Concern

One thing I’d like to see in Mac OS X is a simple way to do versioning. I’m often editing simple stuff on my Mac, and would really benefit from keeping track of older versions. Ideally, when I change files, new versions should just be committed automatically, with some hysteresis. Short of that, a simple command built into the Finder that would let me check in files would be nice.

Automator does make this possible, to a degree, and it’s easy to save a workflow as a Finder plugin, which makes it available in the contextual menu (Automator is still almost completely useless, though, since it’s such a limited parody of a macro system or programming language).

So, here’s something that will take the selected Finder items and check them into a git repository. If no git repository exists in that folder, or a parent one, it will initialize a new one:

Check Files In.workflow

Installation is approximately:

1. Install git.
2. Open Check Files In.workflow in Automator.
3. Select File > Save as Plug-in…
4. Save as a Finder plug-in, with whatever name you want.
5. Enjoy two-click source control.

(Yes, I know about SCPlugin. That uses subversion, though, so it loses.)

I desperately want to love this computer. Apple’s quality just seems to be extremely inconsistent.

The screen is gorgeous. I bought the 24″ model, added another gigabyte of RAM, and have been thoroughly impressed with the system performance and the display. Watching videos — especially HD content — makes this beast well worth the price; it would probably rival some decent televisions, and it works perfectly for my small apartment. The new keyboard design is nice, but it’s nevertheless just a beautifully-designed ergonomic nightmare, and I’m letting my co-worker borrow it instead (since I have a better keyboard anyway). The Mighty Mouse is also neat, but I use a trackball, and could never use that mouse properly since its cable is so ridiculously short. Regardless, it is teh sexy for watching video podcasts and DVDs, and doesn’t hang when doing more than one thing like my Mac Mini did.

But, I’m running into some serious issues. Here’s the list thus far:

1. It kernel panicked the first day, while I was setting it up. Now I was putting some stress on the system — hooking up 1TB of storage through three external drives — but come on. Let me at least install some crazy kernel extensions before it starts panicking on me.
2. There’s a dead pixel, out of the box. It’s near the upper right hand corner of the screen, and thus out of the way, but still.
3. The screen doesn’t feel like glass. Tapping it with my fingernail, it sounds just like a regular old plastic screen, it just looks a lot shinier. I hope I’m just being picky, and didn’t get screwed somehow.
4. This is the kicker: WindowServer will intermittently hang. On Mac OS X, this means that the entire desktop freezes, and while you can still SSH into the system, to use the main display you need to reboot the machine.

   This has happened three times so far, and each time I was looking at the iTunes store in iTunes; I’m starting to suspect that it has something to do with the graphics card, because I can SSH into the system, and using sample can see that iTunes is hung off in the weeds in some graphics routine. Both iTunes and the WindowServer are stuck in uninterruptible sleep, presumably waiting for the graphics hardware to stop freaking out. There’s no obvious crash information, but in the logs I did see this:

   Aug 19 15:02:40 rigel kernel[0]: ** ASIC Hang Log Start **
Aug 19 15:02:40 rigel kernel[0]: 0×01019583 00009062 00009583 00000000
Aug 19 15:02:40 rigel kernel[0]: 0×00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000
Aug 19 15:02:40 rigel kernel[0]: 0×0011a010 00000000 00000000 0083106b
Aug 19 15:02:40 rigel kernel[0]: 0×00f8fc00 00000000 00000001 00008a12

   which continues with a lot of hex values. Fun.

   From reading the discussion boards on Apple’s website, it looks like a few other people have seen this, usually while playing games, which typically means exercising the video.

Update: Rumor has it that the iMac Software Update 1.1 fixes the “ASIC hang” problem. It seems to be working for me.

Update (October 6): Apple seems to be working on the issue. Software update 1.1 does not completely solve the iMac hang problem.

Update (November 3): iMac Software Update 1.2 (Tiger) and 1.3 (Leopard).

I’ve been looking at git for source control, and put together a Mac OS X package installer that will install a Universal binary of git and its man pages into /usr/local. The pax archive in pkg files seems to seriously expand the size — 30M of program files make for a >100M installer!

I’ve only tried this on Intel Macs, so your mileage may vary.

git-1.5.2.4.pkg.zip (113M)

Update: See the newest version.

Update: Also give the torrent a try: git-1.5.4.2.pkg.zip.torrent

I bought a new iMac, and it arrived today.

It’s a 24-inch display. It is gigantic, beautiful, fast, and it kernel panicked once.

I’m hoping that that last bit was just a fluke, we’ll see.

One of the neat things about Mac programming is that you can create some very powerful applications rather quickly, if you do something Apple has built into simple controls.

Here is WebDesk, a preference pane that lets you set your desktop background to a web page. It took me a little time Friday, and Saturday afternoon to put this together. It’s also the first program I’m releasing as free software under the GPLv3.

(I know there’s someone else that did this already, but that isn’t free software, and I for one am not going to wait for the little shithead to charge $20 for such a trivial program, which a lot of Mac “programmers” like to do)