Macintosh

It's not dead yet

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It looks like I’ll be doing a Mac OS 9 product after all. Several months ago there was talk of a Mac OS 9 version of computrace since some schools were interested in it. The idea was shot down, but now it looks like there’s renewed interest. This is going to be LOTS of fun, porting a Mac OS X product back to 9 😉

A few cool things about Cocoa

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I have several fields with date formatting in my application. Since I enabled natural language, you can enter something like ‘today’ or ‘next year’ and it will be converted to a valid date. I didn’t even have to write any code to do that!

By simply writing methods such a getXXX and setXXX I was able to support key/value coding without any extra programming.

I would have to write lots of extra code to do any of those things in Carbon.

My first Cocoa application

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I just wrote my first real Cocoa application. I ended up using mostly ObjectiveC++ since I needed to use some pre-existing C++ classes for most of the functionality. Most of the code I wrote was for bridging the C++ & ObjectiveC code.

Strange system problem

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When I turned on my G4 minitower, instead of booting into the GUI, I got a Darwin/BSD login and my password wouldn’t work. If I booted from the other drive (which has Jaguar installed), everything was normal and I could access the main drive. I repaired the drive & repaired permissions successfully.

The next time I tried to boot, the same thing happened again. I assumed it was a corrupted netinfo database and deleted /var/db/netinfo. That would normally cause the setup assistant to run when I rebooted, but in this case it didn’t.

I ended up re-installing panther as an archive install and recovered my user directory from the Previous System backup. Everything is back to normal now, about an hour and a half later.

W00t!

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We just released the new version of Computrace agent for Panther!

MacMegasite Hacked

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Some asshat “hacked” macmegasite by adding the following message:

Thi$ siTe w@Z ha(Ket!

Thi$ siTe w@Z ha9Ket! by RuSs1an CreZzZy Rabb1T$ HuCk(fuck) teaM! lol! Windows – 4ever!! Russ1an!!!

There was no other damage.

Taking control of my email

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I’ve installed UW imapd on my powerbook to archive my email locally. My email is now stored in a MAIL folder in my home directory and I can access it from any email client. I’m now in the process of migrating my email archive from Eudora to the local server.

Since I have ipfw blocking port 143 to allow local connections only, I built it with “SSLTYPE=unix” to allow plaintext passwords instead of requiring SSL connections for faster access & better compatibility with different email clients.

CRASH!

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My powerbook just locked up badly.. I was typing in XCode (I had auto-completion on, which I then turned off). As I finished typing a function name, the Unstoppable Spinning Pizza of Death appeared. iTunes stopped playing, and I couldn’t even type a command in the terminal – it would hang when I hit return. I couldn’t even SSH into it from another machine, so I finally did a hard reset.

Isn’t interesting that on a Mac something like this is a newsworthy occurrence 🙂