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?

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 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.

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.

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.

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?

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…

Since I store all the email I ever receive, I have a gianormous storage folder. To make things more managable, I have them split up by year. The eds.org mail server runs the old uw-imapd which stores things as flat mbox files in your home directory. I figured, I wasn’t going to be changing my archive at all, so I set the file permissions on these to read-only. It turns out that my mail client, Apple Mail.app, couldn’t download the email from those folder via IMAP. So I recently discovered that if I set the file permissions to read/write, then it can download everything. Arg, annoying…

We were bitten big time by an annoying technical detail: it turns out that third generation iPods will connect to a computer using either a USB or a FireWire cable *BUT* they will only charge from the FireWire, not from the USB. We thought we had a big bag of dead 3G iPods, but now that we got a FW800-to-iPod cable for $5, the first “dead” 3G iPod we tried started right up! So we found this out the hard way, we’d been banging our heads against this pile of iPods using the USB cable… arg!

So I have been banging my head against the strange partition format that palm pilots seem to expect on SD/MMC cards. I am foolhardy to be playing with a Palm Tungsten T2. Under PalmOS it supports SD card, but it doesn’t boot Linux from them yet, only MMC cards. So I searched around for some true MMC cards, which are hard to find these days. I got my hands on two 1gig MMC cards. The palmtt2 recognized them no problem and would start Garux (bootloader) from them no problem. But when I used cfdisk on Ubuntu or Disk Utility under Mac OS X to partition the MMC card, then PalmOS no longer saw Garux. Arg…. I tried gparted too, no luck.
Then I noticed that the palmtt2 would sometimes prompt to format the card when I stuck it in. So I said yes. It produced a partition format that cfdisk refused to read, saying: FATAL ERROR: Bad primary partition 0: Partition ends in the final partial cylinder. So I opened up gparted, and tried resizing the partition. That did the trick, I guess gparted kept the strange format that the palmtt2 was happy with.  w00t!  Now my palmtt2 boots up my custom GNU/Linux image!