The benefits are obvious: it's a bit cheaper than ordering out, takes about the same amount of time as waiting for delivery, or faster if we don't do fancy stuff like grilled chicken sausage, etc. for toppings. And we're shooting for the goal of reproducing a "white pizza" we used to get when we were in Syracuse, about which more later.

This weekend, it was grilled chicken sausage, feta and broccoli:

A couple weekends ago, it was proscuttio and ricotta:

The dough is best suited to thin crust style, which is fine. Anyway, yum! (Note: these pics are of the pre-oven pizzas, "cooked" pics are up on my Flickr photostream.)

diskutil addToRAID member [nameofdisktoadd] [nameofraiddisk]

Fortunately, this seems to have worked, and it only takes a billion hours for the RAID set to rebuild.

I also have a couple of smaller Lacie "Porsche" disks, both of which were once parts of two separate RAID arrays, until I noticed they were really hot when stacked and so did our cat, Mara, who likes to sleep on warm things. So, I lost one of each disk when she jumped off the stack for fear of being beaten bodily about the head and neck for using our remote backup system and music library as an electric blanket. Live and learn.

The problem is that the 160GB disks were in a RAID, and then the RAID only had the one disk. I kept it in the RAID, figuring it was less risky than deleting the RAID and just using it as a single disk. When I upgraded to Leopard, and went to go update my RAIDs to version 2, I had a change of heart and deleted the RAID set that contained the remaining 160GB disk. Sadly, the result seems to have been that OS X doesn't recognize the drive, which naturally contains all of my iTunes library, some digital photos, and the like.

When I go to mount the drive, in Disk Utility, it tells me to run First Aid, but the buttons are greyed out and non-functional (though the microscope icon that says "Verify" does work, but it fails with "Unrecognized Filesystem" error). It says it's an "Apple_Boot_Raid" partition, so it's likely that removing the RAID screwed something up in a big way. I could see if I can get the old companion disk to mount, in hopes that it still remembers it was part of that RAID set, long enough to get the other disk to rebuild... I have the music on a spare drive, anyway. I'll lose some pics, but I already lost most of the pics in a previous crash, so it can't suck that much more.

ANyway, the shine is really starting to wear off Leopard. Time Machine? Great. But Spaces isn't as good as Virtual Desktop Pro, the Terminal is astonishing me by apparently breeding Window settings like rabbits for no good reason, and now this.

I've been using OS X since the first public beta, back when it was simply too slooow, because the idea of a beautiful Unix system on my lovely Pismo laptop was too much to pass up. I'd originally set the Pismo up to triple-boot MacOS 9, OS X beta, and Yellow Dog Linux, but I found after a few weeks that I never wanted to boot into Linux, and while MacOS 9 felt insanely fast after a few days in OS X beta, I missed the Terminal too much to go back into 9 very often. I'm that kind of geek - I generally type what I want the box to do.

So, with all that in mind, I figured I'd review some of the ways in which I'd customized my OS X install in previous releases, and how Leopard makes some of those customizations obsolete, some less useful, how it makes up for it, how it fails, and so forth.

I've used DragThing for years as a Dock supplement (since even before there was a "Dock"), and still find it useful if only to allow arbitrary keyboard shortcuts to launch ssh sessions to specific remote hosts, or to launch applications like certain browsers for testing or simply in order to have a browser without a history and with Javascript and Java disabled, etc. I'll probably keep DragThing, but at some point next year will likely ditch it for Quicksilver, if I can get over the insanity of it all. Oddly, for someone who is keyboard driven, I've never quite been able to like Quicksilver, but I saw this video a few weeks ago and it really impressed me into trying it again.

Stacks strikes me as the sort of useless UI enhancement that I will never, ever use. But I hardly ever use files in the traditional MacOS sense of "icons on a desktop", I read my mail in mutt on the remote server via Terminal window, etc.

I have loved virtual desktops since the old Open Look Virtual Window Manager days, and so I shelled out some cash for CodeTek Virtual Desktop Pro when it became clear that I needed more than one desktop; I'd used other products for MacOS 9 and older, before that, though none of their names stick with me (maybe VirtualDesktop? heh).

Spaces obsoletes CVDP completely, with the caveat that it'd be nice to be able to name your Spaces, and the jarring default "slide" transition is still just that: extremely jarring to me. But hey, it's just a pager. For the most part, I want it to be invisible, and it succeeds on that count. One place where it fails is if I am in a Terminal on one Space and a form in Firefox in another, I can't switch between them so as to copy and paste without losing focus in the form field in Firefox. That's just stupid. I want to switch between applications, not places, I just want the applications to live in those different places so they're not distracting me.

I don't know why, but Firefox still hasn't figured out that when I copy and paste a URL from a Terminal or other plain text context and it wraps, that removing the embedded newline and pasting the result is the Right Thing to Do. So, I end up still using Safari for most browsing, and Firefox for some jobs. I don't know if this is new or not, but I just noticed you can cmd-shift-arrow between Safari tabs, which is pretty cool. I just hope the virtual memory management is better in Leopard; under Tiger I eventually had to reboot every couple days because Safari uses^Wleaks memory like an Alzheimer's patient and things got sluggish when the VM crept up past 1GB, and downright sinfully slow when it broached 2GB - and this was with mods to the paging setup, so it didn't simply double the size of the new swapfiles, etc. So, I'm hopeful that Leopard is smarter about that.

I spend most of my day in Terminal, with a dozen windows open, and mostly the same configuration (three or four logged into our main server, one reading mail, the others open to various filter-related directories; one open to each of my DNSBL nameservers; one open to the occasional client server or our fileserver or firewall, etc), so Window Groups are a nice thing to have, as is the new Settings editor. I still find it slightly confusing, but I'm learning. The ability to specify keyboard shortcuts to Window Groups (now lacking, AFAIK) is a necessity, though, frankly. I hate having to use a mouse to open a few windows I'm just going to type into. Oh, and if I open three windows in a specific order, then save the workspace as a Window Group, by God, I ought to be able to use cmd-1 to go to the FIRST WINDOW, etc. Apparently, this is too much to ask for.

I'd recently discovered and fallen in love with Menufela and MegaZoomer, and had come to love the minimalism of working in a fully expanded Terminal window with no menu bar to distract, and I still have that in Leopard. No issues that I've seen, though I'm still running some apps with menus; still working on figuring out which ones I like having a menu with and which I like in minimalist mode.

I'd earlier hacked my battery and airport menubar images, but the setup has apparently changed under Leopard, which I dislike. I'll probably get around to fixing that at some point.

I make extensive use of Growl, MenuMeters, and SideNote; of these only the last is broken under Leopard, as Spaces screws with the "edge of the screen" paradigm. I'm sure I'll figure out how to make it stick to the side of all my windows eventually, though simply specifying "Every Space" in the per-app Spaces config doesn't seem to be enough.

I've already mentioned the insanity of screwing with the default behavior of decades-old Unix tools and how to fix it; I won't relive that nightmare again (shudder). Aside from that, there have been a few unpleasant or awkward surprises for someone who spends as much time in emacs as he does in a browser (often more). The default emacs in Leopard is 22.1.1, under Tiger it was 21.2.1 (IIRC); behavior in some modes has changed slightly, and others have become barely usable (e.g., cvs-mode doesn't let me check a file in using c-q anymore, it demands I use c-x vv, which is annoying; sendmail-mode simply FAILs to let me insert literal TABs, for chrissakes, which is its SOLE PURPOSE). So, there's some change that needs to happen there, but that's not Leopard's fault, and in a pinch I can use vim, I suppose. I used to be able to cmd-double-click on a URL in Terminal, and it'd take me to the site in Safari; this is slightly broken in that if I select the URL and option-click I get a contextual menu with various search options (in Spotlight, in Google, etc.), but it's cool that as long as nothing is selected option-click on a URL gives me a relatively smart "Open URL" option.

I apparently have to reinstall Parallels, but haven't gotten around to that yet, so nothing to report aside from the fact that I need to reinstall.

I'm running Time Machine, which (along with Window Groups in Terminal) was my primary reason for upgrading to Leopard; it seems to Just Work. More to report on that front after a catastrophic loss of data, I suppose. It seems absurdly simple, almost too simple, but it has to be easier than restoring from Retrospect or CarbonCopy, I suppose.

Oh, and just to round out the "fair and balanced frothing Mac/Unix fanboy" perspective, I should mention that when I upgraded my Mini at the house it couldn't recognize my wireless keyboard and mouse at first (changing batteries helped). So that was kind of annoying, but might have just been because my mouse needed stronger batts in order to be "discovered". Other than that, though, the Mini upgrade was uneventful.

So, all in all, a positive upgrade with some bumps (some ridiculously major, some minor).

UPDATE: Another slightly annoying thing: used to be when I used tab completion on a path containing a symbolic link to a directory, the trailing slash was automatically added. Now it's not, I have to hit tab twice. Minor, but when you use that as much as I do, it adds up.

I use bash as my default shell, and have since OS X Beta days, and have built out a number of libraries, customized perl, and so forth, to support my work on enemieslist. Most of these use GNU autoconf, to enable cross-platform portability and simple compilation/installation. I had done an "archive and install" upgrade, which naturally - and as expected - means I needed to install new versions of certain custom libraries, perl modules, and so forth.

Unfortunately, the upshot was that when I went to compile fresh versions for this new OS, I kept getting strange errors from GNU configure. You know, the toolset that most open source projects are written in, whose sole purpose is to work around slight (and sometimes not so slight) differences between the various *nix platforms? Yeah, well it wasn't working. At all. Just kept bailing at the stage where it tried to create libtool.

configure: creating libtool
configure: error: invalid tag name: CXX

It ostensibly seemed like a problem with libtool, or maybe sed, but it turned out to be a problem with a change in the behavior of "echo", one of those hoary old Unix programs that probably hasn't changed much at all in thirty years or more. More to the point, it's a change in order to comply with the Single Unix Specification.

It used to be that "echo -en" would suppress the addition of a newline, and enable the detection of certain special character sequences (e.g., for whitespace and other "unprintable" characters). And it's still that way in the echo built into Bash. But the echo distributed with Leopard's /bin/sh apparently just prints "-en" - breaking every piece of software that relies on GNU autoconf to compile and assumes that nobody would screw around with /bin/sh.

I found this discussion of the issue on macosxhints, and installed the bash from MacPorts, changed my shell and rebooted just to be sure; sadly, I forgot that you also have to add the shell to /etc/shells first, or you can't run a Terminal or any program that requires a shell. Oops. Chalk that one up to stupid. Fortunately, TextMate came to the rescue and I was back in business.

Or so I thought. It seems that changing my default shell didn't make any difference at all. The only thing that worked was setting COMMAND_MODE="legacy" in my /etc/bashrc, as discussed here.

Thanks, Apple. I really and truly needed to waste an entire day FAILING to reinstall all of my scripts and custom libraries so that I could WORK, over a one-line fix in an rc file.

Obviously, given that Safari sucks ass and leaks like a gig and a half of RAM if you let it sit for a day or so, I need a way to grab every window URL and title and post them to this blog periodically. Hrm.

-DBIND_8_COMPAT

on the end of the DEFS line, and voila.

(if not, read part one first, then part two.) From part two, though, which I thought was probably worth sharing:

[3] I had tried to convince Julia, my wife, to come with me to the Crimea. My first argument was that it would give her an opportunity not only to read the 23rd Psalm, but to see the 23rd Psalm. Then I suggested that it was an opportunity to experience the 23rd Psalm. And while I didn't have a chance to make the argument before I went there, it turns out that there a parts of the Valley of the Shadow of Death that are for sale, and there was an opportunity not to just to see and experience the 23rd Psalm but to own it. Who could resist? I started to think about the possibility of Valley of the Shadow of Death Time Shares. What a fantastic place for a nursing home!

The "Boring Gallery" was this collection of Web sites that had the then-standard "colored bar down left side of screen and white content area" design. Sadly, or not, it's still there, in all its boring glory. For a while, searching on my name returned this page as the first result on Lycos/AltaVista/HotBot/whatever search engine was popular in 1997...

It's amusing to poke through some of those I didn't (and won't) upload; apparently, back then, I considered O'Reilly and Associates, Argus Associates (Lou Rosenfeld did an interview for the site), Perl, Java and the Onion worthy of free advertising on my site, along with hesketh.com and the now-defunct Digital Aspect (where I worked as a consultant for a year after leaving imonics) and Integrated Technical Services, a good chunk of the old imonics IT group (with whom we shared an office).

Heh.

Oh, and to clear up any confusion: the big turd on the modem (yes, a 33.6Kbps US Robotics Sportster - the original animation I did as a "splash page" - remember those? actually had lights that lit up more or less the same way they did on the modem, and in the right order, for a dialup session) is a Buddha, in a position of extreme contemplation. I forget where I got it, but you could still get them (in albeit smaller version) from the Wireless catalog NPR puts out as of ten years ago or so. His head is in his lap. I used to call it the "anxiety Buddha", because he didn't seem too calm to me.