non-pro” hardware is clearly the best place for me to start; the Mac Mini and Macbook fall into this camp.

My original thought was that the Macbook would be a perfect fit since I could hook it up to an external monitor at home and take it along with me when I need to go mobile. Then it dawned on me, I don’t really go mobile. I sure like to imagine all of the cool places I would go with it, but in reality such occurrences are few and far between. For when I really do need a mobile, I’ve go the XO and the ThinkPad, and who knows, if this Mac stuff pans out I wouldn’t mind picking up a Macbook or a MacBook pro. That said: Mini pricing seems very reasonable.

It looks like a Mini with a 2GHz CPU, maxed out with 4GB of ram, the default 120 GB hard drive, and an Nvidia video card that can drive a 1900×1200 display can be had for only $750USD. This seems more than adequate for setting up a Mac development environment; heck even Java would do fine here. What a steal!

The hard drive size upgrade prices are insane. If I need more space, I have a beautiful external LaCie hard drive that has been looking for a home!

Evaluating the ADC Select Membership

Grant — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 01:16:59 +0000

Apple offers 3 levels of memberships: online, select, and premier (0USD, 500USD, and 3500USD respectively). They differ of course on features. For the time being, the select looks the most reasonably priced so I wanted to learn more about how it might make sense.

From what I read, the biggest perks are the 2 support tickets and the hardware discount (10% on normal hardware and 20% on pro hardware). Access to outdated WWDC material is not very compelling. While the online “coding headstarts” might make sense, neither seem justified by the price.

The hardware discount is interesting, as the discount essentially cuts 500USD off of any pro hardware, and then you end up purchasing the select membership with what you have “saved”; so this alone can make the membership worth it. One might wonder why you wouldn’t simply purchase this membership when you want a discount and let it lapse when you don’t; but apparently if you do so, you will no longer be offered the discount. In other words, once you purchase it you have to keep it up.

For me it looks like the best approach would simply be to start with a Macbook and take some time to ramp up and get familiar with things. If it makes sense to take advantage of the support tickets and faster hardware (every year or so) then the Macbook could get passed down to someone else and I could find out how helpful the tickets really are to me.