fplanque: dev blog

What do you do if you have, say, an encrypted sparsebundle and some day you try to open it and you discover it shows up as a plain folder in the Finder instead as a bundle icon? Double clicking will just open the folder and show you the bands that make up the bundle. So I don’t know how you fix the issue in the Finder but I know how you mount the sparsebundle and access the files: just open a Terminal window and type this: hdid "/path/to/bundle/name_of_bundle.sparsebundle/" Then you’ll have your virtual drive mounted on teh desktop, and if need be you can just copy them to a new sparsebundle.

I finally ordered the Mac Pro that will kick the last “standing” PC out of this place :D

I feel lighter already :))

Switching & Software

This is going to be my main/development machine. The PC I had for this since 2006 is actually still good from a hardware standpoint… the problem is with the software.

Windows to begin with. Everything has been said about Vista already. XP feels limited by now and I don’t believe in Windows 7.  Also, it’s about software that isn’t available for Windows at all, like Things.

Of course there’s also Windows software that doesn’t work on Mac OS X. Nusphere PhpED for example. But for these cases there’s VMware Fusion! Plus, there’s so much more you can do with virtual machines once you start to get the feel of it…

My specs… and why :)

Now, even though it’s about my main work machine and a business expense (which basically cuts the price in half due to zero taxation), I tried to stay reasonable… Yet I feel like it’s Christmas already ;)

• Quad Core 2.66 GHz – Actually, I’m a bit concerned about fan noise levels with higher speeds or with 8 cores :p
• 8 GB of RAM in order to run several VMware virtual machines at once. Also, I know from experience that as soon as you’re out of RAM, performance goes down the tubes (RAM is much more important than processor speed).
• 1 TB 7200 rpm drive – Staying away from RAID for now because let’s face it… I don’t crunch that much data and the occasional video editing I do is not HD (errr… yet :p)
• 2x NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 512MB graphic cards to run my 3 displays. Being able to connect 3 displays was my main reason for going Mac Pro instead of high-end iMac. There’s three reasons why I keep my existing 2006 Sony monitors:
  • They work just fine and there is no software update issue
  • They have incomparable color rendering compared to 95% of other displays on the market
  • Apple may have tempted me to buy bigger and nicely designed screens but I just hate the glossy glass with a passion. Sure they look better when they’re off. But when you try to work on them you always have window (real world windows) or lamp (real world lamps, not linux-apache-yada-yada) reflections somewhere.

…

• and of course: Upgrade to Snow Leopard included for just 10€ S&H :p

Ideally I would have moved my ATI graphics cards from the PC to the Mac, but I was just easier to order new ones:

• First you cannot order a Mac with zero graphics cards and bring your own. I’m not very happy about that but I understand why Apple would only ship machines that can work right out of the box.
• Once you have one, it’s pretty cheap to buy the second matching one.
• I’m not sure the old ATIs have drivers for the mac…
• … and finally those ATI cards were the noisiest components of the PC. I hope Moore’s law will contribute to giving me quieter cards for the same thoughput ;)

OK now in between assembling, shipping and getting the delivery guy not to show up at 8 a.m. (like they always do) it’s probably going to take almost 2 weeks… during which I expect to wear the current PC down to it’s bones… and release b2evolution 3.x stable too!

Back to work!

We had them before, but suddenly in Mac OS X 10.5 they disappeared! However, whenever I want to grab something on the network, my intuitive reflex is to look for the network drive icon on the desktop!

I had to dig around quite a while to find teh setting to bring them back. No it's not in the System Preferences... No it's not in the UI tweaks... it is in... the Finder Preferences!

1. Click on teh desktop
2. In the Finder menu, click Preferences...
3. Select the General tab
4. Under "Show these items on the Desktop:", check "Connected servers"

Now you're back to normal.

Btw, you may also take the opportunity to reduce the clutter under "SHARED" in your Finder window sidebars:

1. Same as above but select the Sidebar tab
2. Uncheck "Bonjour Computers"

One thing I hate about US keyboards is that they don’t let me type my French special characters by any memorable strecth – what’s the dead key for the cedilla again? (ç)

One thing I hate about French keytboards is that they have all the punctuation keys messed up… which is particularily painful when trying to write code. < and > share a single key! [ and ] require THREE fingers! (you’d better give un on using arrays!! )

The only bearable solution in the long run is to remap the keys to an order that makes a little more sense.

I just found the perfect tool for create new keyboard layouts on the mac: Ukelele !

Ukele easily lets you reassign characters to keys with any hot key combination and it also lets you create dead keys (multiple keypress sequences to create one character).

Now one question remains: which keyboard should I start with: a French AZERTY or a US QWERTY keyboard? (All mac keyboard layouts here)

By the way: if you’re looking for a keymap editor for Windows, here’s one from Microsoft.

Tested with MAMP 1.7.2, b2evolution 3.2 and Mac OS X 10.5.7 :

1. Download and install MAMP (Free) into the Applications folder
2. Start MAMP and make sure you get the MAMP start page
3. Download b2evolution and unzip it into /Applications/MAMP/htdocs
4. Point yout browser to http://localhost:8888/b2evolution/ and follow install procedure
5. When prompted for mysql username and password use "root" and "root". (the mysql host is "localhost")
6. You're up and running, but with one caveat... when displaying blogs you'll run into incomplete pages and the php error log (/Applications/MAMP/logs/php_error.log) will give you a hint:

PHP Fatal error:  Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted

It doesn't make much sense that MAMP would come preconfigured with only 8MB of RAM available to apps. I bet that's an easy settign to change if you buy MAMP Pro (39 €). To fix this on the free version though, open the file /Applications/MAMP/conf/php5/php.ini with TextEdit. Find the line that starts with memory_limit = and edit it as follows:

memory_limit = 32M