Mac on Evan Hoffman

"You have to install development tools first." - OSX Mavericks, ruby, chef, and nokogiri

Tue, 29 Jul 2014 16:57:06 +0000

I was trying to get knife ec2 working on my Mac, but even though my system Ruby was at 2.0.0, the embedded Ruby that chef/knife use (in /opt/chef/embedded/bin) was 1.9.1. Installing knife-ec2 should just be a matter of typing “gem install knife-ec2” but due to some weird issues with nokogiri, I burned about 4 hours trying to make it work. I tried everything I could find - installing iconv, libxml2, and libxslt via brew and telling “gem install” to use the custom libs in /usr/local/Cellar was the most common suggestion on StackOverflow - but nothing worked. What ended up fixing it for me was reinstalling chef. :|

Displaying currently-playing iTunes track in the Mac menu bar

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 14:48:42 +0000

In an attempt to teach myself Objective C, and because I couldn’t find anything that did what I wanted, I wrote a little utility to display the currently-playing iTunes track in the Mac taskbar. Originally I had it display the full track name right in the taskbar but it was too much text for such a small space (especially on a 1440x900 screen), so now you click a little musical note and it shows you the info in a menu.

Macbook Pro locks up with SSD installed.

Tue, 23 Aug 2011 12:04:54 +0000

A few weeks ago I switched from my trusty old HP nc8430 to a Macbook Pro (MC118LL/A) that was left spare when another employee left. I mostly enjoyed using Linux but I was tired of dealing with weird quirks like having X lock up, essentially forcing me to do a hard reboot.

To transition, I copied my documents from Linux to Mac, then turned off the Linux laptop. Surprisingly I found I didn’t need to turn Linux back on at all. Last week, I decided to put the final nail in Linux’s coffin by taking the SSD (Corsair CMFSSD-128GBG2D)out of it and putting it in my Macbook. The Macbook was pretty fast (Core 2 Duo @ 2.5 GHz) but some things were noticeably slower on its 7200RPM disk than on Linux with an SSD, especially running Windows VMs.

One reason I hate iTunes.

Thu, 16 Sep 2010 08:04:43 +0000

I’ve always hated iTunes. It’s a huge pile of bloatware and it’s slow as poo. It’s like 100 mb or more for an mp3 player. I remember winamp playing mp3s when it was a 500k download. Anyway.

I keep all my music on a Linux machine running samba. This way it’s available to every machine in the house. When I had Winamp on all my machines this was wonderful. But now that I’m forced into iTunes (thanks to having an iPhone), it turns out to be a major pain. In iTunes I unchecked the box for “let iTunes keep my libary organized” to prevent it from copying the entire library to each computer’s local disk. Initially adding my library of ~4000 tracks to iTunes takes over an hour (100 mbit wire) - it would take about 5 minutes in Winamp, even reading the ID3 tags for each track as it was added (rather than lazily as the song was played).

I may never buy a Windows computer again

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 01:16:41 +0000

I guess it’s not really a fair comparison since I’m running 32-bit Windows XP, but it strikes me as mildly retarded how much better my stupid $350 Mac Mini performs than my ~$1000 desktop. The Mac has a Core 2 Duo 1.83 GHz CPU with 1 gig ram and an 80 gig HD, running 10.5.6 (or something). My desktop is a 3.0 GHz Wolfdale with 4 gigs ram and a 1 TB 7200 RPM sata drive. The Mac isn’t super speedy but it seems more responsive in everything except iTunes, and that’s probably due to all the MP3s being served off my ancient Linux box (over G wireless). Actually, I still completely detest iTunes, and think Winamp is about the perfect MP3 player. But anyway, the stuff you can do “for free” on a Mac is pretty amazing. I haven’t played with iMovie or a bunch of the other programs yet, but even just Expose is pretty remarkable.

Debating a MacBook

Sun, 31 May 2009 00:25:02 +0000

I’m considering a MacBook. This is about 85% motivated by my desire to try writing an iPhone app, and apparently the SDK requires a Mac. I was thinking of a Mac mini but a laptop seems to have more utility.

I’ll have to think this over for several more weeks I guess.

Oh, and Starcraft Protoss mission 7 is quite annoying.