And so it rumbles on, this joke OS. 10.7 is what I give it out of a hundred. This time it’s the network not coming back after sleeping. According to this thread you can variously turn off/on wifi to get your wired connection back, invoke network in system preferences, or, get this, start a backup. I mean, what’s the point of releasing crap like 10.7? There has obviously been very little testing.

This time it’s XCode. Refuses to install from the app store. None of that fancy leaping from the store into your dock with a progress bar to inform you it’s downloading. Nothing. It just sits there saying “Installing” then installs nothing. Thinking it had opened a wormhole in space and time to download its multi-gig bulk in super quick time I tried XCode in my dock. It blew up complaining it wanted 10.6 back. Sigh. Uninstall the now dud XCode:

sudo sh
/Developer/Library/uninstall-devtools --mode=all

delete XCode from the dock, login to the Apple Developer site and download the DMG from there. But wait. Where are the commandline tools? Sigh. They’re making it as difficult as possible to develop on this platform now. You need to go into XCode -> Preferences -> Downloads and install them from there. Or you can download them separately from the SDK site.

This is so tedious, having to go through settings putting them back to the ‘default’ before OS X Lion stamped it’s iOS footprint all over them. This time it’s Safari opening with the last page viewed no matter what its settings are. You have to go into a completely unrelated area to sort this. This smacks of iOS interference as that’s what you do on iOS, use the Settings App to change some global settings. Well OS X is NOT iOS.

System Preferences -> General

uncheck this:

Restore windows when quitting and re-opening apps

Seriously, are they taking the mickey? I upgraded to OS X Lion and thought the browser had crashed. No way could I scroll down. Then I realised they’d decided my laptop was a phone and I had to scroll as if on the iPhone. Excuse me? Are they having a laugh? Apparently they call it ‘natural’ scrolling. I call it crap and here’s how to go back to a really natural scrolling movement:

System Preferences -> Trackpad

Uncheck this garbage:

“When using gestures to scroll or navigate, move content in the direction of finger movement”

You wouldn’t have liked to have seen which finger I was moving when they did that.

I’m always amazed that patents are granted for sitting on your bum and doing nothing but writing down the bleedin’ obvious. There’s a kerfuffle in the mobile development world about gathering user information from a form in a mobile app. That’s the bleedin’ obvious and now, apparently, Lodsys are patenting their ideas and seeing who they can intimidate to extract cash. Now, as we all know, ideas are worthless without the skills to implement them. These developers have the skills and the backbone to get off the couch and implement great ideas and others are starting to notice the free ride they could get. Why are patents granted with no proof of implementation? Patents such as these are nothing more than a tax on innovation.

iOS5 is coming and there are a couple of things I like about it. The first is PC Free. When the iPad came out I took an immediate interest as it seemed to be an iOS device for the normal person. Wrong. You need a hulking great Mac to get it to work. It’s touted as a mobile device, as are all iOS devices but they all need a monster of a machine back at base to make them work. I remember walking into the Apple store in Glasgow, finding one of the myriad salespeople and asking if the iPad needed a Mac, then walking straight back out. Apple mobile devices are the equivalent of the first mobile phone. That’s the phone on the left, nice and slim and portable but look what you need to make it work! Apple products are for an Apple lifestyle I’ve always said. I used to have a tiny Creative MuVo mp3 player that took a single AAA battery that lasted for weeks and when the iPod came out I had a quick look and went back to my MuVo. You see, I’m a mountain guide as well as programmer and the Apple lifestyle just doesn’t work for me. You need a grid power source to maintain an Apple mobile device. Either a plug socket or a huge Mac, neither of which you find in the mountains. So Apple products have never really appealed to me, especially as they’re so fragile and are useless once the juice runs out. Plus I’m not that keen on having the phone used as an entertainment centre in the wilds when it’s the phone you’ll have to rely on in an emergency, only to find all that mp3-ing has drained the battery and it’s turned into a useless lump of plastic. (more…)

21st April 2011. The date the machines rise. The date the  ”Global Digital Defense Network” known as Skynet becomes sentient and takes over the world. Except Amazon had other ideas. It’s also the date Amazon’s cloud infrastructure went down for an extended period. When the machines rose it was a case of “all dressed up and nowhere to go”.

It also exposed some people to an uncomfortable public airing of their griefs. This company was monitoring patients’ ECG outputs using the cloud and were unable to fulfil their commitments to patients’ lives. They took a bollocking for putting a system on which peoples’ lives depend in the cloud without any backup or failover strategy but is that really the case? There are some real howlers in the extended exchange, from which Amazon support is noticeably missing. Gems like: (more…)

Twitter has decided it’s time to ditch all those hairy arsed developers who are apparently confusing users by displaying tweets in non standard ways, using different terms for twitter actions such as favourite (that should have been favorite? but that’s spelled wrong!) and worse of all, playing fast and loose with their privacy. Apparently users are confused by the multifarious nature of tweets exposed to them in different parts of the internet. Oh dear, doesn’t bode well for the future of humanity. How do they cope when they’re on holiday and they have to go into a different supermarket, where the tin of beans is on a lower shelf? “There are no beans!” they cry, so twitter would have us believe. “Purchase two for one the sign says”. According to twitter, the hapless user must seek a supermarket assistant and cry “I want to buy two tins of beans for the price of one but it only says I can purchase them! What does purchase mean? Can’t I just buy them instead?”. (more…)

So I came in this morning, ran this:

svn update
rake db:migrate

and got this:

`bin_path': can't find executable rake for rake-0.8.7

Turns out you have to remove this file:

RUBY_HOME/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/specifications/rake.gemspec

rake was working so where did that file come from? There are two possibilities, either RubyMine did something bad to my system as it doesn’t work, or I haven’t run rake since installing spork as it doesn’t work either apparently. Who knows? It’s ruby, get used to the mess.

Just saw this press release from Apple announcing Java will be available post Snow Leopard, i.e. Lion (10.7) but it’ll be Java 6 only. As I said before, not a problem. It’s a trade off I’m willing to make. I’ll happily use Java 6 instead of 7 for the productivity of developing on OS X. It seems that Apple are handing over their Java implementation to the OpenJDK project and the availability of Java 7 on OS X will be down to Oracle.

I like it when a big commercial outfit open sources their inhouse development. The software that comes out is usually pretty good, such as BEA Systems open sourcing XMLBeans and Novell giving the Java LDAP libraries to the OpenLDAP project. Those are two open source libraries I use almost every day.

So a big thank you to Apple for keeping Java on OS X!