Re: OS X
On Thu, 6 May 2004, Stephen Harris wrote: I decided to teach myself Perl and the got Sam's Teach Yourself Perl in 24 hrs (book CD ) from the local library. I began working with the book and found that perl 5.6.1 only runs in Classic environment, but that the Unix version of perl runs fine in OS X. OK, maybe, but how do you get it in there? (I'm running OS X 10.2.8 on a dual processor G-4 silver Power PC.) Follow any instructions that the book gives for Unix versions of Perl; pretend for now that you aren't even using a Mac. MacOSX is based on Unix. Earlier versions of the MacOS weren't. Because Perl was originally written on for Unix systems, that's where it has always worked most smoothly, even though versions existed for other systems -- the MacOS version of Perl, MacPerl, was a good example of that: it worked well enough, but it stuck out like a sore thumb. Now though, Perl is shipped along with a full suite of standard Unix commands and programming languages (awk, grep, sed, Perl, Python, Ruby, TCL, etc). Therefore, you can access it the same way Linux or Solaris users do: open up a command line session [the application you want for this is /Applications/Utilities/Terminal] and work from there. This is the approach that will be familiar to Unix nerds, but if Unix is still unfamiliar to you then there are other approaches, of course. The old Classic version of MacPerl will still run, but there's little reason to use it anymore. A version of Perl at least as recent as 5.6.1 should already be installed at /usr/bin/perl, which is the typical location for it on most versions of Unix. (If you upgrade to Panther, you'll have Perl 5.8.1, out of the box, in the same location.) I hope this helps. If you find the Sams book unhelpful, you may want to take a look at _Learning Perl_ by Randal Schwartz Tom Phoenix: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/lperl3/ Please ask the list if you have more questions, or would like a more detailed walkthrough of how to get a simple first program running. -- Chris Devers
Re: OS X
On 2004.5.6, at 09:01 PM, Stephen Harris wrote: Hi, Decided to teach myself Perl and the got Sam's Teach Yourself Perl in 24 hrs (book CD ) from the local library. I began working with the book and found that perl 5.6.1 only runs in Classic environment, That would be macPerl 5.6.1? but that the Unix version of perl runs fine in OS X. OK, maybe, but how do you get it in there? It's in there. Try this in the terminal: ls -l /usr/bin/p* and then this: perl --version which will show that it is 5.6.0. If you want the latest perl, 5.8.4, that does have to be installed (for instance, if you are like me and need the Unicode support). (I'm running OS X 10.2.8 on a dual processor G-4 silver Power PC.) Thanks S. M. Harris
Re: OS X
On Thu, 6 May 2004, Stephen Harris wrote: Thanks, Chris. I am only a nerd wannabe, so I'll try going the OS X route and the Learning Perl book until I get ready to shell out $100 for Panther. If you get stuck on anything, please feel free to write to the [EMAIL PROTECTED] list. Many of us subscribe to this list because we like being able to help out new users, so keep us in mind if things aren't making any sense for you. -- Chris Devers
Re: OS X Smokers
Hep, I considered sending a new mail to the list on the subject of smoke testing. Then I remembered that I had done it before - so I might aswell write a follow up on this thread. About the world of, pain it is actually quite easy to be a smoke tester, well I haven't actually sent of any reports yet due to problems with sending cron mail from an unqualified host to a mailing list. The only pain I have experienced as a smoke-tester is when my TiBook becomes VERY hot and you put your finger on the powerbutton. But I have to ask again are there no smoke-testers but me using a mac? jonasbn On Monday, September 30, 2002, at 02:03 , Robin wrote: perl.org quoth: The smokers does smoke tests of the bleading edge Perl on various platforms to help the developers spot new bugs as fast as possibly. man sounds like a world of pain..
Re: OS X Installed numbers (Was Re: mac-toolbox)
Well, I for one, use Maya from SGI|Alias|Waefront - and it doesn;t support 10.2 - there are a number of dialog boxen which get very screwed up by it. Are there any other packages which work under 10.1- not in 10.2+ ? Certainly some of the shareware stuff like fruitmenu windowshade have different versions... From a developer's view are there any commonly known gotchas to look for? On Thursday, November 14, 2002, at 05:44 PM, Phil Dobbin wrote: -- From: Phil Dobbin[SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Thursday, November 14, 2002 5:44:56 PM To: David Wheeler; Ken Williams Cc: Rich Morin; Mac OS X Perl Subject: Re: OS X Installed numbers (Was Re: mac-toolbox) Auto forwarded by a Rule On 14/11/02 1:05, David Wheeler [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Wednesday, November 13, 2002, at 04:27 PM, Ken Williams wrote: 2) High-end users who are dying to switch, but need to wait until their software is properly supported, or until they can properly do a massive switchover of technologies in their business You can probably blame Quark for about 90% of this. They're *really* far behind updating QuarkXPress to Mac OS X, and they still pretty well own the professional design layout market. This is especially true here in the U.K. The overwhelming majority of Mac users here are in the design/bureaux/newspaper business and won't touch OS X with a bargepole exclusively because of Quark. There are hopes that OS X may eat into the Oracle/Unix/db market but it's a *very* long shot. Local Perl Monger groups are reporting lay offs and the vast majority of _them_ are Windoze users. Switch, whether from Mac OS 9 or Win32, definitely ain't happening here :-( Regards, Phil.
Re: OS X Installed numbers (Was Re: mac-toolbox)
At 7:58 -0500 15/11/02, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Well, I for one, use Maya from SGI|Alias|Waefront - and it doesn;t support 10.2 - there are a number of dialog boxen which get very screwed up by it. Are there any other packages which work under 10.1- not in 10.2+ ? Yes, there have been quite a number of programs with problems under 10.2, I don't have any particular gotchas, but lots of programs required updating for 10.2. Enjoy, Peter. -- http://www.interarchy.com/ http://download.interarchy.com/
Re: OS X: iTunes to HTML, by yours truly
you shouldn't have any problem installing any of the dependencies with CPAN.pm though. did you have problems? I did, but if you ask me what they were, I've forgotten. I remember running the command two or three times, getting different errors on some of the dependencies, and then shrugging and moving on. My biggest problem wasn't installation, but the sheer amount of dependencies - something like 20 additional modules needed just for an iTunes parser? That's insane. That's just a personal preference though. Annnyways, running it now, the last I get is: # BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at blib/lib/Mac/iTunes/AppleScript.pm line 10. # Compilation failed in require at (eval 38) line 2. FAILED--Further testing stopped: Mac::iTunes::AppleScript did not compile make: *** [test_dynamic] Error 35 The very first error I get is in Test::Pod: t/pod_ok...NOK 3# STDERR is: # # Failed test (t/pod_ok.t at line 36) # # Pod had errors in [t/pod/bad.pod] # # *** WARNING: No numeric argument for =over at line 9 in file t/pod/bad.pod # # *** ERROR: =over on line 9 without closing =back (at head1) at line 13 in file t/pod/bad.pod # # t/pod/bad.pod has 1 pod syntax error. That starts cascading into errors in Text::Prereq: BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at /Users/morbus/.cpan/build/Test-Prereq-0.18/t/pod.t line 8. Can't locate object method ARRAY via package B::begin_av at /Library/Perl/B/Module/Info.pm line 49. There's probably another fifty cascading errors past that. the XML format doesn't gve you everything that iTunes knows about the mp3 files. you'll have to look in the iTunes Music Library for some of it. Oh? Any ideas off the top what's missing? here's a quick Mac::iTunes script to do the same thing. you can do just about anything you like in the template file. if you want real control, separate data generation from presentation. :) Heh, funny - I'm a huUUge fan of Text::Template, but decided not to use it because I wanted the script as standalonish as possible. -- Morbus Iff ( relax have a happy meal ) Culture: http://www.disobey.com/ and http://www.gamegrene.com/ Tech: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/779 - articles and weblog icq: 2927491 / aim: akaMorbus / yahoo: morbus_iff / jabber.org: morbus
Re: OS X: iTunes to HTML, by yours truly
you shouldn't have any problem installing any of the dependencies with CPAN.pm though. did you have problems? dependencies, and then shrugging and moving on. My biggest problem wasn't installation, but the sheer amount of dependencies - something like 20 additional modules needed just for an iTunes parser? That's insane. That's To be more fair and accurate: - I was exaggerating. - Most of the dependencies were second-level ones. It's still early yet. -- Morbus Iff ( relax have a happy meal ) Culture: http://www.disobey.com/ and http://www.gamegrene.com/ Tech: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/779 - articles and weblog icq: 2927491 / aim: akaMorbus / yahoo: morbus_iff / jabber.org: morbus
Re: OS X Installed numbers (Was Re: mac-toolbox)
On 14/11/02 1:05, David Wheeler [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Wednesday, November 13, 2002, at 04:27 PM, Ken Williams wrote: 2) High-end users who are dying to switch, but need to wait until their software is properly supported, or until they can properly do a massive switchover of technologies in their business You can probably blame Quark for about 90% of this. They're *really* far behind updating QuarkXPress to Mac OS X, and they still pretty well own the professional design layout market. This is especially true here in the U.K. The overwhelming majority of Mac users here are in the design/bureaux/newspaper business and won't touch OS X with a bargepole exclusively because of Quark. There are hopes that OS X may eat into the Oracle/Unix/db market but it's a *very* long shot. Local Perl Monger groups are reporting lay offs and the vast majority of _them_ are Windoze users. Switch, whether from Mac OS 9 or Win32, definitely ain't happening here :-( Regards, Phil.
Re: OS X: iTunes to HTML, by yours truly
On Friday, November 15, 2002, at 05:53 AM, _brian_d_foy wrote: In article p05200f00b9f941ddf9bc@[63.173.138.149], Morbus Iff [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: My biggest problem wasn't installation, but the sheer amount of dependencies - something like 20 additional modules needed just for an iTunes parser? it's not just an iTunes parser. i only have about 7 explicit dependencies, and most of those are only for testing. It's sometimes better to just include testing dependencies in t/lib or similar, or if you were to use Module::Build instead of MakeMaker, as a 'build-time' dependency. Otherwise it creates extra burden on people installing. -Ken
Re: OS X Installed numbers (Was Re: mac-toolbox)
On Wednesday, November 13, 2002, at 04:27 PM, Ken Williams wrote: 2) High-end users who are dying to switch, but need to wait until their software is properly supported, or until they can properly do a massive switchover of technologies in their business You can probably blame Quark for about 90% of this. They're *really* far behind updating QuarkXPress to Mac OS X, and they still pretty well own the professional design layout market. D -- David Wheeler AIM: dwTheory [EMAIL PROTECTED] ICQ: 15726394 http://david.wheeler.net/ Yahoo!: dew7e Jabber: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: OS X Installed numbers (Was Re: mac-toolbox)
At 11:27 AM +1100 11/14/02, Ken Williams wrote: On Wednesday, November 13, 2002, at 03:58 PM, Rich Morin wrote: At 8:45 PM -0500 11/12/02, John Gruber wrote: Even Apple admits that they expect only 20 percent of the Mac user base to be running OS X by the end of 2002. It could be quite a long time before that number gets to 50. There are ~25 million Macs out there. 20% of this is ~5 million. If Apple sells ~5 million Macs in 2003 (all running OSX) and another 10% of the existing base switch over, you have ~50% by the end of 2003. Eh? 5M new Macs, all on OS X, brings the ratio to 10M OS X, 20M MacOS. Then 10% or the existing base is 2.5M, which would bring it to 12.5M OS X, 17.5M MacOS. That's still only 41.7% for OS X. Sorry for the sloppy math. Bear in mind, however, that I also left out the issue of folks who simply abandon their old Macs. This tends to bring the percentage back up. In any case, my point was that it won't take all _that_ long to reach 50%. However, I'm generally optimistic about it - I'm guessing that most of the MacOS users are in one of the following categories: 1) People who can't upgrade hardware or software for various reasons, so they keep a static system which doesn't need (and can't get anymore) much support 2) High-end users who are dying to switch, but need to wait until their software is properly supported, or until they can properly do a massive switchover of technologies in their business There are doubtless some people who stick with MacOS because they just like it better, but I bet there aren't very many of them. There is also the group that is sticking to Mac OS for reasons of caution. I expect many of these folks to switch over in the next year, however... -r -- email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; phone: +1 650-873-7841 http://www.cfcl.com/rdm- my home page, resume, etc. http://www.cfcl.com/Meta - The FreeBSD Browser, Meta Project, etc. http://www.ptf.com/dossier - Prime Time Freeware's DOSSIER series http://www.ptf.com/tdc - Prime Time Freeware's Darwin Collection
Re: OS X Installed numbers (Was Re: mac-toolbox)
On Wednesday, November 13, 2002, at 06:06 PM, Rich Morin wrote: There is also the group that is sticking to Mac OS for reasons of caution. I expect many of these folks to switch over in the next year, however... Some will also stick to Mac OS for a while because it's still faster than Mac OS X for a lot of things. Pity, that. David -- David Wheeler AIM: dwTheory [EMAIL PROTECTED] ICQ: 15726394 http://david.wheeler.net/ Yahoo!: dew7e Jabber: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: OS X: iTunes to HTML, by yours truly
In article p05200f01b9f8db35ea84@[63.173.138.149], Morbus Iff [EMAIL PROTECTED]
wrote:
I've recently been reorganizing my mp3 collections, and part of the reason
was because I wanted to generate a listing of my albums automatically, but
with ultimate control over the display. Most of the shareware/freeware
converters worked, but didn't give me enough control.
here's a quick Mac::iTunes script to do the same thing. you can do just about
anything you like in the template file. if you want real control, separate
data generation from presentation. :)
#!/usr/bin/perl
use Mac::iTunes;
use Text::Template 'fill_in_file';
my $template = $ARGV[0] || die Specify an output template file\n;
my $file = $ARGV[1] || $ENV{HOME}/Music/iTunes/iTunes 3 Music Library;
my $playlist = $ARGV[2] || 'Library';
die Music library file [$file] does not exist\n unless -e $file;
die Output template file [$file] does not exist\n unless -e $template;
my $itunes = Mac::iTunes-read( $file );
die unless ref $itunes;
my $playlist = $itunes-get_playlist( $playlist );
print fill_in_file( $template, HASH =
{
playlist = $playlist-title,
items= [ $playlist-items ],
} );
Here's a template file example to make tab delimited output.
{
use Mac::iTunes::Item;
my $string = Playlist $playlist\n;
foreach my $item ( @items )
{
$string .= join \t, map { $item-$_ } qw(title artist);
}
$string;
}
Here's a template for an HTML table.
html
head
titlePlaylist { $playlist }/title
/head
body
table
{
use Mac::iTunes::Item;
use CGI qw(:html);
foreach my $item ( @items )
{
$string .= Tr( td( $item-title ), td( $item-artist ) );
}
$string;
}
/table
/body
/html
Re: OS X meltdown
On Wednesday, October 23, 2002, at 11:48 AM, Puneet Kishor wrote: several reasons... - putting a computer to sleep still consumes power. Not very much. I'm one of those people who only sleeps my iBook, I never turn it off. The machine can go several days asleep without losing more than a tiny amount off the battery. It's essentially the same as turned off - the battery seems to drain about the same amount when the machine is turned off. - the computer seems to lose its tcp settings on wake... this was a known problem in OS 9, and I have personally experienced it in OS X... I wake up the computer and it doesn't know how to get out to the internet via my switch to DHCP-ed cable mode to the outside world. I have to log into the switch, release the ip address, and have the cable modem get a new lease. Weird. I use lots of different DHCP environments, and what seems to happen is that when I wake from sleep, the OS automatically renews its leases. In fact, if I'm having network or video problems, closing the lid and re-opening it (after a few seconds) is a pretty dependable way of *fixing* problems. - I may still want to turn off the computer. Yup. I do this when I get on an airplane, because they may want me to remove my battery at a moment's notice at the security screening. -Ken
Re: OS X meltdown
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: A computer-clueless co-worker of mine had a similar problem under OS 10.1.??. She reinstalled the OS on top of the current fubarred installation and things were magically fixed. YMMV. It's just another anecdote, but our iMac booted recently to a root shell, requesting a manual fsck. My wife, knowing nothing about Unix, simply cycled power on the computer to fix it. It tried to boot, but complained about a lot of things being gone in /etc. She reinstalled from the Jaguar CDs, and the system came back, and knew about all of the accounts and other info that I assumed would have to be recreated. The only thing lost was the password change my daughter had done the night before. I was impressed. Past Unix experience told me we were hosed when she didn't do the manual fsck. So, I would say if all looks lost, reinstalling over the top *might* restore things to sanity. No guarantees, but worth a try. Geoff -- Geoff Allen, [EMAIL PROTECTED], http://www.wsu.edu/~geoff/ I love being a sysadmin, because it is the only job where going non-linear *always* solves the problem. -- Mark Irwin Bentkower, [EMAIL PROTECTED], in alt.sysadmin.recovery
Re: OS X meltdown
On Wednesday, October 23, 2002, at 02:12 PM, Trey Harris wrote: Yeah, but this whole episode was presaged by a spinning-beachball-of-death attack. [...] This happens with some regularity to me, and the only answer seems to be to just powerdown. Am I the only one who sees this? It must happen once a month or more, though it seems to be somewhat rarer with Jaguar than it was with 10.1. Happens to me occasionally, but as you say, it's much less frequent with Jaguar. So no, it's not just you.
Re: OS X meltdown
I saw the spinning beach ball of death a lot with 10.0.4, and then less with 10.1.x and now with 10.2 I still see it, but not quite as often it seems. This is on a G4 with 768 MB of RAM. Nowadays it seems to just affect one app rather than the whole system... which isn't quite as bad, a force quit usually takes care of it. Still, it make one wonder if a reboot would help clear/clean things up. (Can you tell I've been using Macs forever? ;) Pete Sherm Pendley wrote: On Wednesday, October 23, 2002, at 02:17 PM, Dan Sugalski wrote: At 2:12 PM -0400 10/23/02, Trey Harris wrote: Yeah, but this whole episode was presaged by a spinning-beachball-of-death attack. One of those where a seemingly innocuous click on a menu starts the spinning ball in one app, and then over the next minute or two, the spinning ball spreads to every other app, you can't logout--you can't pull up a logout dialog--attempts to ssh in never respond, etc. This happens with some regularity to me, and the only answer seems to be to just powerdown. Am I the only one who sees this? I occasionally see something similar, and it happens when I've got huge amounts of swap in use, relative to memory. I've never seen this happen - ever. I've been using OS X since DP4, and I'm still using X.I.V. I agree with Dan, that it's probably related to swap usage; I've got 1G of RAM, so my machine rarely (if ever) swaps. sherm--
(OT)Re: OS X meltdown
On Thursday, Oct 24, 2002, at 11:03 US/Pacific, Lou Moran wrote: Not the case with my stuff. I have a second drive that I have installed all my apps to (except the ones that insist on being in /Applications) so that saved a lot of time. I also kept my mail and my /Documents folder (although I don't save my documents there but iTunes seems to). But I ended up resetting nearly every preference. My guess is that they live in ~/Library or something. They do indeed, at least for the well behaving apps! ~/Library is *supposed* to be where that sort of stuff is kept (look in ~/Library/Preferences for preferences specifically). ~/Library (same for /Library) is where most things that a user wouldn't normally modify by hand are kept (not that there are not very good reasons to occasionally modify these things). - Daniel C. Stillwaggon ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
Re: OS X meltdown
On Thursday, October 24, 2002, at 12:29 PM, Trey Harris wrote: In case anyone wonders (or cares), I ran DiskWarrior last night, and after twelve hours (!) of repair, my machine came back behaving much more nicely. At the very least, I could once again use the Finder. I also ran the Disk Permissions Repair. 12 hours? Wow, that drive had problems... tell me, were there overlapped/crosslinked files? Unfortunately, the fonts are still all missing from the system, and no amount of dragging them into and out of the Fonts folder makes any difference, sigh. Everything is *much* more speedy when running with just the ten default system fonts, however--300+ installed fonts seems to really bog things down. It's the price you pay for having a professional designer as a spouse... Do yourself a favor and invest in a font management utility like Suitcase or Font Reserve. This way your wife can set up font sets organized how she sees fit (job, client) and you won't have the overhead of all of those fonts. BTW, I don't know if your performance improvement is due to fewer fonts being active but rather to the elimination of a problematic HDD. Ah well, I came to OS X as sort of a Linux refugee. I guess I'm trading off the immense amount of time you can spend fixing Linux problems for the fact that on a proprietary OS you sometimes *can't* fix all your problems Unfortunately, not yet. OS X is *alot* more forgiving about dealing with corrupted hard drive directories and fragmentation. In many cases under OS 9 and earlier the system just wouldn't boot. That may actually have been better as it would force one to repair the corruption. It appears that under OS X the forgiving nature of the OS towards the HDD creates a ton of problems. I am completely ignorant of the advantages of a journaled FS. To steer this thread even further OT, perhaps someone more enlightened about JFSes could elaborate a bit? Phil Burk Systems Support Technician Wiley Publishing, Inc. 10475 Crosspoint Blvd Indianapolis, IN 46256 317.572.3049 phone 317.572.1049 fax [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: OS X meltdown
On Thursday, Oct 24, 2002, at 13:50 America/New_York, Ian Ragsdale wrote: The only truly annoying part of this is the number of shareware apps I have which do *not* send their registrations via email. Once I clear the disk, I'm going to lose the registration keys, unless I find the patience to track down where every one of these apps store them. There does not seem to be a clear pattern in the first few I've looked at. *grumble* Most of the companies I dealt with when I did my disk wipe/damn upgrade my ass/install 10.2 responded within minutes with my Hi, I'm stupid and lost my Reg # email most mac applications are very good about storing all preferences in the users's preferences folder. Not the case with my stuff. I have a second drive that I have installed all my apps to (except the ones that insist on being in /Applications) so that saved a lot of time. I also kept my mail and my /Documents folder (although I don't save my documents there but iTunes seems to). But I ended up resetting nearly every preference. My guess is that they live in ~/Library or something. -- Lou Moran [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://ellem.dyn.dhs.org:5281/resume/
Re: OS X meltdown
In a message dated Thu, 24 Oct 2002, Ian Ragsdale writes: You should be able to re-install without having to reinstall everything. Since only Apple stuff goes in /System, the archive install option on the 10.2 disk should move the /System folder and reinstall all the system files without disturbing everything else. *Should*. My system has been acting so strangely that I'm very suspicious of anything short of a reformat of the disk. I might give it a try, but this has knocked me out of commission for three days, and I'm thinking it's better to get it all over with than take the chance that at some random point in the future it will all happen again Trey
Re: OS X meltdown
You should be able to re-install without having to reinstall everything. Since only Apple stuff goes in /System, the archive install option on the 10.2 disk should move the /System folder and reinstall all the system files without disturbing everything else. Ian On 10/24/02 12:29 PM, Trey Harris [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Time to haul out a small fortune of DVDs (but not quite enough to justify buying another FireWire disk, alas) to make backups before reinstalling, I think.
Re: OS X meltdown
In case anyone wonders (or cares), I ran DiskWarrior last night, and after twelve hours (!) of repair, my machine came back behaving much more nicely. At the very least, I could once again use the Finder. I also ran the Disk Permissions Repair. Unfortunately, the fonts are still all missing from the system, and no amount of dragging them into and out of the Fonts folder makes any difference, sigh. Everything is *much* more speedy when running with just the ten default system fonts, however--300+ installed fonts seems to really bog things down. It's the price you pay for having a professional designer as a spouse... Time to haul out a small fortune of DVDs (but not quite enough to justify buying another FireWire disk, alas) to make backups before reinstalling, I think. The only truly annoying part of this is the number of shareware apps I have which do *not* send their registrations via email. Once I clear the disk, I'm going to lose the registration keys, unless I find the patience to track down where every one of these apps store them. There does not seem to be a clear pattern in the first few I've looked at. *grumble* Oh, and installing Perl 5.8 again and all its modules so that it can run peacefully with the default 5.6.1 (and all *its* modules) is going to be a chore, too. Ah well, I came to OS X as sort of a Linux refugee. I guess I'm trading off the immense amount of time you can spend fixing Linux problems for the fact that on a proprietary OS you sometimes *can't* fix all your problems Trey
Re: OS X meltdown
On 10/24/02 12:41 PM, Trey Harris [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: In a message dated Thu, 24 Oct 2002, Ian Ragsdale writes: You should be able to re-install without having to reinstall everything. Since only Apple stuff goes in /System, the archive install option on the 10.2 disk should move the /System folder and reinstall all the system files without disturbing everything else. *Should*. My system has been acting so strangely that I'm very suspicious of anything short of a reformat of the disk. I might give it a try, but this has knocked me out of commission for three days, and I'm thinking it's better to get it all over with than take the chance that at some random point in the future it will all happen again If it was me, I'd back up my Users folder and my Applications folder, and do a clean install. If you create the users with the same UIDs, you should be able to just put the Users Applications folders back be pretty close to where you started - most mac applications are very good about storing all preferences in the users's preferences folder. Good luck, Ian
Re: OS X meltdown
On 10/23/02 10:54 AM, Puneet Kishor [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: don't know how you can solve this one, but for the future... get a $150 refurbished, external 40Gb firewire hd and Dan Kogai's most excellent, free psync (written in Perl!!! of course) configured to run on shutdown. If your computer crashes you still have the last good config. Shutdown? Was does it mean to shut down your computer? I seem to remember doing something like that under Mac OS 9, but that was so long ago I can't be certain. - geoff
Re: OS X meltdown
On Wednesday, October 23, 2002, at 11:38 AM, Puneet Kishor wrote: y'know geoff, methinks you are right. There was a shutdown folder in OS 9...dunno if it is in OS X. I actually just run the script manually, but I am sure in Unix there are shutdown scripts... I haven't explored in OS X, but in Linux there are a set of scripts that are run when rebooting or shutting down. I presume there will be something analagous in OS X. Geoff was making a joke, but his point is that in X there's not really any need to shutdown the computer anymore. Just put it to sleep, since it wakes so damn fast. I would suggest leaving the machine on all the time and installing a crontab entry to run psync at a specific time. Or, if you're on a laptop, install anacron and do it that way. There is no Shutdown folder in X as far as I am aware. There's not even a Startup folder, which is a shame. (Okay, there is, but you have to know how to write shell scripts. You can't just put an alias to something in there the way you could in 9.) jon
Re: OS X meltdown
Geoffrey F. Green wrote:
On 10/23/02 11:40 AM, David Wheeler [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
On Wednesday, October 23, 2002, at 08:38 AM, Puneet Kishor wrote:
y'know geoff, methinks you are right. There was a shutdown folder in
OS 9...dunno if it is in OS X. I actually just run the script
manually, but I am sure in Unix there are shutdown scripts... I
haven't explored in OS X, but in Linux there are a set of scripts that
are run when rebooting or shutting down. I presume there will be
something analagous in OS X.
I think Geoff was being facetious. Many of us OS X users shut down our
computers only rarely. Back in OS 9, one had to do it regularly, but no
more.
Correct. Guess I should have added the smiley!
no problem ;-)
That said, there is still value in what I said. I actually turn off my
computer all the time (well, _after_ everytime I turn it on ;-)
I use an iBook, and I just don't believe notebooks are designed for very
long use... their power supply heats up, they don't have adequate
ventilation, if using a battery, you can deplete their battery faster,
etc. Besides, what a waste of electricity. If I am not going to use the
computer for 12 hours, why have it on. One thing we forget here in the
US is that the rest of the world does not have uninterrupted power
supply... so, computers, even Unix boxes, are routinely shut down.
(While I am now in the US, once upon a time I was not. )
So, perhaps I should have added...
if {
you turn off your computer, figure out how to run
psync on shutdown; }
else {
crontab it }
thanks.
Re: OS X meltdown
Man, how these things take a life of their own. The original message was about help with a crashed OS X box. My suggestion was to backup using psync... now we have this thread... ok... Jonathan Baumgartner wrote: On Wednesday, October 23, 2002, at 11:57 AM, Puneet Kishor wrote: I use an iBook, and I just don't believe notebooks are designed for very long use... their power supply heats up, they don't have adequate ventilation, I disagree with this. Are you actually saying that a powerbook shouldn't be used for extended periods of time? I use my TiBook easily 12 hours a day, and have no problems whatsoever. we can disagree... we can agree to disagree. No, I am not saying a powerbook shouldn't be used for extended periods of time. I am not saying I have problems using my iBook 12 hours a day. I am saying that when I am NOT using it for 12 hours I find it better to turn it off than to put it to sleep. if using a battery, you can deplete their battery faster, etc. Well yeah, using the battery uses the battery. No way around that as far as I know. :) ok... so, once again I should have spelled out everything. _If_ the battery is in the computer, _and_ the computer is powered by electricity, _then_ the battery life can shorten considerably. While newer batteries are not supposed to suffer from memory effect, I have experienced first hand where a battery was left in the computer that was always powered on by electricity... eventually the battery life became less than half an hour. This is because the computer is powered by the battery, which gets drained on use. The battery is being charged by the electric current, which charges the battery almost as it is being drained... so the battery is never drained almost completely, etc. Again, I know the new batteries are not supposed to suffer from this, but I don't believe the hype... a new battery is upward of $100, and I just don't want to find out the wrong way. I save my battery for when I am actually travelling with the iBook. At home, it is always powered by electricity. Well yeah, using the battery uses the battery. No way around that as far as I know. :) Besides, what a waste of electricity. If I am not going to use the computer for 12 hours, why have it on. Why not put it to sleep? That's one of the best things about OS X, IMO. Sleep and wake are almost instantaneous. It's much faster than waiting around for the thing to boot up every time you want to use it. several reasons... - putting a computer to sleep still consumes power. - the computer seems to lose its tcp settings on wake... this was a known problem in OS 9, and I have personally experienced it in OS X... I wake up the computer and it doesn't know how to get out to the internet via my switch to DHCP-ed cable mode to the outside world. I have to log into the switch, release the ip address, and have the cable modem get a new lease. - I may still want to turn off the computer. The point is -- if you don't ever turn off the computer then psync with crontab will be a good solution. anacron is only a partial solution because it doesn't handle time diffs of less than a day. if you do turn off the computer, then either remember to run psync before turning it off, or figure out how to have it run automatically on shutdown. anyway, that last para above was the message. The rest is... I dunno... noise maybe. Puneet.
Re: OS X meltdown
Ok, steering back on track... I always create another user account on my OS X machines. If you see something extremely odd, reboot and log in as another user and verify that the problem is with the system, and not just an individual user's account. If you're a terminal lover you can always boot into single user mode and see what's up as well... Pete Puneet Kishor wrote: Man, how these things take a life of their own. The original message was about help with a crashed OS X box. My suggestion was to backup using psync...
Re: OS X meltdown
On Wednesday, October 23, 2002, at 01:12 PM, Trey Harris wrote: In a message dated Wed, 23 Oct 2002, Bruce A. Burdick, Jr. writes: You could have a bad hard drive. That might explain the behavior you are seeing. Wiping the drive and reinstalling OS X may work. But if it's the drive, you're not out of the woods. Yeah, but this whole episode was presaged by a spinning-beachball-of-death attack. One of those where a seemingly innocuous click on a menu starts the spinning ball in one app, and then over the next minute or two, the spinning ball spreads to every other app, you can't logout--you can't pull up a logout dialog--attempts to ssh in never respond, etc. This happens with some regularity to me, and the only answer seems to be to just powerdown. Am I the only one who sees this? It must happen once a month or more, though it seems to be somewhat rarer with Jaguar than it was with 10.1. *That's* what caused the hour-long fsck, I think--cycling power on a running machine. Maybe there's disk problems too, but I don't want to think about that yet... Trey, I would try two things before doing anything drastic like wiping that drive. Boot the machine with a DiskWarrior CD and run that utility. If there are any problems with the HDD they'll be gone. Period. Then I would open Disk Utility and run the repair privileges utility. If anything's wacky with the base system (and it is in your case) this will reset the privs to their installed state. If you're not familiar with this util, it'll only touch the Apple-installed stuff on your box, not anything in /Users or other apps you've installed. Good luck. Phil Burk Systems Support Technician Wiley Publishing, Inc. 10475 Crosspoint Blvd Indianapolis, IN 46256 317.572.3049 phone 317.572.1049 fax [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: OS X meltdown
At 2:44 PM -0400 10/23/02, John Siracusa wrote: On 10/23/02 2:17 PM, Dan Sugalski wrote: Something in freeciv leaks memory badly, both on the X side *and* on the Window Server side. (I've seen the WindowServer process have 250M+ mapped in, which on a 384M system is a lot) That's (probably) not indicative of a leak in the window server. First, if you look closely you should see that almost all of the window server's memory is marked as shared. Specifically, the window buffers are shared with each application that has windows open. Right, but this is RSIZE, not VSIZE. (Though I admit I get cranky when I see trivial apps have 100M or more VSIZE but that's just a pet peeve from someone feeling codgerish :) I realize that it's not the window server per se that's leaking--it's definitely something on the X11 side of things. The window server's huge memory use is just a side effect, and it goes down when XDarwin's killed off. I mentioned it as a place to start troubleshooting, since if the problem shows up mostly when using X11 apps, that would be a good place to look... -- Dan --it's like this--- Dan Sugalski even samurai [EMAIL PROTECTED] have teddy bears and even teddy bears get drunk
Re: OS X meltdown
On Wednesday, October 23, 2002, at 02:17 PM, Dan Sugalski wrote: At 2:12 PM -0400 10/23/02, Trey Harris wrote: Yeah, but this whole episode was presaged by a spinning-beachball-of-death attack. One of those where a seemingly innocuous click on a menu starts the spinning ball in one app, and then over the next minute or two, the spinning ball spreads to every other app, you can't logout--you can't pull up a logout dialog--attempts to ssh in never respond, etc. This happens with some regularity to me, and the only answer seems to be to just powerdown. Am I the only one who sees this? I occasionally see something similar, and it happens when I've got huge amounts of swap in use, relative to memory. I've never seen this happen - ever. I've been using OS X since DP4, and I'm still using X.I.V. I agree with Dan, that it's probably related to swap usage; I've got 1G of RAM, so my machine rarely (if ever) swaps. sherm-- If you listen to a UNIX shell, can you hear the C?
Re: OS X meltdown
On Wednesday, October 23, 2002, at 01:16 PM, Trey Harris wrote: Well, I can certainly do that. But exactly what should I be looking for? As a Unix machine, the box seems to be responding fine--it's still doing firewalling and NAT just fine, for instance. It's just the Mac-y stuff that's fubar'ed. There is a version file that gets clobbered which prevents the GUI from starting up. /System/Library/CoreServices/SystemVersion.plist There was actually a bug back in one of he 10.x updates when it was first released for testing (long since fixed)... it didn't write the file out when it was done. The end result was a box that ran fine as a Unix machine, but no GUI. It's an ASCII text file, This is the correct file from 10.2.1 ===cut here== ?xml version=1.0 encoding=UTF-8? !DOCTYPE plist SYSTEM file://localhost/System/Library/DTDs/PropertyList.dtd plist version=0.9 dict keyProductBuildVersion/key string6D52/string keyProductCopyright/key stringApple Computer, Inc. 1983-2002/string keyProductName/key stringMac OS X/string keyProductUserVisibleVersion/key string10.2.1/string keyProductVersion/key string10.2.1/string /dict /plist ===cut here== T.T.F.N. William H. Magill [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: OS X meltdown
In a message dated Wed, 23 Oct 2002, William H. Magill writes: There is a version file that gets clobbered which prevents the GUI from starting up. /System/Library/CoreServices/SystemVersion.plist Not my problem--the file I have and the file you posted match, but thanks for the suggestion. I'm going to try the DiskWarrior suggestion tonight--heading to the Apple store now to pick up a copy. Trey
Re: OS X meltdown
In a message dated Wed, 23 Oct 2002, Charles Albrecht writes: At 11:48 AM -0500 10/23/2002, Puneet Kishor wrote: if you do turn off the computer, then either remember to run psync before turning it off, or figure out how to have it run automatically on shutdown. Although SystemStarter, which processes and prioritizes the entries in OS X's StartupItems folders, is documented to allow 'stop' or 'restart' parameters in addition to 'start' to be sent to the StartupItems scripts themselves, this ability hasn't yet been activated. I had heard rumors that Jaguar would enable this, but read recently (on O'Reilly's macdevcenter.com) that it's still missing in 10.2. Eventually having it run automatically on shutdown will be something we can accomplish on OS X. Of course, that wouldn't have helped me. The first thing I do when I have a crash and get the system back up is reboot it again so that I'm sure I get a clean cold boot. (Call it superstition, but a system that has gone through a clean shutdown/reboot cycle has always seemed more stable to me than one coming right back from a crash.) That means I'd really need room for *two* images of my disk to go back to before the problem erupted. Really, even that probably wouldn't do it, as several have noted--my problem has probably been burgeoning for quite a while now, and who knows how far back I'd have to go to get to the point before it occurred. Disk is cheap, but it isn't cheap enough for daily backups over any appreciable length of time. :-) Trey
Re: os x specific DBD::mysql insert_id problem?
On Tue, 22 Oct 2002, william ross wrote:
i doubt that this is an actual bug, or there would have been a
discussion before, but just in case someone can save what remains of my
hair:
anyone aware of an os-x-specific problem with dbd::mysql's
$dbh-{last_insertid}?
it always returns zero on my powerbook, but the identical applications
work perfectly everywhere else I've tried them.
[snip]
I've been updating like crazy to try and make it go away, to no avail.
Here's the resulting setup:
perl 5.8.0
DBI 1.30
mysql Ver 11.18 Distrib 3.23.53, for apple-darwin6.1 (powerpc)
msql-mysql tools 1.2219 (ie DBD::mysql 2.0419)
I saw this behavior in older DBD::mysql's as well. 2.1020 works properly
for me at least (with 10.2.1, perl 5.6.1, and DBI 1.30).
--
Chris Reinhardt
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Systems Architect
Dynamic DNS Network Services
http://www.dyndns.org/
Re: OS X Smokers
On Monday, September 30, 2002, at 03:15 AM, Jonas B.Nielsen wrote: Hello All, After having attended the YAPC::Europe a few weeks ago, I signed up as a Perl smoke tester. So I just want to hear whether there are any other OS X smoke testers on this list, and whether they have some possible tips? Forgive me for being dumb, but what's a smoke tester? Erik -- Erik Price (zombies roam) email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] jabber: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: OS X Smokers
On 30/09/2002 11:04, Erik Price [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Monday, September 30, 2002, at 03:15 AM, Jonas B.Nielsen wrote: Hello All, After having attended the YAPC::Europe a few weeks ago, I signed up as a Perl smoke tester. So I just want to hear whether there are any other OS X smoke testers on this list, and whether they have some possible tips? Forgive me for being dumb, but what's a smoke tester? http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/smoke-test.html and http://qa.perl.org/ Regards, Phil.
Re: OS X Smokers
perl.org quoth: The smokers does smoke tests of the bleading edge Perl on various platforms to help the developers spot new bugs as fast as possibly. man sounds like a world of pain..
Re: OS X Smokers
The smokers does smoke tests of the bleading edge Perl on a spelling mistake on the third para of the quality assurance page! though it could be argued it is intentional, hope this is not the way of lexicon to come... ;-) On Monday, September 30, 2002, at 05:24 AM, phildobbin wrote: http://qa.perl.org/ On Monday, September 30, 2002, at 07:03 AM, Robin wrote: perl.org quoth: The smokers does smoke tests of the bleading edge Perl on various platforms to help the developers spot new bugs as fast as possibly. man sounds like a world of pain..
Re: OS X Smokers
On Mon, 30 Sep 2002, Puneet Kishor wrote: The smokers does smoke tests of the bleading edge Perl on I think that's an intentional pun -- bleeding edge / leading edge. Bleadperl seems to be the nickname for whatever the current development version of the language happens to be at at any given point. -- Chris Devers[EMAIL PROTECTED] Q: How do you play religious roulette? A: You stand around in a circle and blaspheme and see who gets struck by lightning first.
