Macintosh

Hard Drive Upgrade

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My MacBookPro is now on the way to TechRestore for a 160 GB Hard Drive Upgrade. This will allow me to create a second boot partition to install Leopard & maybe even install BootCamp as well. Plus I’ll have room for several Parallels VMs for Linux & Vista.

New look for MacMegasite

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New MacMegasite Theme

Originally uploaded by mike3k.

I’m working on a new look for MacMegasite, based on the Aquasoft theme for Drupal, as well as a lightweight theme for mobile viewing. MacMegasite also has an enthusiastic new staff member, etomic13, who’s bringing new life to the site.

Fix for crash

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I came up with a fix for the APE-related crash I found a few days ago. It seems that signals can be delivered to any active thread. If you have APE installed, it injects its own thread into the application. If the signal happens to be sent to APE’s thread, there’s a chance bad things might happen.

The fix was for my signal handler to make sure it’s running in the thread we want, and if it isn’t, I send the signal to the proper thread and don’t do anything else.

void MySignalHandler(int SigNum)
{
	if (!pthread_equal(_my_signal_thread,pthread_self()))
	{
		pthread_kill(_my_signal_thread,SigNum);
		return;
	}
 ... etc ...

Elsewhere, I save a reference to the desired thread when I install the signal handlers:

main(int argc, char **argv)
{
	_my_signal_thread = pthread_self();
	signal(SIGIO, MySignalHandler);
 ... etc ...

Don't put stuff in my dock

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I don’t like application installers to add icons to my dock without my permission. I prefer to choose what appears in the dock. When I installed Stuffit Deluxe 11 it added icons for each of its applications to my dock & I didn’t notice any option to say whether or not I wanted those icons added. It also has a very sneaky installer. You simply drag it to your application folder and when you run it the first time it launches a setup assistant that looks a lot like Apple’s installer.

APE caused a crash

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I know Unsanity’s Application Enhancer is often unjustly blamed for crashes, but in this case it definitely caused one of my applications to crash, as shown in this stack frame from the crash report.

Thread 1 Crashed:
0   com.absolute.ctmweb      	0x0002b9a9 CheckForListen() + 253
1   com.absolute.ctmweb      	0x0002bba0 MyNot(int) + 28
2   libSystem.B.dylib        	0x9011108c _sigtramp + 49
3   libSystem.B.dylib        	0x9000a5c7 mach_msg_trap + 7
4   com.unsanity.ape         	0xc0001d12 __ape_agent + 307
5   libSystem.B.dylib        	0x90024b07 _pthread_body + 84

UPDATE: I realized that it’s my signal handler code being executed in APE’s thread.

Another iTunes 7 Change

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I found another new feature in iTunes 7 I haven’t seen mentioned anywhere else: when you purchase several songs from iTunes Store (it’s no longer called iTunes Music Store), it will download several items at once, which will be shown in a separate downloads list, rather than downloading each one separately.

I haven’t bought anything in iTunes Music Store for a while since I’m starting to dislike their DRM. Today I bought “Favori” by Thione Seck, which I only had as an import cassette.

New iPod

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I ordered a new iPod today, a black 80GB model to replace my 60GB iPod Photo (and probably also my PSP). I wasn’t that thrilled with the previous video iPod, but this one seems like a nice improvement. I’m becoming less happy with watching movies on my PSP because it’s such a pain converting videos (although the latest firmware makes it a lot better), limited capacity of the memory stick only lets me put a few videos & tunes on it, plus it won’t play videos purchased in iTunes Music Store.

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Apple 'crumbling'?

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We haven’t heard much from the nay-sayers lately. Did this guy see the same event everyone else did? I don’t think the iPod upgrades were ‘minor’. In fact I just ordered a new iPod.

Apple is losing its hip and unpredictable edge as it risks being left behind by the very technology it helped to proliferate, says Victor Keegan

Guardian Unlimited Business | | Every empire crumbles

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Windows X net

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Windows x net is a new Drupal-based Mac-friendly Windows site. Unfortunately they screwed up the Drupal configuration badly — all users have FULL administrative access! I took advantage of having administrative access to fix it by turning off all administrative options for regular users.

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