Archive for May, 2005

java readline for OS X post updated

Tuesday, May 17th, 2005

I’ve updated my post on getting java readline working with OS X. Some derivation of readline now seems to be included with Tiger (10.4), and that makes it important to put /opt/local/lib before /usr/lib in the library path.

Posted in Geekery, Java, OS X | No Comments »

Dension ice>Link: Plus BMW cable fix

Friday, May 13th, 2005

Information on Dension’s little “fixes” is so hard to come by. Google searches always end up pointing me to MotoringFile, and the search engines on MINI2 and NAM suck.

So, that being said, here’s an exchange I had with Tom Guagliardo from Dension USA.

from me, May 10, 2005:

Subject: ice>link: plus ground wire question

Good evening, Tom. In doing some more reading on NAM and MINI2 tonight, it looks like there is a problem with some ice>link harnesses, in that some have a ground wire in the wrong place.

Can you help me determine if mine has that problem, and, if so, how to correct it? Is Dension replacing the incorrectly manufactured harnesses?

If what I’ve read is correct (black wire is next to the white wire instead of the red wire), then I’ve got a bad harness. Since I have yet to install the unit, I’d really prefer to have the correct harness from Dension, than have to modify my own.

Thanks,
B

his response, May 11, 2005:

Brian,

Some BMW/Mini’s have a reversed ground – you may or may not need to perform the procedure.

Enclosed is the document to verify the wiring pinout.

Best Regards,

Tom Guagliardo | Dension USA

The referenced PDF is here: Dension ice>Link: Plus cable repair guide

Posted in Motoring | No Comments »

Tiger annoyances

Tuesday, May 3rd, 2005

Well, I’ve had OS X 10.4 (Tiger) running on my G4 PowerBook for about 18 hours now. I’m feeling slightly underwhelmed. Performance isn’t what I feel it should be, but I opted to perform an “upgrade” instead of doing an archive and install or fresh installation. I intend to backup and do a clean install in the next day or so to try to clean up some weirdness. That and it gives me that freshly showered feeling, reinstalling my OS from scratch. :-)

Lots has changed in Tiger, and it’s been reviewed out the wazoo, so I won’t try to repeat what’s already been done so well elesewhere, but I am going to point out some of the things that are already bugging me…

  • The popup Safari presents you with when it unarchives a DMG or ZIP file with a possible “application” in it is maddening. There should be a way to turn that off. (Apple bug id #4107374)
  • Spotlight is cool, but it isn’t as fast on my PB as I was lead to believe it would be. Getting search results pointing to an in-progress iChat definitely rocks, however. I’m also irritated by the magical moving search results; I’ve opened the wrong file a couple of times, now, when the one I’m about to click on jumps down a level as another match is found.
  • The weather widget is too honkin’ big.
  • No way to disable inline viewing of PDFs in Safari (Apple bug id #4107371)
  • gcc4 breaks stuff. So far, I’ve been unable to build mysql4 or rrdtool 1.0.49 with Darwinports. Apparently gcc_select is used to choose a different compiler. Having just discovered this after building a bunch of other packages, I’m really hoping there won’t be problems with linking binaries compiled with different versions…

Posted in Geekery, OS X | No Comments »