So first I decided to consolidate all my development locally on my HackPro workstation, which is more than up to the task. But running all these different platforms and frameworks on my mac was a bit daunting; using the stock apache has always been a bit of a pain and compiling and configuring my own builds on the mac just seemed masochistic. Enter Bitnami stacks — self-contained development environments including Apache + MySQL + Rails/Django/PHP, with an amazing selection of every major platform built using these frameworks. Excellent… an atomic Apache + MySQL build for every development environment was exactly what I was looking for. And, as a bonus, once it’s installed, it’s portable: I can easily zip it up, copy it over to my MacBook, and take it with me without missing a beat. Bliss.

Oh, they also provide VM images and EC2 cloud instances if that’s more your thing.

Next task: accessing the utilities, libraries, and shell tools that I’m accustomed to developing with on Linux. For this, MacPorts is a must-have. With a few short commands, you can compile and install your own Perl, ImageMagick, ghostscript, etc., and all their dependencies in just a few minutes. Truly awesome.

Last thing on the agenda is getting everything in version control. That was pretty easy: I have a few Slicehost servers and it was not problem to set up a remote repository for my unversioned client code. If Slicehost isn’t your thing, there are services like Beanstalk too for Subversion hosting. All of the repositories I work with are Subversion based, and I’ve traditionally used the shell to manage my repositories. But this year, I’ve decided to look into some graphical SVN clients to see if they make managing my repositories and working directories any easier. The two main contenders on the Mac right now are Versions and Cornerstone; while quite close functionally, Versions seems to have the edge on the UI and polish, while Cornerstone has a bit more for advanced users. I’m using Cornerstone right now, and have been fairly impressed. Jury’s still out as I haven’t used it too much, and I’ve noticed the absence of some critical commands, e.g “svn merge” and “svn switch”. But it’s got most of the stuff I need, which might be enough, I certainly don’t mind using the shell for the heavy lifting. And I certainly do like a common interface to access all my repositories across a variety of remote servers.

Throw in your favorite editor, Textmate, Vim, Coda, or whatever, and now you’re cooking with gas! So that’s what I’ve got so far, and so far it’s been working pretty well. Develop on a mac? What works for you?

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To manually enable it, just use this terminal command:

defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain AppleFontSmoothing -int 2

As you can see from the picture, this setting makes quite a difference. Well this change is literally a welcome relief for the old eyeballs.

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Improved VM Management Interface

Generally, I haven’t been disappointed by Fusion yet, and v3 continues to build on and improve a great product. Their VM setup sequences make hands-free installations pretty easy, and they’ve even improved their Linux install process with automated VMware Tools installs as well. Throw in improved mac filesystem integration, a new menubar applet, and a high degree of customization, v3 does a nice job of striking that balance between the power and casual user in a single package. I’m definitely impressed.

Better Host OS Integration

If you’re running Fusion 3, drop a line and let me know what you think.

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Basically, by way of some trial and error through the settings, I discovered that if I left the CAISS pop-up blocker enabled, a lot of the javascript simply stopped in its tracks. In particular, I noticed that using any  jQuery effects with timers (e.g. $().toggle(500)) or AJAX requests that had timeouts set would fail. By using Firefox coupled with the Firebug plugin (Firebug is AMAZING, thank you Joe Hewitt et. al.), I was able to ascertain the following interesting clues:

• The CAISS popup blocker works by injecting a javascript file load into every HTML page the browser receives, and serves that page from a local webserver that runs on your local computer on a high port.
• This javascript file, xpopup.js, does a number of cute things, but most noticeably, it wraps the browsers setTimeout and setInterval and intercepts any code calls to these two functions.
• The wrapper’s job is essentially to disable window.open() before allowing any code passed to setTimeout or setInterval to execute. I suppose this is because a lot of sites attempt to circumvent popup blockers by placing timers on their popups.

Well, normally, I suppose this is a fine strategy and shouldn’t interfere with my client’s code as it doesn’t open any new windows. So, the wrapper should just execute the code, right? Unfortunately, no. The wrapper is busted and appears to balk at executing any code passed to it that contains newlines. I suppose CA assumed that no one would actually think to call setInterval with a multiline function right? Anyway, yes, jQuery does a lot of this.

After attempting to get my code to somehow play nice with the offending code, I found that it wasn’t possible. What was trivial, however, was simply disabling the blocker’s wrapper with a few lines of javascript:

$('document').ready(function() {
  if(window._orig_windowSetTimeout !== undefined)
    window.setTimeout = _orig_windowSetTimeout;
  if(window._orig_windowSetInterval !== undefined)
    window.setInterval = _orig_windowSetInterval;
});

So not only was the blocker buggy, it’s trivial to circumvent anyway. Nice work there CA.

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Waaaa! Only 3Mb/s?! What is this... DSL?

Now, for those who have had experience with Comcast techs, especially the contractors, you know it’s very hit and miss; usually miss. I’ve dealt with lots of them in various cities, and I was expecting a fairly similar experience, which usually involves some hand-waving and wire-wiggling combined with a BS explanation that doesn’t fix the problem. Well, holy cow, I ran into like the rockstar of techs this morning. Point-by-point, he ran tests on every point of the line, adjusted the signal where necessary to bring it within tolerances, made sure everything was working to spec, and then for good measure he noticed my drop cable from the pole was very old and poorly shielded, so he even ran a new cable to the house. I had been resigned to the reality that I’d probably never be able to get that replaced, but he just shook his head and said, “Why didn’t this get replaced before?” I know, that’s a good question, right?

Eventually, we nailed the cause of the problem, which turned out to be interference on my 802.11n 5ghz wireless band that was killing the throughput beyond 15 or 20 feet from the access point. Ok, so it wasn’t even an issue with the cable. But this guy totally spent a lot of time making sure everything was perfect with the cable regardless. Then for good measure, he left me his direct number and told me not to hesitate to call if I had any other problems. I felt like I was in the twilight zone.

After I complimented him as he was wrapping up for going “above and beyond,” he just shrugged and said, “just doing my job”. While this may be true, it just says something about the other techs and contractors out there, doesn’t it?

After adjusting some properties on my routers I’m happy to report that my download rates are now back to ludicrous speeds:

Back to ludicrous speed

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I had been using an unlocked 2G iPhone for the past couple of years on T-Mobile, and had been generally very happy with it. But I did want 3G access, and the faster chip and video capabilities of the new hardware were big enticements. Moreover, always needing to wait for the devteam to crack and unlock the iPhone OS, and then manually upgrading and patching it, while not too difficult, wasn’t very convenient either. And perhaps the final straw was that my T-Mobile coverage, while usually quite reliable, was extremely weak inside my new house. So I figured if the service was acceptable, there were enough reasons to upgrade and switch carriers.

Well, to my amazement, I get 4-5 bars inside my house, so that right there is a huge win. But using the 3GS with its real GPS, faster chip, and the rest of the upgrades has been a real pleasure to use. So absolutely no regrets here, it was a complete no-brainer. I’m just glad I living some place where AT&T actually seems to have good coverage here in Chicago.

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So it was with some interest that I began reading about various success stories of people installing Mac OS X on Netbooks (aka hackintoshes). From all reports, the Dell Mini 9 and MSI Wind were the most hardware compatible, with my Netbook, the Acer Aspire One having some core issues. But I figured I had nothing to lose by trying it out.

So, using iDeneb’s installer, along with some small tweaks, I had it going in about an hour. It’s a good install, but there are currently 3 notable problems: first, there are no working drivers for the Atheros wireless card, so I’m going to have to switch it out for a Broadcom 1390 (found one on ebay for 5 bucks) to get the wireless working. Second, the computer won’t sleep, at all. Lastly, while the SDHC card reader on the machine can be coaxed into reading SD (apparently, I haven’t tried it yet), the experimental driver does not support SDHC. yet.

So, after I swap the wifi out, apart from the sleep issue, it will be pretty near 100% functional. Not bad for a small cheap little Mac!

A nice little writeup on the install is here.

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It was a pretty odd moment of cognitive dissonance, I’m definitely not used to having something I coded have this kind of exposure. Aside from being novel though, it’s nice to know as a programmer that your code is actually being used for some benefit.

I suppose that’s generally true for any endeavor…

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I have a feeling these hiccups were mainly because I was attempting to watch a movie at 8pm on a Saturday night, and their streaming servers simply couldn’t keep up. Looks really promising though, if they get a handle on the bandwidth thing. I’m going to try again on a weeknight to see if I get better results…

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2. Good times
3. OMG..GH!!!