Jaharmi’s Irreality renewable hyperlinks with 0% transfat since 1999

I was trying to install Dulwich on a Mac OS X Lion system this week and ran into difficulty. I kept getting installation failures that included a missing “python.h” and, eventually, llvm-gcc-4.2 failed to compile the module.

I found the situation frustrating, partly because I pretty much own the top search hits about how to install Dulwich and Hg-Git on Mac OS X Lion, thanks to some earlier article.

It turns out that I had reinstalled Lion about two weeks ago, and had not reinstalled Xcode 4. So, I updated to Xcode 4.2 and this completely eliminated my problem. Presumably, it would also work for you — and for future me, since I’m likely to repeat this — even if Lion hadn’t been reinstalled in between.

Things that didn’t work included but were not limited to:

• cursing under my breath
• stomping
• hand-waving
• complaining on Twitter
• the silent treatment
• waiting for 4, 12, and then 24 hours to see if it would fix itself
• installing the latest version of setuptools, v0.6c11, from an egg
• installing the current version of Distribute, new hotness or not
• any steps involving Linux distribution package managers like apt-get.

I stumbled into winning a copy of Beginning Drupal 7 by Todd Tomlinson from Apress and the nice hosts of the Drupal Easy podcast.

The announcement on the podcast had me laughing out loud. (Luckily, I was home with a sick child who was sleeping upstairs.) I hope Mike and Andrew don’t mind that I transcribed the bit where they talked about me (starting at 46:24 into the podcast):

Mike: Anyway, [laughs] so we picked the winners earlier today, and they have not gotten back to me yet, but I’m going to say, I’m going to feel pretty good that they will get back to me so I’m going to announce their names, anyway. Jeremy Reichman, who — get this — his user ID on Drupal.org is 2039. Now, that doesn’t seem that small, but I think we’re up over five hundred thousand right now. Is that correct?
Andrew: Yeah, I believe so. It’s a pretty high number now. My number is 98,079.
Mike: Right. So this guy’s way better than you.
Andrew: Yes.
Mike: Way better. But he’s been a user for over nine — nine and half years — on Drupal.org.
Andrew: Wow.
Mike: So I’m not sure what he needs a Beginning Drupal 7 book for but, you know, I would guess it’s probably for his child that he’s had between the time that he started iwth Drupal and now.
Andrew: Although the could still be using Drupal 2.
Mike: Yeah, that’s true.

Indeed, my user ID is 2039. Indeed, I have been a member on Drupal.org for “9 years 37 weeks,” according to my profile. That’s a long time! The low user ID certainly doesn’t make my account better than someone else’s, but it is kind-of fun to have now that Drupal has become so popular.

One possibility they did not raise in that announcement was that I could just have been lurking on Drupal.org for five or six years — biding my time with my increasingly-creaky UserLand Manila Web site — before I decided to take the plunge with Drupal. This may be why my Certified To Rock score is a mere 3.

But perhaps I will share Beginning Drupal 7 with my children when the book arrives. This is not a bad idea, and I already have precedent for it. Our new arrival needs some technical reading material — and I’m going to have to upgrade to Drupal 7 sometime.

As you may know, I absolutely live to submit crash and bug reports to vendors.

Normally, these reports are staid affairs involving copious amounts of detail, exquisite reproduction steps, and both expected and actual results. I’m sure that these kinds of reports get a certain amount of attention from software developers. I say that with confidence because at least one person in that position has told me my bug reports are his favorite. Sure, it was a few years ago now, but I’m sure I’ve still got some mojo.

Occasionally, I get the opportunity to take some creative license with these submissions. For example, there was that one involving the hockey game. The standard was raised after I saw my current all-time favorite crash report.

So, when I had a particularly frustrating crash in Safari, I decided I needed to raise my game. After all, I’ve probably submitted 33 boring crash reports on Safari already. Here’s what I came up with this time:

For those of you reading with Lynx, the text of the submission was:

Safari was launched by me. It had tabs. The set of tabs evolved. They were created to help me. There were so many of them there may have been copies. And I had a plan for them.

I hope someone enjoyed this crash report. And, for all I know, they fixed the problem in Safari 5.0.3.

I had interesting things happen when I ran out of disk space today.

The most notable one was that I saw “Process completed” — or some variant of that — every time I tried to open a Terminal window with a new shell session. I briefly staved it off by specifying Bash as my shell, but then it came right back after opening another tab or two in Terminal. Consulting Google led me to this “Terminal application quits” thread at Apple Discussions. On a lark, I tried deleting /usr/bin/login as one poster suggested. It worked!

…But only for a little while. The problem returned. In the meantime, I had freed up some disk space because I’d realized I couldn’t save files anywhere (“But ~/Pictures is writable!”). Clearly something else had become an issue, because disk space was available.

Then I found another thread, “Terminal’s ’Process Completed’ message and /usr/bin/login,” on Apple Discussions. The more permanent solution from that thread appears to be the removal of corrupted Apple System Log databases. Once I did that and restarted the ASL service, all was well and has stayed that way so far.

Filling up my disk must have corrupted the logs as they were being written or rotated, and led to this cascade failure. Like I said, interesting!

One of the posters in the second Apple Discussions thread indicated that the underlying database corruption issue is addressed in Snow Leopard. However, it seems that you could still see this on Leopard — my experience was with a recently-patched Mac OS X 10.5.8 system.

The Address Book application in Mac OS X Snow Leopard has a new telephone number label for contacts: “iPhone.” (Credit to Jeff Carlson for bringing it to my attention.)

What I find just as interesting as its existence is its order in the list. The “iPhone” label comes before “mobile,” the label I used for all cellular numbers. Is that a subtle dig to put the iPhone above other mobile phones?

It is also the only label that rates a capital letter.

I have no idea how or if this label will survive through Entourage Sync Services and Exchange synchronization. Hm.

Update: I wouldn’t advise using this label right now if you use Sync Services or otherwise sync data elsewhere. I’ve already lost cell numbers in Entourage with Sync Services enabled when I flipped an existing “mobile” number to “iPhone” and back.

Update: I have tested it twice with dummy contacts and could not reproduce the problem that resulted in the number being removed from both Entourage and Address Book. (I believe this is odd because it happened to two of my existing contacts when I flipped them to “iPhone” and back to “mobile.”) However, the “iPhone” number does definitely get removed from Entourage through Sync Services, which means you would lose the number on anything connected to an Exchange account (if Entourage is synchronizing with Exchange). … Such as an iPhone with Exchange ActiveSync.

A wonderful passage about the best hamburger from How I Met Your Mother:

Marshall: Just a burger? Just a burger? Robin, it’s so much than just a burger. I … I mean, that first bite, oh what heaven that first bite is. The bun, like a sesame-freckled breast of an angel resting gently on the ketchup and mustard below. Flavors mingling in a seductive pas de deux. And then … a pickle … the most playful little pickle, and a slice of tomato, a leaf of lettuce, and a patty of ground beef so exquisite … swirling in your mouth, breaking apart and combining again in a fugue of sweets and savory, so delightful. This is no mere sandwich of grilled meat and toasted bread, Robin. This is God, speaking to us through food.

Lily: And you got our wedding vows off the Internet.

A while back, Microsoft announced their Silverlight software. I didn’t think much of it, but now that they have announced the Azure platform, I realized that they have developed a Forgotten Realms theme in their products.

Let’s look at this, while we’re in the beginning of the trend, to see how this relates to the the SSI “gold box” Forgotten Realms games:

Based on this flimsy evidence, I suspect the next major product platform from Microsoft to be related, somehow, to “radiance.” (As in Pool of Radiance, of course.)

We might also expect a future initiative centered around “darkness,” but I consider that less likely — or, it may already have happened, given the reverse chronology that seems to be at work. (See Pools of Darkness.)

I’ve long had a problem with the search fields that are omnipresent in the toolbars of so many Mac OS X applications. My problem? I wanted to quickly jump up to them so I could enter text directly, but I wanted to do so with a keyboard shortcut.

This is particularly true in Safari and Keychain Access, two applications where I frequently want to use the toolbar search field.

It turns out that I was too lazy to look for it, and the option is labeled in a misleading way. I’ll admit, I just plain missed the keyboard shortcut.

The command can be labeled as “Find” where I’ve seen it. It may vary and carry some additional text, as in Safari where it is “Google Search” and MarsEdit where the label is “Search Weblogs,” both of which make sense when the resulting action is to jump to the search field. In both of these applications, the command is in a submenu under Edit > Find.

In Keychain Access, it’s just “Find” — so it doesn’t even match the label on the “Search” field it sends cursor focus to.

The keyboard shortcut is Option-Command-F, and appears as ⌥⌘F.

It’s sad when you can’t find the “Find” command, isn’t it? Grin.

“Well, you know, I think when you go into a bar and you serve the country, you deserve to have your chicken wing not be alligator-clamped onto a booklight. That’s what separates us from the Russians.”

— Merlin Mann, You Look Nice Today: “Aunt Nancy”, approximately 15:52

Note: In case you wondered, StupidFilter rated that quote as “not likely to be stupid.”

If you can’t remember the specific name of an application, but you often think of it by another name, you can change how it is referred to in your LaunchBar configuration.

I used to do something like this with Microsoft Excel; I’d change its name in the LaunchBar configuration to “XL.” You could also refer “Lineform” as “Illustrator” without changing the application’s name in the Finder.

To make the change, open LaunchBar. If you can remember the application, perform a search for it. When it is selected in the LaunchBar bar, choose Configuration > Reveal in Configuration. Enter a new name for the selected app in the “Name” column in the window that appears.

I’m not aware, however, of a way to have an application to respond to two or more names in LaunchBar. There may be a way; I just don’t know it.