Eclipse, Always Almost Good

Every few months, for the past 5 years or so, I try to move my development over to Eclipse.  I install the package, poke around, fall in love, then quickly something explodes and I fall out of love.

Just now, on a fresh, clean instsall of 3.5.1, I tried to install the Android SDK.  It failed complaining about missing some package dependancies, but for some reason the package manager couldn’t go and find those standard packages for me.  A little searching and I discover that I have to manually tell Eclipse how to find its own updates.  Bizarre:

Eclipse 3.5 (Galileo)

1. Select Help > Install New Software…
2. Click the hyperlink for Available Software Sites.
3. Ensure there is an update site named Galileo. If this is not present, click Add… and enter http://download.eclipse.org/releases/galileo for the Location.
4. Now go through the installation steps; Eclipse should download and install the plugin’s dependencies.

So I do this and select a bunch of useful sounding packages, bam, it fails again:

An error occurred while installing the items
session context was:(profile=PlatformProfile, phase=org.eclipse.equinox.internal.provisional.p2.engine.phases.Install, operand=null –> [R]org.eclipse.ant.ui 3.4.1.v20090901_r351, action=org.eclipse.equinox.internal.p2.touchpoint.eclipse.actions.InstallBundleAction).
The artifact file for osgi.bundle,org.eclipse.ant.ui,3.4.1.v20090901_r351 was not found.

I have no clue what an artfact file is and have no way to resolve this problem without a bunch more searching and reading.  Komodo is starting to sound nice and simple to use again…

Back to setting up the Android SDK, I try again, and now Eclipse find its dependencies and it installs… but I still get that same error above.  I have this nagging feeling that that broken update above will come back to haunt me at 11pm when I’m trying to push out a new release in  3 months.

Updated: Looks like I was wrong, that error was fatal and the Android plugin failed.  Looks like the answer to that problem is here:

Bug #477944 in eclipse (Ubuntu): “Unable to Install any plugins – 3.5.1+repack~1-0ubuntu1 on Karmic”

Which boils down to:

sudo apt-get install eclipse-pde

And now Android’s plugin works!

 

Magic Mouse install process not so Magic

Dont:  Get your new Magic Mouse and pair it with your Mac expecting it to Just Work ™.  It won’t.  In fact, it will screw you over pretty well.  Forcing you to go through loops of randomly uninstalling anything even closely related to bluetooth or usb and forcing it to forget the bluetooth pairing and rebooting and installing the system update a few more times at random and finally its fixed.

Do: Download the system update, reboot, then pair.  It will Just Work ™

 

Ubuntu/Karmic 9.10 freaks out on libm linking

So for Pure Data 0.43, we rewrote the build system from scratch and did a proper autotools system using autoconf, automake and libtool. This is all fine and dandy and working well enough. But then I ran into a totally bizarre problem that only seems to affect Ubuntu/Karmic 9.10 that has been a fresh install. My Ubuntu machines that were upgraded from Jaunty/9.04 were not affected.. It doesn’t add libm to the final linking, i.e. just a -lm to the LDFLAGS. So there was lots of “undefined references” errors to standard functions like floor, sin, cos, sinf, etc.




I tried adding lots of different things in configure.ac: LT_LIB_M and various related things; also, AC_CHECK_LIBM with AC_SUBST(LIBM) and AC_CHECK_LIB([m], [sin]). Nothing would do it on the affected machine.

In the end, I more or less hard-coded it to always add -lm to the LDFLAGS when linking on GNU/Linux:

configure.ac:

AC_CHECK_LIBM
AC_SUBST(LIBM)
AC_CHECK_LIB(m, sinf)


src/Makefile.am:

if LINUX
pd_LDFLAGS = $(LIBM)
endif


 

sshing into a MSYS MinGW shell

So for some reason I feel compelled to work on Windows tho I don’t use it at all myself. The sad fact is the majority of computer users out there are on Windows. And someone has to make the Pd builds on Windows, so here I find myself again. In order to reduce the pain as much as possible, I use Cygwin, MinGW, and MSYS to make it as UNIX-like as possible. There is just one little thing missing for me, and that is the ability to ssh into a Windows box and get the MSYS/MinGW shell.

I did just find that I can get a broken-ish MinGW MSYS shell by sshing into Cygwin, then running /cygdrive/c/msys/1.0/bin/sh --login -i. But it inherits the environment variables from Cygwin, and so it barely works. I did find this Python script that is supposed to fix that problem, but no luck for me.

Has anyone out there done this successfully?

 

installing iPodLinux build tools on Mac OS X with Fink

So I use Mac OS X a fair amount and I use Fink to get all of my favorite free software tools in a Debian-ish style. I recently downloaded the iPodLinux Toolchain for Mac OS X/Intel and tried to install it. First off, these .sh scripts are a crazy hack, first 45 or so lines are an bourne shell script, the rest is the binary of the .tar.gz tarball to install. So the script parses itself, then feeds the binary part of itself to be un-targz’ed.

When I ran this crazy script on my machine, I got this:

tail: cannot open `+43' for reading: No such file or directory

gunzip: stdin: not in gzip format

It turns out that the script was written expecting the BSD tail when running tail. Since I have Fink as the first in the path, it was getting the GNU tail. So I just changed tail to /usr/bin/tail and it works. Time to submit a bug report…

 

Not-so-high-scalability

Not to be too mean spirited, because someone over at HighScalability.com (which is one of my favorite tech blogs) is obviously having a hard day, but the irony was too rich to pass up:

The MySQL error was: User highscal_admin already has more than ‘max_user_connections’ active connections.

 

tcsh in cygwin…

So I am back beating my head against WinXP, arg… the Pd WindowsXP build machine died and I can’t get the disk to do anything but click. So I am actually running a Windows install… ug. I just got Cygwin installed and am setting up my old environment, making my Cygwin HOME dir use my Windows %UserProfile%. And yes, I still use tcsh… when running tcsh, I get if: Expression Syntax. and it doesn’t finish loading its rc files.

For some reason, this bug has existed for years, and hasn’t been fixed. I guess I am the only one making my Windows home dir the same as my Cygwin home dir. Perhaps I expect too much from Cygwin+Windows.

It turns out that it is just a case of missing quotes in /etc/profile.d/complete.tcsh. At line 44, if ( -r $f ) then should be if ( -r "$f" ) then and voila! it works.

 

quicktime pro: plist or free software?

I rebuilt a machine from scratch that had a Final Cut Pro license on it, but that machine no longer needed Final Cut, but really only Quicktime Pro. Too bad VLC doesn’t have simple editing like QuickTime Pro. I looked into ffmpeg/mencoder, and I think that I probably wouldn’t remember the command line flags for it. I found the file that has the registration in it so that QuickTime Pro works, its in /Library/Application Support/ProApps/Final Cut Studio System ID.

Perhaps I should add Kino to Fink so that would be easy to install on Mac OS X.

 

Apple Mail.app’s disappearing Outbox

I’ve recently realized that making it too easy to send email is a bad thing. For the longest time, I thought that any mail program that didn’t have a key shortcut for sending an email was broken. Now I have seen the error of my ways. I’ve gotten in the habit of using Apple Mail in Offline mode so that it doesn’t send the emails until I return to Online mode. Apple Mail always tries to second guess me on this, which is a constant agravation, and then came the biggest affront: the Outbox disappeared comletely! ARG! Normally, when you are in Offline mode and you send email, the Outbox shows up and will stay there until the email is sent. That is nice, and useful. But recently, for whatever reason, the Outbox never came out anymore. What a pain… go after some searching around and reading of the ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist , I found this forum thread to set DisplayInThreadedMode to no in order to permanently hide the Outbox. It turns out mine was set to no already. I switched it to yes and voila! I had a reappearing Outbox again! Yee haw! Now WTF does “Threaded Mode” have to do with the visibility of the Outbox?

 

Not Installed, Can’t Install Because… It’s Already Installed

I thought this was a particularly poetic bit of Installer/Updater catch-22 in action:

Having spent 18 months of my life shafted with maintaining an installer, download manager and patching system, I feel a weird mix of compassion and schadenfreude when I see this kind of stuff…